Over the last few months we have been reclaiming and landscaping a small Gloucestershire garden.

Using sheet mulching and sustainable gardening methods, our idea is that through experimenting we will learn what works and what doesn’t.  This blog will keep you up to date with how it goes, and also it will give us a reference to look back over…

This is a photo of Cressida picking grapes from our vine in October 2011.

Later I will include some photos of her working in the polytunnel.  Sometimes the temperature reaches over 80 degrees and she has serious problems with overheating, as I will show you when I update this blog soon!

The poly is starting to get established now. We have a wealth of fruit and vegetables coming on, and the Three Sisters experiment appears to be working. People say that in this country it can only thrive in a polytunnel, and it certainly seems to be working in ours…

Courgettes and Tricolour corn…

Aubergines (Money-Maker) starting out…

Three sisters experiment seems to be working

The little olive tree appeared to have died in the front garden, so we transplanted it (or ripped it out of the ground as is Cressida’s preferred technique!).

Anyway, it seems to have rallied, and is now basking in 85 degrees, and starting to throw off shoots from ground level.  It thinks that its in a grove in Skopelos now hee hee…see the little shoots starting to form? It was only put in to the tunnel a month ago…

We have recently been reading ‘The Barefoot Beekeeper’ and as a result have shelved our plans with the national hive, and instead we are building Top Bar hives. These are a completely different way of beekeeping, as Phil Chandler explains on his website, involving allowing bees to decide how they want to run their lives, rather than imposing Victorian methods of Langstroth and associates.

This is another version of the TBH which is the one I am concentrating on building now!

The Three Sisters planting system is all about growing plants that are going to nurture each other to reach their full potential.  The corn will achieve a height which will help the beans that need a strong plant to support  them. The squashes that grow below the other two are benefitting from the shade they are providing. The root systems probably provide nutrients and other benefits which I have yet to discover.  It is so obvious when you actually DO IT!