 observe and interact. It's David Hongren's first permaculture principle and it comes at the beginning because in order to know what to do we need to understand where we are so that's the bit about observation but the interaction bit is also important because we can observe what's going on around us but by interacting with things by doing stuff then we also learn as a result of you know did that work well. And Bill Morrison warned us not to do anything big or that we might regret early on like build a house because of course we might look at it later and say we put it in the wrong place but planting some annual veg there's not too much that can go wrong with that. If we're planting a fruit tree and there are some fruit trees up here then they're likely to be there for a long time so we need to be a bit clear about that but we can do things with annuals and learn about how they're feeling. We very much got an interesting mixture of different responses from different beds and places that we've been growing things on the site so we thought we'd start here at the top of the land. This is a bed we made in the spring as part of the orchard ultimately to be part of the forest garden that we're going to be putting in here but for now we basically we put down cardboard we surrounded with some stones so there's some compost on here but there wasn't a huge amount I mean it's more in the middle and on the outside because we heap it up in the centre and we planted three things primarily we put in New Zealand spinach which is this one it's been doing very well we've been cropping for salads the small things and also for cooking, steaming, the leeks as you can see they're doing pretty well you know not super super but they're okay given that it's October and we put a lot of beetroot as well and that's dotted about there's this one here is typical so let's just pull it out let's give you a sense of the size of that and you know we've had a good beetroot crop this year and this is one of the things we're going to see in a few places so let's now compare this site with the bottom of this tree over here so here's the bed that we've just been looking at you can see this tree is very close by we planted this in the spring it's a plum well it's a gauge called old green gauge and it's done pretty well this year considering it's quite a big tree to be transplanting and we mulched around the base to give it a chance against the grass because grass obviously is quite very competitive to newly planted trees and we planted in a few things like some allium so these alliums had mycorrhizal fungi grown with them before we put them in you can see they're very happy and i suspect that might be why the tree is done pretty well this year one of the reasons and so we surrounded it with cardboard and put a lot of seaweed down because we're very close to the coast and we've got good access to seaweed so we just mulched all around the outside and put a little bit of compost on top i think but not very much as you can see over the course of the summer a lot of plants have started to make their way in but i had some spare beetroots which i didn't have anywhere else to plant because early days we still hadn't made enough beds and so i thought well i'll just chop some in around the base of the tree what no there's nothing to lose and interestingly now this is the one i've just picked from the other bed and as you can see the ones in this bed let's not pull them all up at once have done a little bit better maybe that might even be heading in the direction of twice as big obviously the leaves are a lot bigger and happier essentially the same microclimate this one's here this one's here um this one's had more seaweed this bed didn't have seaweed so and i suspect that may be one reason but again observing the interacts we're observing the differences without necessarily making assumptions about this is the exact reason why but it might be something to do with the seaweed and one of the trees that we planted actually grew some sea beet underneath obviously the sea beet which grows along the coast has seeded into some of the seaweed we brought the seaweed home and on one of the pear trees down in the lower garden there's a really big sea beet plant growing there very very happy so obviously beet is the kind of family that would you know likes these kind of conditions anyway so anyway there's those two let's go look further down in the bottom garden ah before we get to the bottom garden just want to show you this on the way this is a bed that we made in the spring again we looked at this area and we were looking for somewhere with a bit of shelter because it's quite a windy site particularly up on the top here and we noticed this this provides some shelter from the wind so the west is behind us and we thought this would be a good place to be growing squashes and we've also put in a few other things like yakkons and some Jerusalem architokes and so on here and tucked in here also we've put well there's more New Zealand spinach which grew quite leggy and we've put in some leeks and if you can see this leak but compared to all the other leeks on the site it's pretty pitiful really the squashes the courgettes as they are have suffered a lot from powdery mildew this year which affects photosynthesis so as soon as the leaf gets it it basically it stops working and they have to make new leaves and these have not been very happy but i think in part it's all been down to the fertility here so we got in some different kinds of compost this year we didn't move house with compost so we had to get hold of some and in the spring we got hold of some locally green waste compost but the guy he has storage and it's obviously been there for a while it looks like he doesn't sell a lot of it and it had been sat for a while and we made the bed at the top with it and some of the beds further down and that seemed to be really nice stuff and then we got some in because of the lockdown we had difficulty getting some compost we managed to get some from further away and the guy brought it on the lorry on a truck and tipped it and it was really hot as soon as it arrived it was