The Incredible, Edible, Pigeon Pea.
Pigeon pea is a very versatile plant in a sustainable garden because of it’s many uses as food, mulch, green manure, shelter, windbreaks, living trellises, and even firewood. Read on to learn how you can grow it in your garden and benefit from it’s many uses.
Make Your Own Plant Based Potting Soil
A quality potting soil is essential for successful container gardening, but if you’ve ever tried to find a commercial mix that doesn’t contain animal products such as manure, blood, and bone, you know it can be a real challenge. The solution is to make your own so you control what goes into the mix, and if you need a lot of it, you might just save some money too.
The Incredibly Versatile Comfrey Plant
Comfrey is a perennial herb that has many uses in the garden. It has a well-deserved reputation as a super plant amongst organic growers and permaculture practitioners. It’s a nutrient rich ‘chop and drop’ mulch and compost activator, helps to break up compacted soils with its’ thick tuberous roots, can serve as a barrier to spreading grasses and weeds, and the leaves make a potent plant based liquid fertiliser.
How to Choose the Right Mulch for your Garden
Mulch can offer many benefits for your garden, but if you don’t know how to choose the right type for your needs, you might be doing more harm than good.
Grow Vigorous and Healthy Plants with Beneficial Fungi
Give your fruits and vegetables, lawns, and ornamental plants a secondary root system that is more extensive and efficient than their own to improve nutrient uptake, drought tolerance, and overall health with a beneficial fungus known as mycorrhizal fungi.
Turn Your Lawn into an Instant Garden with Sheet Mulching
Do you want to turn a lawn, weeds, or a patch of bad soil into a garden bed with little to no digging? Sheet mulching is a method that does most of the hard work for you!
Create Incredibly Rich Soil with Chipped Branch Wood
Green manures add short-lived fertility to your soil, but chipped branch wood is a much longer lasting source of organic matter. Combine the two and you’ll create incredibly rich soil!
Grow Your Own Fertiliser with Green Manures
Why buy fertiliser when you can grow it yourself at low cost? The best manure for your garden isn’t manure at all. You can feed your annual and perennial plants and improve the soil in your garden by growing green manures.
Harvest & Store Rainwater with Contour Swales
You already know rainwater is good for your garden and may have noticed how green your plants look after a good rainfall. That’s because rainwater contains nitrogen which “washes out” of the atmosphere, providing your plants with a nutrient boost, giving them their green colour. So it makes sense to catch and store this free resource to irrigate and feed your garden, and one of the best ways to do that is a low-tech do-it-yourself method known as a contour swale.
Create Low Maintenance Garden Beds with Hugelkultur
If you have woody garden waste like fallen trees, branches and shrubs, instead of burning or throwing it out, put it to good use by creating raised garden beds that retain moisture, build soil fertility, and increase drainage. This easy to build garden bed method, used in Eastern Europe for centuries, turns a waste product into delicious fruit and vegetables.
Grow Bananas Easily & Sustainably With Banana Circles
Turn your kitchen or garden waste and excess water into delicious bananas and other crops with an easily constructed and low-maintenance banana circle.
No-Dig Vegetable Gardening
To build and maintain a no-dig garden, just layer organic materials on top of the ground and let nature do the work for you by creating beautiful fertile soil as the material breaks down, a lot like composting. It’s a great option if you want a garden but don’t have a lot of time to devote to its care and maintenance, and because you don’t have to dig the soil, it’s kind to the life in your garden too.
Improve Your Garden with Plant Communities
Creating plant communities naturally increases yields, reduces pests, and protects the soil. It’s a sustainable, ecological method of gardening that imitates the diversity of natural ecosystems.