'Letting in the Wild Edges' by Glennie Kindred has, as anticipated, has become my 'book of the moment' and I am really cherishing re-reading the seasonal chapters as the year progresses round the circle......Glennie discusses many different wild edges that are fundamental to our lives, but my focus over the last few days (inbetween sheep clipping and workshop writing..amongst other things) has been to tame down the wilderness of the border of my Edible Garden...I have purposely designed the edge of my edible garden to provide multiple functions....shelter, habitat for pollinators, craft materials, food, and visual beauty...the 'wilderness' type design also means that there is little need for much maintenance over the growing season......the last couple of weeks of hot sunny weather has meant lots of extra growing for this diverse part of the garden though, and it wasn't going to be long before it started competing with some of the annual vegetable beds for growing space, light, nutrients and water........
.....so I set too and trimmed a lot of the growth right back...though not all of it of course!.....some nettles were added to my nettle brew fertiliser and others dried to trial a 'nettle hay' to feed to animals...some of the comfrey was layered under courgette plants and fruit trees, and more added to the comfrey brew fertiliser bucket, soon to be fed to tomato, chilii and cucumber plants in the polytunnel...and the majority of rest of vegetation cut back was just left to fall on the ground it was cut from and will be incorporated back into the ground by all that soil life to increase fertility , carbon and water storage capacity...the exception being grasses that had already seeded which gave to the chickens...
.....and of course, an additional positive and yield from this garden care, was the time and freedom to reflect further on Glennies magical words and artwork.....but more on that in another post. You can read the review of 'Letting in the Wild Edges' I wrote for Permaculture Magazine a couple of months ago here
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