by Mark Brown
Does your garlic get inundated with rye and winter grass? It can take the shine off a pleasant experience. A "trick" I learned some years ago on the PRI forum has helped us and may help you too.
The process involves first chipping the weeds from the bed and allowing them to wilt and become "part of the solution".
The beds are then raked, compost spread and drip irrigation lines laid. These are covered with wet newspaper (turning bad news to good news). The purpose of the paper is to suppress weeds which can look very much like the emerging onion and make weeding difficult.
Notice the string line in the previous bed. It marks the irrigation so they can be avoided during planting.
Mulch is placed on top of the paper to keep it in place and further protect the soil. Sand is sometimes used instead of hay if it is readily available.
The mulch is moved aside and the paper pierced to plant the garlic or onion. Watering the bed sees the soil surround the seedling. If you look hard you may see young garlic emerging from the holes.
The garlic growing with dogs to guard it (or more likely to walk on it) and guinea pigs in a cage to mow between the beds and keep the grass down.
Yes, but, you’re growing them in monoculture, without any companions or connections to other resources. Is drip irrigation really the first choice in a non-arid environment as this appears to be?
I like the chop-and-drop and the sheet and surface mulching, but I don’t see much interesting permaculture design here.
That seems a lot of garlic Mark, have you got vampires round there or do you have a plan for the surplus ;)
Seems like you done a ton of work putting those beds in! It looks a bit two dimensional atm, is this an early stage of your design plan?
Have you ever looked at agro-forestry? My PDC course mates visited a site recently where hazel and willow was planted in N-S strips 20M apart, the bits in between were either row cropped or grazed, the trees were coppiced in rotation (3 yrs willow, 7 yrs hazel) to provide fuel.
Seeing your beds going off into infinity in the pic reminded me of the agro-forestry site, so I thought I’d mention it :) I’m sure someone took some video, I’ll see if I can hunt it down.
I have grown Certified Vegetables for 14 years and have taught food growing for 10 years.
Personally I dislike using newspaper (industrial smoke stack carbon black with starches and recycled paper with dioxin)…..
The method described here is Practical and Professional. The beds seem about 15 to 20 metres long. A lovely cash/ barter crop will result. There will be a decent result for the effort put in.
Quite a lot of Permie veg. growing is really only supplementary to that which is purchased.
Volume this may seem to other commentators, but definitely the way to grow Food.
Lets be Practical and grow food in volume. Supply the suburb.
Maybe scale up the amount of guinea pigs too; the grass grows fast. We keep the herbage between the beds short with solar recharged Enviromower (not a toy, really amazing! get 2 batteries for large area) and Envirotrimmer.
https://www.victa.com.au/index.cfm?p=9592516C-6FBA-42E8-845AB0A16B50058D
https://www.victa.com.au/index.cfm?p=099D5444-1372-FC39-F19C9C05E14D767F
Keep up the good work Mark + Co.
Good on ya Mark!
Coming from dry old Perth, I think that’s a great planting method. From the pics, it looks like you’re using quite thin sheets of newspaper – which should break down over the season. A good cheap, temporary, composting weed suppression system.
This would make a lot of sense in my raised beds.
Cheers,
Sam
Easy on Gil and Pete,
The picture is misleading. Mark has established a very diverse polyculture that is the essence of permaculture. I WWOOFed there for a few months and learnt a lot. Mark has a great chook tractor system happening, bees, fruit trees and more.
This is ‘real’ permaculture if anything is. And what wrong with having a few main crop beds? Remember zone III from your PDC lads? Maybe sell some surplus or supply a community supported agriculture project (like Mark does)?
And you’d probably want a decent sized bed for personal consumption. If you eat one head a week (4-6 cloves like I do), you’ll need 52 heads to see you through the year. That’s a decent sized bed or couple of beds. And some parsley to keep your breath fresh..
There is a tension between the diversity principle and obtaining a yield. Diversity is great but you may not get the best yield. I know that Mark values both principles.
Hello gil – it is true it looks monocultural and lacks design. Truth is that garlic does not lend itself to polyculture though we do spread vetch through the rows later in the season to return organic matter and fix nitrogen. The rows sit in spaces on the edge of a mandala garden that ozzes design and integration. If you google Purple Pear Organics you may be able to get a better view of the system which the rows of garlic are a part.
The use of small animals as part of the system should score a few points anyway shouldn’t it?
The under mulch irrigation is best for our dry summers though we use it only in the rows and not in the mandalas
Pete – the area you can see at the end of the rows has passionfruit growing on the gates and the trees behind are a mixture of agro forestry and food forest species. We grow for a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and believe me you would never be able to grow sufficient garlic to satisfy that lot.