hot so it had hardly been decomposed and the problem i think we have with this is that essentially it has no life in it so whilst there's a lot of organic matter here what it does lack is life it's not right now lacking water let's go down the bottom autumn is most definitely upon us so this is a little bed that we made earlier in the season we put a gate through here in this fence and this was all hedge around the corner here so we moved some of the hedging plants and some of the stone that was over here that was making this bed that was continuous here we made into a round bed and just made a very basic cardboard mulching bed so this was directly under soil but there was lots of sedge and different weeds and things in here so we just put a load of cardboard down we covered it in compost because we didn't have lots of stone to build up the sides it wasn't a lot of compost we planted some fecilia so it's some fecilia in this is a nitrogen fixer it's been a bit slow getting going again i think the compost not especially good but over the period of the season a whole bunch of things have grown in here some of which we put in like the strawberries and this brassica is a spare brassica i had i don't even know what it is we'll find out when it grows and some beetroots here and there's some volunteers like the nettles and the campion and so on and so forth there's some dock in here the main thing really for me was to get it covered get some things growing in here get the life in the soil going and really it needs building up more but it's interesting not just looking at the size of the beetroots again so here this is a yellow one rather than a red one here's a nice red one but what happens if we pull them well they've obviously grown pretty well but we have a lot of nibbling going on and there we are you can see essentially whether the beetroot been out the ground they've been eaten and we do know we have voles here voles like good cover that they can scurry around underneath not be seen by birds of prey and so on anything that might like to eat them so oh there's a bit of fissilia come out there so beetroots they've grown okay considering but they're getting nibbled here so something important for us to be aware of is next year we will we either have to make this less full friendly or it's not a very good idea to be planting crops that voles would like to eat let's have a look down here so the other thing that's been going on as we've been moving from place to place is we've been getting closer to the back door and from here it's maybe between five and ten meters to this bed uh when we arrived this was full of roses and roses like feeding so I imagine they were pretty well fed this got good deep compost we actually put in a cherry tree here we weren't expecting to plant a tree in this bed but when we looked at the compost we thought yes we should do that and we planted a lot of fruit along here various different things the currents perhaps were a bit over fertilized because they grew quite vigorously and then got attacked by aphids in the first year but then again aphids would be around for the roses so maybe that was a connection there hopefully that will be less of an issue this next year they've got some good buds on anyway and you can see the strawberries have done very well we're making sure we've got some for next year to be planting out as well and another thing of course what else will be put in the bed but beet roots it's worth bearing in mind that all of these beet roots were grown in the same module sown from seed at the same time grown side by side in the same modules in the same place and planted out at the same time and we've had well this is from the top bed this is from the one next to it but under the tree this one probably more or less as good and what's worth bearing in mind is that essentially this has been growing in virtually no soil this has had seaweed so what's the difference apart from the fact that this has been seriously munched what is the difference well the difference is that we're right next to the pond here in the spring there's a lot of algae that grows in the pond because the fish obviously they continue to poo over the winter and what happens is that builds up the algae take advantage of that and there's no bigger plants growing at that point so you get this big flush so we're scooping lots of that water out and we're using it to water things and because water is heavy we don't like to move it very far so essentially it comes from there and what's the easiest place to put it to that bed there which is also a fruit bed or this bed or up here so basically in the bottom courtyard here near the back door in zone one or zone 1.1 everything's getting a lot of feeding whereas these at the top were not really being fed at all then we're getting a little bit of watering from time to time but it's a lot of way it's basically up that wall there on the other side to take that heavy water with the nutrients in so these got less fed so the benefits these have had down here this had less fertility in the soil than this one but this one got more often fed and let's have a look at this one well what's going on with this beetroot well it is a monster beetroot as you can see you probably guessed from the leaves fantastic leaves but essentially if we put that side by side with the best one from the top there we are that's the difference now i'm not saying that that's going to be as tender as this one but this bed is full of fertility and it's getting fed a lot and that's the big difference so putting things in zone one nearest where you hang out and particularly if you're going to be moving water around for watering or nourishing plants with liquid feeds then the closer they are to your back door the more likely they are to look like this and of course we also have voles here as you can see because again there's lots of vegetation they're hanging around here but we've still got a lot more beetroot left after that good munch than we do with this one so look at what you're fertilizing with how far things away to move water and just bear in mind that those things can make a huge difference