The Productive Garden Guide: Part 2
Including the Cut Flower Garden, Glasshouse and Berry Patch. (See The Orchard Guide under the Garden Guides section for our Fruit Trees).
Dear Greenthumbs and those who dream of being!
Growing your own food must be one of life’s greatest privileges and joys. When we began a new life here at Moorfield, one of the first conversations we had was about where and how to create the Productive Garden, having created a vegetable garden and orchard that had supplied us with hefty hauls of both at Little Oak and realising that starting from scratch meant spending a good long while without access to the fresh and highly nutritious, not to mention tastiest produce, we’d been enjoying for years, while we created the new one.
NOTE: For the purposes of not entirely overwhelming you with information, the orchard is not included in this Productive Garden Guide: Part 2, there is already enough to cover, there is an existing Orchard Guide available here at this link which covers all things growing and caring for our fruit trees based on our Little Oak Orchard. While we have established an Orchard here there are many exciting developments to come in that space too so we will wait to produce the Orchard Guide: Part 2 based on the Moorfield Orchard until we are ready to do that work.
This past summer we enjoyed our first Moorfield Productive Garden harvests and to say it was life affirming is by no means an over-exaggeration, it felt that good! Tomatoes to sweet corn to cucumbers to pumpkins to melons……WE GREW MELONS!!!! And everything in between! We were amazed at the proliferous nature of such a young vegetable garden, berry patch and cut flower garden, the three main areas that make up our Productive Garden (not inc. the orchard, of course), especially as we don’t spend loads of money bringing in top grade veggie mix mediums, we had to excavate down to subsoil and do not have the resources (time or money) right now to do the large hardscaped framework for deeper beds or the protective and heat radiating retaining walls (yet) that we have planned as this garden evolves.
Using methods we perfected at Little Oak and throwing everything at it that we could muster at next to no cost (think kitchen waste, leaf litter, livestock manures and the like) we created beds that in their first season, pumped out food. It was such a thrill and surprise and that has invigorated us not end for this upcoming growing season, now with another years veggie bed cultivation, growing space extensions, composting zones and THE GLASSHOUSE!!! A glasshouse that had been flat packed on our driveway for over two years is now built and for the most part finished (except for the panels we smashed and have ordered in replacements for), this guide covers off on this dream-come-true strcuture, also.
The Productive Garden: Part 2 (under our Garden Guides Section) shows you the evolution of our plans and designs, offers a look at the illustrations, the maps and provides links to detailed information on certain topics living in some of our other published pieces. It offers you our how-to diagrams and gives you an overview into our thought process and why we made the choices we made. The Productive Garden: Part 1 can also be a good place to start too as it breaks down how and why we do everything we do the way we do it to help build an organic productive garden and a healthy ecosystem to support that.
Thank you as always for being here, I hope this finds you nestled into winter in the Southern Hemisphere, ready to work out some new plans or improvements to your own productive patch in time for spring and the new growing season, or if you are joining us from the Northern Hemisphere, head down and bum up in the glory of your growing season in full swing and hopefully, some things you can apply now.
Always, your fellow gardening nerd, Pip xo
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