All Categories - permanentlybrilliant

a forest garden ... or food forest ...

When a tyre becomes a bee feast ...

4/28/2015

Take a tyre. Stuff with old cardboard, bracken, garden brash, soil, and woodchip. Add bulbs. Keep moderately watered if no rain. Cook on a very low heat over the winter. Ready for the perfect early bee snack around Feb/March. Season as you go with nasturtium seeds, wildflower seeds and well established sunflower seedlings; experiment with rosemary, lavender, sweet peas and canes. Bingo. Bit like the best sort of casserole. Just gets better and better. The bees are going to LOVE you. :)

Well, fancy that.

4/27/2015

This rather splendid and unassuming table was printed in The Organic Way magazine last year. It looks at behavioural change after 12 months' involvement in the Master Gardener Programme. 'Nuff said. Get yer trowels out.

Treating soil like dirt.

4/27/2015

And here y'go. Sort of makes you wonder how you can read two pieces like this and the last one on the same planet. We need 6m hectares a year of new farmland a year to keep up with food demand. And we're trashing 12 million hectares a year. So ... we're wrecking TWICE as much as we need to CREATE. Ouchouchouch. Interestingly, it also cites research that shows that "soil in allotments – the small patches in towns and cities that people cultivate by hand – contains a third more organic carbon than agricultural soil and 25% more nitrogen. This is one of the reasons why allotment holders produce between four and 11 times more food per hectare than do farmers". If you can stomach the whole read, it's here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/25/treating-soil-like-dirt-fatal-mistake-human-life

If you're a fan of soil, Look Away Now.

4/27/2015

This is probably one of the scariest things I read this month. Chinese pollution is increasing. Pesticides, insecticide and fertilisers have wrecked the soil; but now they can't afford to stop. They're actually demolishing our soil. The image is of one of the pages; I couldn't decide which paragraph was more shocking. It just got worse as I scrolled. If you have the guts to read the whole thing, it's here. Brace yourself. http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/04/14/us-china-agriculture-pollution-idUKKBN0N50L720150414

A Prescription for Common Sense.

4/27/2015

Even the Express carried it. This is not a paper that frequents the kitchen table, but it was brought by someone who thought we would appreciate it. We did. GPs are now being told to prescribe the outside. It made us laugh. Especially as the person who gave it to us is a GP working with us to help us prescribe our green space for therapeutic reasons. He said he brought it because he thought it would tickle us. Tickle it did. They're going to say the run rises in the east, next. Jeepers.

A thought on abundance.

4/27/2015

It rained this weekend. It hasn't rained for weeks. And suddenly after parsing out our water, being super careful when running the tap inside and out, using every drop of water for the hundreds of seedlings in the garden so carefully, prioritising the chickens and the pigs before the plants, and thanking our lucky stars for all our horse muck which is SO good at keeping in moisture whilst the unusually hot sun was doing its best to dehydrate all the beds, the rain suddenly fell out the sky and we had water seeping into dry soil and filling up water butts and splashing out of containers; we could see everything suck it up and delight in its abundance. And the same weekend (carefully timed before the rain arrived) we got another four trailer loads of horse muck from the neighbouring stables, working with our lovely neighbours to share the work of loading, and then share the booty .... a sky full of spring rain and a mound of gorgeous 3 yr old horse muck ready to be shovelled straight into waiting beds: I stood back and grinned like a muddy fool. THAT felt like wealth.

Rocket Kitchen, here we come

2/22/2015

Yup, we were chuffed to bits to successfully get our £450 from Unltd for our Rocket Kitchen, where we can start to teach people to learn how to make the simplest of things - home made bread and home made pizza - outside. The pigs are doing a brilliant job at helping us clear the bracken and brambles to make a good space amongst the trees. Watch this space for more on this; one of our fab local schools is keen as mustard to help us build it, and then use it. Brilliant with bells on.

cardboard

2/22/2015

Cardboard. Beloved material of the gardener, permaculturalist, and orchard collaborator. (I could say orchard manager, but it seems a little presumptuous. We work with it; would be lost without it. No orchard would mean many, many fewer bees. ) So anyway. Cardboard. There is now a great deal of re-purposed surfboard packaging made in China, wrapped round a surfboard in Sydney, and ending up in Penwith, acting as an excellent mulch on our many blackcurrant plants. At least it will have been shipped rather than flown. And Alan planted in the region of 1,000 blackcurrant plants. That's a lot of surfing....

Blooming Bee-tastic...

12/1/2014

We had a brilliant afternoon with Brigit this weekend: a whole afternoon of learning quite how extraordinary bees are. We had members of Hayle in Bloom, Penwith Organic Growers' group, Helston Organic Growers' Group, Transition members, Quakers, West Cornwall Bee Keepers, and Permanently Brilliant...all scribbling notes and mesmerised by Brigit's extraordinary knowledge and passion. Blimey. Proper job. And we came out with loads of new ideas for Hayle in Bloom to think about... more pictures here: http://www.permanentlybrilliant.com/hayle-pollinator-masterclass.html

Our Fabulous WWoofers...

8/6/2014

What a boon our wonderful Wwoofers are. Cutting, mulching, carrying, clearing, planting, weeding...an endless variety of jobs. And they never complain. Even building stone walls round one of the bee hives, using wall building skills taught by their father at home in France, and talking all the time to the bees. Proper job. :) Thanks to Thomas and Perrine - worked like Trojans.