I return back from a two-week vacations.
There was no need for watering. All the food garden was a jungle. The weather was quite cool and wet.
The jungle is crazy growing tomatoes, pumpkins, zucchini and beans. Maybe because I don't prune my tomatoes, and I don't stake any plant. I just let everything growing wildy and mixed. Talk about excessive companion planting!
So, I learnt a few valuable lessons:
plan and organize your garden!
give enough space to each plant to avoid becoming a jungle!
Next year, I will make of companion planting a wise and careful choice, such as not mixing a big plant such a tomato or zucchini with small ones like swiss chard or tiger nuts, or mixing brocculi withbeets. The vines are particularly invasive!
About pruning: remember last year, I had only one tomato plant, I didn't prune it, and I got in the end more than 100 tomatoes, in only one plant! So, I keep not pruning; let them grow without limits.
There are now dozens of green tomatoes.
We harvested zucchini (unfortunely some were rot, due to the cold weather), swiss chard, lettuce, one big cucumber, beautiful kohl-rabi, and plenty of zucchini and nasturtium flowers for our salads. We have also dozens of nice brocculi!
The fact that the garden has only 3-4 hours of daily sunlight seems not to be a problem. Yes, I have more greens than fruits, and ripening is slower, but the crops still are fine.
Now, we got four days of warm, humid, thunder weather; today it rained heavily for five hours. Then, as it was very humid evening, we went slug hunting, and imagine... we catch 127 slugs! Half were around the compost bins! Usually, I am not a killer (!!), but I have had enough. I just cut them in half. I think tomorrow the birds are going to have a dinner party!!
, which for me is the absolute bible of self-sufficiency living. Written a few decades ago, it stands as bright and updated as ever, and it features an amazing ammount of information and resources of how to grow your own food, catch water, in very specific, non-sense and practical situations. This is a book for a lifetime.
Another very good book is Perennial Vegetables: From Artichokes to Zuiki Taro, A Gardener's Guide to Over 100 Delicious and Easy to Grow Edibles by Eric Toensmeier. It features an extensive list of many perennial vegetables, easy to grow, how to grow and prepare them, many of which have great potential for permaculture, and are not yet so well known. I have grown some of them this year with excellent results. This is practical Permaculture at its best. I also like very much his detailed style of writting.
Finally, the best general (and a fairly cheap one) Permaculture book for more urban settings, it's 21st Century Smallholder: From Window Boxes to Allotments: How to Go Back to the Land Without Leaving Home
by Paul Waddington. This is not only a very practical book but an inspiring one. Particularly for people who live in cities, and would like to get more ecological and self-reliant. The book is divided in the sections garden and food, water, energy, waste, and has many little advices and tricks to reduce our ecological footprint and it also includes a few case-studies. Excellent book to start with.