Thanks for your comments and thanks too to Craig for lifting this. It prompts me to submit something that shows the true extent of the permaculture that is happening at Purple Pear Farm in the Hunter Valley where true sustainability will feature in our upcomming Permaculture Design Course. (some spaces available!!)
Great to read about how other people grow their garlic, thanks for the info and pics. Last season we grew garlic which we over planted with Broccoli. In July/August we harvested loads of Broccoli and in December we harvested a years supply of garlic for our family so around 52 bulbs. By over planting the garlic with broccoli it suppressed most weeds and the garlic acted as a companion plant to ward away the white cabbage butterfly from the broccoli as well as scattering eggshells to scare them off. The garlic was planted into a no dig style garden with layers of straw, comfrey, chicken manure, compost and mulched with finely chopped up sugarcane mulch. It was the first crop we had grown in this new garden bed. We had bumper crops of both garlic and broccoli. The garlic was planted in April/May and the broccoli was planted once the garlic was about 10cm high. We had an open house for the Small Footprint Initiative sustainable homes and lifestyle Weekend and one of the participants commented that it was the best broccoli they’d ever seen.
Pacific Palms,Mid North Coast, NSW
we’re just starting community-scale growing and grappling with the shift in headspace from polyculture beds to intensive beds… https://milkwood.net/2011/07/13/shifting-to-community-scale-food-thinking/
I would say planting a bed of garlic or three does not make a monoculture, nor does it denote a lack of permaculture design… and further to that I rekon that kind of dogmatic thinking leads ultimately to scarcity, not abundance…
Thanks for your reply purplepear, it’s great to see more of the context, it all sounds fantastic :)
I think originally it posted under Craigs name, I thought I was talking to Craig anyway, either my post got edited or I may be going slightly mad!
No, you’re not going crazy, at least not quite yet ;)
I accidentally put the wrong author, and your comment made me realise the mistake, so when I corrected the author name, I did the same for your comment.
I really enjoy the opinions & personal expeiences that are as diverse as the number of people responding.
Opinions are clouded by personal involvement or adherence to a philopsophy,force of habit or lack of exposure that can lead to a particular method ‘being the only way’.
There really is no right or wrong way- ‘perhaps consider this as an alternative or in conjunction with’- it’s not as if the Criteria is blah blah blah.
Any picture is only a relection of what is directly in front of you – there’s always so much happening @ the sides & behind which impacts then on what you see before you..
I’m just thankful for wonderful people out there with diverse techniques that can be applied or tweeked to increase roductivity and compliment the time, physical effort & expense spent within that garden.
I get so many ideas to apply to my own humble garden in Southport – thank you & keep up the good work!
Kirsten,
Accusing others of dogmatic thinking is itself an example of the same, and certainly an example of not being open to what they’re saying and seeing. I would hope you’d realize that if Permaculture is everything then it’s nothing. It’s very necessary to make distinctions and uphold values. I think Gil and Pete’s comments were well taken. The photos do show a monoculture. No one said it was a huge one. And I, for one, have yet to hear why garlic “does not lend itself to a polyculture… but I, at least, am certainly open to hearing an argument why. Let’s be a little more open to other points of view. This doesn’t have to be a mutual admiration society where no one learns anything.
re pete’s comments july23, what are enviromowers and envirotrimmers?
this is mostly new to me and would apreciate some clarification.
Bert, my dear, I think you just need an argument but I will bite a little,
Some research by yourself would reveal a companion planting chart that shows the range of plants that grow happily with garlic and those that do not like to grow at all. This chart as posted here in the past https://www.permaculturenews.org/resources/Poster_GDN_Com_Plant.pdf shows fruit trees will benefit from companionship of garlic but I was not keen to fill my garlic beds with cherry trees and many vegetables that do not tolerate co existence. Further to that – if you had read my reply to pete you would see that we add vetch later in the season to fix nitrogen and provide biomass when the garlic is harvested. Add to that the existence of the guinea pigs adding there manure to the area as well as other inputs they make ( do you need me to expand on that or can you use your own initiative?) and you have the makings of a polyculture.
I think a soft apology to Kirsten is in order and in future if you just want an argument go find a forum that caters for argumentative people and leave us to work together to a better future. Or come and join us and be constructive.
Re Garlic and companion plants, I have seen Garlic doing well planted in a polyculture of mainly woody perennials, loosely classified as a medicinal and natural dye plants bed. Coupled with the chart recommending fruit trees, I wonder if Garlic prefers a fungal dominant soil, and weather this is so for other Alliums, or weather there is another reason for the relationship?
Great article. What do you use to chip the weeds initially? How did you build the beds initially? Same method of sheet mulching, composting and mulching?