Creating A Perennial Vegetable Garden for Self-Sufficiency in the UK

Welcome to Freedom Forest guys, the three acre edible oasis that we're creating here in the south of England, where we like to try lots of new things and push the boundaries with what we can grow using permaculture and no-dig methods. Absolutely no chemicals, weed killers or synthetic fertilizers, just what nature provides. Ten years ago Dan bought this land thick with gauze and bramble as marginal wasteland and about six years ago together we began transforming it into an edible oasis. As we slowly expand out and plant up new areas of our land our aim for the existing areas is to make them as easy to manage and as productive as possible as we work towards our goal of self-sufficiency and hopefully one day being able to sustain enough income directly from our land to cover the cost of the things that we can't provide ourselves. This whole area was bramble and gauze as well and we've now been growing crops like potatoes, yacon and sweet potatoes here for about five years and today we're going to transform this whole area into perennial vegetable beds that will hopefully sustain us for many years to come and also provide us with crops and plants that we may be able to sell in the future as well. It was a bit of a last minute decision to turn this area over to perennial vegetables so we've done a bit of preliminary work beforehand because we've had the plants in order and we're right at the end of the bare root season. So this whole back run of the bed along here is going to be different varieties of asparagus and I've begun the area by putting in these hardwood posts which were reclaimed. These should last a lot longer than the standard pressure treated softwood which I find here like these ones are already nearly all broken and they're only about four to five years old. They may look like they've been treated with something like creosote but they're actually that's the natural colour and I've just treated them with tongue oil which is a natural oil pressed from the nuts of the tongue tree and these are going to create the support for the asparagus as they grow up. I've already prepared most of the holes here. We've got a three or four inch layer of compost from our no dig beds underneath that is a solid hard pan of clay so I've broken that up a little bit to initially allow varieties so it's going to be really interesting over the next few years to see if there are particular varieties that grow better for us and asparagus is an awesome vegetable for this time of year as you can be harvesting it all through April once your plants get going and it has to be one of my favourite all-time vegetables anyway. We've tried to grow asparagus a few times here before but we just haven't given it the space or the attention which I've learnt now that asparagus staggered rows approximately two foot or 60 centimetres apart and the soil here on top is really nice and well draining from years of having wood chip layered on top which has slowly broken down into compost but like Dan was saying earlier we do have quite a hard clay base below which is slowly softening so yeah he loosened off the clay and we have added some extra compost to the holes and a little bit of wood chip on top to hopefully give our asparagus the best possible start. And the perennial plant that we're putting in next all along the front of this bed here is rhubarb and we're going to put 10 crowns of rhubarb along this side of the bed and another 10 crowns on the front of the bed on the other side of the path and hopefully with the spacing that we've allowed it will still give us just a narrow path along here in front of the asparagus for when the time comes that we get to harvest. We're planting four different varieties of rhubarb today which should give us a potential harvest from February right through June and the nice thing about the two crops that we've planted in this bed today is that it should give us a good harvest through the leanest time of the year. I was speaking to one of the old school guys around this area the other day and he was one of the market gardeners who were still operating before the supermarkets came in and pretty much ended that tradition and this whole valley along here we're in was all market gardens and he said one of the big crops that they used to grow here was rhubarb so it's really nice that decades on from that now that we can be re-establishing some of that in the local area and strawberries as well he said were a big crop around here so we love our strawberries and we're growing tons of those as well. So we've planted two early varieties of rhubarb which is red raspberry and timperley early and we've chosen to plant the early varieties on the bed this side because we're actually on a north facing slope here so because of this bank we've got this bed will actually get the sun earlier in the day and earlier in the year a little bit so hopefully it will get our early crop of rhubarb going sooner over this side we've got victoria and sutton seedless which are mid-season varieties and so hopefully by the time they're getting going the sun is going to be higher in the sky already later in the year. Now our next job today is to divide down all of our yacon plants and we're actually going to extend this yacon bed out a little bit more and the plan for our yacon bed as well as giving us an amazing winter harvest is that hopefully we are going to be able to sell the growing tips of the yacon going forward and that's one of the things that we would really harvest these massive sweet potato like tubers all through the winter months and they can be eaten raw or cooked and in the winter they give you a really nice fresh crunch that we're often missing when we haven't got things like cucumber on offer and when you're eating seasonally and one of the amazing things about this plant is that it doesn't regrow from the tubers so you can take 100% of your harvest it actually regrows from growing tips which sit at the top of the plant so we divide those off separately and that's what we're doing today is harvesting some of the tubers dividing up the plants and spreading them out through the bed to make more new plants and if you would like to know more about this amazing crop we have made heaps of videos on it in the past so check out this playlist here and learn more about yacon. Okay so that is some of our beautiful yacon plants divided down to create new plants for us and so we've extended out the yacon bed and we will be able to create even more plants next year which may give us the possibility of selling some of the growing tips in the future. As we've expanded into new areas of our land it's become apparent to us how much more time and attention annual crops take. Now we do of course always intend to grow annual vegetables as well as we really value their flavours and their diversity particularly during the peak growing season but when planning for the future after this initial input perennial beds should take a lot less time and attention just weeding and harvesting mainly and generally perennial plants are a lot hardier as well. It will be around two to three years before we're taking good harvests from this area but we do see it as an investment in our future and now here we are approximately five months later and these perennial beds are looking absolutely lush and abundant. We are really tempted to harvest some of this amazing ginormous rhubarb but it's my understanding that we are best to leave the plants for the first year to establish and it will be three years for the rhubarb until we can start taking full harvests and it will probably be similar with the asparagus as well. We hope you've enjoyed seeing the creation of this beautiful perennial vegetable area with crops that are largely going to feed us through the winter as with the yacon and through the hungry gap in the very early spring with a lot of the rhubarb and the asparagus. 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