Experimenting with our growing areas

Soil health and biodiversity are important to us, which is why we don't till our soil, or use herbicides. This means that any weeds that grow in our beds have to be removed by hand, but this takes time that we'd rather spend making tea, so this year we're experimenting to see which bed preparation and management techniques are the most efficient. We’re trying 3 different approaches and at the end of the year we’ll evaluate which was the most effective:

Area 1 - Compost and woodchip

Covering the existing grass with an organic, biodegradable mulch film and then layering with local green waste compost and woodchip creates low maintenance beds and paths that are relatively weed-free once persistent weeds like dandelions and buttercups are removed, but they take a lot of work to establish and are dependent .on a reliable source of lots of woodchip.

Area 2 - Mown paths

Similar to above but without the dependency on woodchip, we instead leave the paths in between the beds as they are and mow them to keep the grass down. This is definitely quicker to set up, but there's more time needed to maintain throughout the season and the grass starts to creep into the beds which also requires management.

Area 3 - Broadcast seeding

Instead of sowing our annuals (calendula, chamomile, corn flower and borage) into beds we thought we'd try growing them over a larger, less formal area. We covered this with our big reusable sheets to kill off most of the grass, hand-weeded any remaining dandelions and docks, then raked and scattered the mixed seed directly on the soil. The idea is that from this stage we don't intervene until harvest time and the hope is that by selectively harvesting some flowers, whilst leaving others to self-seed we will reduce the need to import seed compost and seeds next year. However, it is inevitable that weeds will grow amongst the herbs and in this unseasonably hot, dry spring the herbs may struggle to grow without watering, so the yield may not be sufficient.

It's going to be interesting to see which is the most effective method - cutting down the time needed by just an hour when setting up and maintaining new beds can have a big impact - we've almost quadrupled our original growing space for this season and expect to double it again next year!