Hello there!
After a well deserved Christmas & New Years vacation, where most of us spend the holidays with our friends and family, we finally got back into gardening. Last Friday, we dedicated a few hours to maintain our garden and create future plans to make the place more comfortable and clean - since we are still in winter and we can’t do much at the moment, we are taking the time to organize ideas and visualize the concepts for the upcoming projects, that, of course, will be shared here.
For the meantime, we divided ourselves in two teams: one focused on fixing our compost, while the other had the task of taking care of the greenhouse. Since we consider ourselves a sustainable project and have a lot of organic materials to dispose, we noticed that the main compost was not working as well as it should - normally, it is used to collect the ashes from the fire, the chicken’s organic waste, our own food scraps and the weeding we do in the garden, and, although it is supposed to shrink over time and transform the organic materials into hummus (good decomposed soil), we have been noticing that it was not the case in the past weeks.
In order to discover what was the problem, we had to dig all the natural components until we reached the hummus, in which we analyzed that, even though it was full of insects (always a good sign!), it still was not healthy enough to decompose the organic matter all by itself, since it was super dry. The solution was to put all the excess in the garden to air a bit and maybe do the whole process by itself, while at the same time we used the rainy weather to allow the hummus to get more humid and functional. It was a lot of hours of digging and collecting rotten semi-decomposed organic waste, a complete full arm workout, but personally I found it really important to understand the practices around compost, a topic that I have been fully passionate about, but only had theoretical information.
While we were busy digging into the different layers of the compost, the other team was busy organizing the greenhouse - it is still a recent project and still had some weeds from the past seasons, so they got in charge of clearing everything up and start mulching the soil so it would be packed and full of nutrients for the spring. The mulching process (when you cover the soil with wet cardboard and straw) is super vital to keep a healthy soil, since it retains the humidity, promotes biodiversity and keeps the nutrients in place, while protecting it from adverse temperatures. Additionally, they organized all the baby plants that we have been growing, such as spinach, rocket and different types of lettuce - we had to put some in our house, as it was too cold still for them in the greenhouse, as the Hungarian weather has not been nice to us.
I get really excited explaining and learning about permaculture and regenerative agriculture practices, so I am extremely thrilled for the next upcoming projects, specially having the chance to explain them to you.
Stay safe!
- Fi :+)
