This Beautiful Small-Scale Kitchen Garden Mixes Edibles & Ornamentals

Hello, my name is Hugh Richards and I am a super passionate gardener and author and YouTuber and my goal is simple. I want to make growing food as accessible as possible by working with nature rather than against it. And welcome to my second permaculture kitchen garden. This is 125 square meters. Now, the average size of a garden for a house in London is 140 meters. So whilst the camera may make it feel big, the first thing that happens when people walk in is, wow, it's smaller than I expected. And this place really is kind of my escape from a busy world, but it's also my creative outlet. You know, I think a garden is very much about, it's kind of like a garden is an extension of a gardener's personality. And what does one, what does every single garden have in common? Every single garden has a gardener. And whilst there are so many different gardening techniques out there, one of the things that I love to say is that there's more than a hundred ways to grow a potato and a garden is full of opportunities. Every single garden is unique. You know, every single garden is going to have its own particular challenges, but it's also going to have its own opportunities. And it's about seeking those opportunities combined with what you want, because a lot of gardening techniques kind of forget about how the gardener is feeling. And so that is why I'm into this thing called permaculture, which in a nutshell of nutshells is its nature-inspired design. It's using patterns and systems in nature, for example, the layers in the forest, and then how I could maybe utilize those different layers here in this very garden to turn it into an edible jungle. And you can see from the footage that this space here really is an absolute jungle during the growing season. And instead of coming out here into the garden to harvest food, it's more of a case of I come to the garden and I forage for food. And it is so important to me that my garden is a space that I come and enjoy. There's that old gardening proverb about the best fertilizer is a garden of shadow. And I could not agree with that more. If you create things in your garden that make you come to it more, it's going to be a more well-tended garden. And what I think a garden is, is very much our, perhaps for many of us, our most intimate connection with the natural world. We might only have an allotment or a back garden or even a balcony, but the fact that we can grow plants and we can grow flowers and we see all sorts of bees and butterflies and hover flies and see that life, it is so fun. It's so empowering and it's kind of so addictive. And what I've been working on for the last couple of years is a book called The Permaculture Garden, which really tries to encapsulate the idea how every single garden is different. And to recognize that every single household has its own unique set of limitations or challenges and to cater for that. Because a lot of gardening kind of styles out there assume a lot of things, like assume you can access lots of compost or assume you can access lots of resources. But permaculture isn't a gardening technique. Permaculture is a way of design. It's a way of thinking outside the box with a set of principles rather than a set of rules to help you, to help make things possible. And I honestly believe that the more challenging your situation, the more that permaculture comes into its own to help. And nothing is more important to a healthy garden than a healthy gardener. So if you sometimes feel like your garden isn't working for you, or if you notice particular things that you really enjoy, then kind of lean into that. Like if you love growing loads of flowers, just fill your garden with flowers. And so if that all sounds interesting, and if this channel has helped in any way, shape, or form help your garden, then I really think you're going to love the permaculture garden. Now, something that you'll see in a lot of permaculture gardens is this thing called polyculture. So polyculture is the opposite of monoculture. Monoculture is where you have one crop growing in a space, for example, a field of wheat. Polyculture is where you have lots of different things growing together. And this is what happens in nature. If you go out into a rainforest or something, there's lots of different species all within a small space or like a coral reef. It is a pattern seen across nature. And we can apply that to the garden, and that gives us a nice naturalistic feel. But one of the actual reasons why I love growing in a polyculture is because it's cheating a bit, because it kind of allows you to hide any failures. If you're growing lots of different things together, let's say I was growing a kale, and I had like beans growing, and calendula, and lettuce, and cosmos, and all these different things. If the kale plant died, kind of the gap would be hidden a bit because everything else is growing around it, and it wouldn't be as obvious as saying having a total crop failure where you're just growing potatoes in a single raised bed. Now, one thing I've realized over the few years is companion planting is not for me, partly because a lot of the charts online contradict each other, partly because a lot of it has no scientific backing, but also part of it is because I can't remember what I should and shouldn't be planting together. And what I found is actually kind of if a plant wants to grow, it wants to grow. And I take no account for companion planting at all. What I do instead is something called complementary planting, or I don't actually know what the official term is, so I call it complementary planting. And so complementary planting really takes into account lots of different things. I'll do a whole video about it, but it takes into account what's currently growing and what could kind of complement that based on a series of factors such as how long the plant lives for, how tall it grows, how big it gets, what color it is. And doing that is so much more liberating than companion planting. And part of issue is I don't have any phone signal here. So if I was like, oh, does this plant go with that? I can't look it up. And it turns out over the last few years, I've done a lot of things that I shouldn't have planted together. And a garden can also adapt. You can try something for a year, and if it doesn't work, then you've always got next year. To show you how much a garden can adapt, the year before this became my kind of permaculture garden 2.0, this was a self-sufficiency garden for a book project that I did with my colleague Sam. And that was very much about like intensive growing, grow as much food as possible, almost 600 kilos of food. But you can see from the footage the difference between what that garden looked like one September and then September of 2024. And really the only thing that changed between the two was the planting style. And so of course, polyculture as a planting style is a core part of my permaculture garden book. If there was one thing that I wish I did a little bit more in this garden last year, it would be probably utilizing more perennial herbs and flowers. So a lot of perennial veg has been in, like we grew yacon and ochre, and you can I think just see behind me, that is a perennial kale. But one of my favorite beds was this bed where I had things like bee balm and Korean mint growing, and a few annual herbs and flowers. But it was just alive, it just felt alive. Every time you went past it, there were just tons of bumblebees. The other thing that was really important to me in this garden is to make sure it was self-sufficient in finished compost. And you can see behind me, I've got a hotbed where the seedlings have just started sprouting through. This gives me a huge amount of compost. I've also got a worm bin here. So a worm bin is a great option if you only have a patio or balcony. And I have a couple of cold compost bins. Now the great thing about cold compost bins is that you can also plant in them. So if you want to grow like a pumpkin or something, it will turn massive and grow. The act of growing food is one of the most powerful things you can do. And whatever way you grow food, it's so much better than going to a supermarket to buy that very stuff, which of course is going to be much poor quality and much blander than homegrown veg. This garden last year was such a joy to be in, and I cannot wait for this growing season. And so if you want some gardening inspiration, I've got a video here, which collects some of my favorite permaculture gardens that I visited. And also here, you can find out more about permaculture. And don't forget, if you want to get my book, there'll be a link down below.