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Posts from Forest Garden Wales Blog for 05/01/2019
By [email protected] (Jake Rayson) on Apr 30, 2019 08:10 pm
A step-by-step guide to establishing a living ground cover: to protect the soil, create a habitat for wildlife and provide you with a harvest. Win, win, win.
A key principle of no-dig gardening is to always protect the soil with mulch. In a forest garden, the soil is protected by a living mulch, a ground cover plant. Here are some instructions for establishing the ground cover layer on an area of grass.
Kill the grass with sheet mulch. A quality, woven plastic sheet mulch is the cheapest, reusable option but it does involve plastic. Also, buy a large width (2-3 metres) to reduce the time spent preparing and buy a smaller amount of a higher quality and plan to rotate its use in the garden. Mow the grass first, then peg out the sheet mulch with metal pegs. Weigh it down with heavy things because otherwise it will blow away.
Leave for 6-12 months. Six months is enough for the grass, 12 months, kills off deep-rooted perennials. The process works faster in summer, and it can take less than 6 months depending on conditions, so do check. Don’t leave for longer than 12 months, as grass will grow on top.
Remove the sheet mulch, a process which can take some time! The earth should be brown and crumbly, with lots of vole and mice tunnels.
Mark out and plant shrubs.
Cover with wood chip or bark mulch. You can use wood chip as it doesn’t rob nitrogenPDF.
Plant ground cover through the wood chip at about a half metre spacing, in a staggered fashion.
Sow the temporary ground cover, which helps prevent weeds getting a hold until your ground cover established. Here in Wales, I use White Mustard Sinapsis alba, which is cheapest to buy in bulk, eg at the time of writing, 21 kilos from Cotswold Seeds £50 including postage, enough for a couple of acres. You could go dutch with someone.
Do remember that you will still need to weed until the ground cover plants are established. With something like Ground Ivy and Chilean Strawberry, this can be within the year, although evergreens like Lesser Periwinkle and Nepalese Raspberry I’ve found take longer. When you’re weeding, you can simply cut the tops of dandelion and plantain and drop them in situ. They will grow back but will die out after a cuople of weedings. Grass on the other hand needs to be removed, although the roots don’t get established in the soil, just in the wood chip.
By [email protected] (Jake Rayson) on Apr 30, 2019 11:58 am
This is the CAD plan for Forest Garden One
This is the latest version of the forest garden plan for what is unaffectionately known as Forest Garden One (I had a mental block with names that day). It’s created using the excellent Open Source QCAD Professional software. You can download the PDF or source code files, if it’s of interest:
Hi-res, zoomable PDF version of plan
DXF CAD version of plan
There is also a plan for the Ornamental Forest Garden.
By [email protected] (Jake Rayson) on Apr 30, 2019 11:58 am
This is the CAD plan for the Ornamental Forest Garden
The Ornamental Forest Garden (OFG) plan is based on a satellite photo, so it should be more accurate than the Forest Garden One, which is based on a digital Ordnance Survey map. It also is created using the excellent Open Source QCAD Professional software. If you like, you can download the PDF or source code files:
Hi-res, zoomable PDF version of plan.
DXF CAD version of plan, with background image.
