Permaculture Directory. 10 Tomatoes to Grow in Your Container Garden. Ajith_chatie/CC BY 2.0 I tend to be a bit obsessive about tomatoes. In my summer garden, they are allotted the most space, the sunniest spots, and the beds with the fluffiest soil. And, inevitably, I run out of good garden spots before I run out of tomato plants that need to be planted (this is not how one should plan a garden. It makes sense to have spots for all of the plants you are going to grow. I forget this rule every year when seed buying/trading time arrives.)
The result is that I usually have a half-dozen (or more...) tomato plants that need to be planted in pots every year. Here are some of the varieties that have worked well for me, as well as recommendations from other garden writers. 1. 'Japanese Black Trifele' is tied with 'Brandywine' for my favorite tomato. 2. While my garden generally belongs to heirloom tomatoes, I do plant hybrid 'Sungold' tomatoes every year. Photofarmer/CC BY 2.0 3. If you've never grown 'Wapsipinicon Peach,' you're in for a real treat. 4. 5. 6. 7. Gardener's Supply Kitchen Garden Planner, planting map | Grow Your Own Vegetables. With our free online planner, you can design a super-productive vegetable garden, based on square-foot gardening techniques instead of traditional rows. Just drag and drop crops to the planting grid and the planner fills in the number of plants.
Or choose from 16 pre-planned gardens. Print out your planting map and you're ready to go. Get Started or Expert Advice and Resources. Vegetable Garden Planner — Design Your Best Garden Ever. Interactive tools: Calculators and Resources to Help You Plan Your Growing Season | Johnny's Selected Seeds. Highly Uncivilized | getting the dirt back under our fingernails for a more sustainable suburbia. Small-scale hugelkultur in raised beds. Hugelkultur is a method of building planting beds by covering wood with dirt; big piles of wood and sometimes other organic matter. You can dig a trench and fill it with wood, or just pile the wood on the ground and cover it. There are many different approaches as Paul Wheaton points out, and the results are impressive.
This has to be one of the most low tech systems I've ever heard of. Why would you do this? As the wood rots, it has an incredible capacity for holding water, and creates a nifty little ecosphere to promote a healthy soil web of microbes, fungi, insects and worms. I had a big pile of firewood from some dying trees we took down several years ago, and rather than starting a new bed, I decided to convert an existing raised bed planter. When I removed the worm tower it was full of happy worm life, with worms in the tube, and hanging out of the holes in the side.
After the dirt was removed I layered in the wood, and added a couple of buckets of compost from different stages. How Nature Makes Soil, And You Can Too (Video) Image credit: Ecofilms Australia From helping to convert arid, salty desert into a productive permaculture garden, to reminding us of the astounding fact that there are 40 tons of life in just one acre of soil, Geoff Lawton knows a thing or two about the magic of soil.
Here he reveals a few choice places where nature likes to make soil (it's not where you'd think!) —and tells us how to take advantage of that in your own garden. I am assuming this clip was filmed as part of Geoff's Permaculture Soils DVD, which looks to be a veritable feast of information, tips and inspiration for those gardeners who believe in the old adage that if you feed the soil, the plants look after themselves. Certainly the notion of looking to the bottom of your pond for valuable soil, before you go buying in top soil stripped from land elsewhere, is about as simple and as important a tip as I can think of. Thanks again for the inspiration Geoff.
Get more fascinating permaculture footage over at EcoFilms Australia. San Francisco Permaculture Garden Grows Thousands of Pounds of Food. Image credit: Growing Your Greens From an awesome tour of an urban permaculture allotment through wild permaculture forest gardening on the BBC to greening the deserts of Jordan, we've seen plenty of great footage of how permaculture design can help grow healthy, productive food systems that need minimal inputs or management. Here we see another example growing in the heart of San Francisco, and I am reminded yet again why permaculture is so ideally suited to collective, community gardening.
While some of its most ardent advocates will claim that permaculture designs can be almost completely self sufficient, I've yet to see a system like that. From harvesting to occasional weeding to mulching and watering, most permaculture gardens still require significant human management. But crucially, such inputs can usually be done at less regular intervals than a traditional garden based on annual vegetable garden—which may need daily watering in the summer. Wild' Permaculture Forest Gardening. How To Make a DIY Natural Swimming Pool.