Winter Newsletter from The Polyculture Project - 2023
Hello!
We hope you are well wherever you may be on our beautiful planet and a very warm welcome to our newsletter where you can find what we've been up to last year, new plants from the nursery, a special offer on our online course, and what we are planning next.
We have lots of news so if you'd like to see it all, be sure to click the "view entire message" link at the bottom of the mail.
Our new, old Forest Garden - Phronesis
Our vision for the land we have under our stewardship is to create a 9ha edible park that will serve as a world-class example of regenerative landscape design. We’re piecing together plots and have been holding off fencing, however, the process of acquiring land is slow and we've been unable to establish the new areas we've been planting. The local goats in the spring and summer, followed by horses and cows in the autumn, and wild deer and rabbits in the winter have enjoyed the majority of trees we have planted so far. Last spring we decided to start fencing some of the plots and in the Autumn, re-planting began with the canopy layer and boundary plantings of our new, old forest garden Phronesis.
We planted out the tree layer on the west and central areas of the garden, along with boundary planting, and mapped the planted locations onto an overhead orthophoto. You can see a growth forecast for this garden in the below image.
We’ll manage the emergent native woodland on the east side of the plot and maintain the meadow. This will provide a mosaic of habitat within the area, at varying stages of succession, the ideal conditions to enhance biodiversity. As you can see from the below tree species list, there will be plenty of food crops included.
Regenerative Landscape Design - Online Interactive Course
This coming Spring will be the fourth season of our Regenerative Landscape Design - Online Interactive Course. It's been very rewarding getting to know the participants and their projects from all over the world and watching their ideas and designs grow and develop throughout the course and finally, be presented to the group. Our primary goal is for this course to provide our participants with the confidence and inspiration to start building regenerative landscapes, gardens, and farms that produce food and other resources for humans while enhancing biodiversity.
If you are interested in joining us this year you can find what we cover during the course here and we're pleased to offer a $400 discount on the full enrollment fees for everyone that is subscribed to our newsletter. Just use the promo code NEWS2023 when you fill out the registration form and you'll receive your 25% discount.
You are also welcome to pay for the course in six installments (one per month) of $270 with the first payment made by February 15th.
If you are wondering whether this course is right for you, take a look here.
We're looking forward to it!
Polyculture Study Developments
We've paused our polyculture study for the last few years and have taken the opportunity to improve the project site infrastructure to address some ongoing problems, namely, unreliable irrigation, wild animals eating our research, and having our gardens spread out over the town. The break from the study also made it apparent that we were previously overburdened with the work involved in the management, collation, and presentation aspects of the research and that this was not sustainable moving forward.
In light of this, we are concentrating our research and demonstration gardens in a fenced area with a perennial source of water installed and as mentioned above so far it's going well with Phronesis and Ataraxia (our trial garden) fully fenced with reliable irrigation in place.
The next phase of the plan is to find permanent members of the team to help manage the research side of the project and this year we are building a new framework for our polyculture studies and shifting focus to perennial polyculture trials starting with a comparative Polyculture vs Monoculture study looking at how they compare in terms of costs, soil health, biodiversity, production and time. more on that here.
This framework will incorporate a longer-term sustainable model for the research where we aim to offer ownership shares of the land to team members that can commit to the project for certain periods throughout the year. We are calling this plan “Regenerative Syndicates” and will be revealing more details throughout 2023. We're looking forward to experimenting with this concept and, I believe it has great potential for regenerative land management, not just at our site, but all across the planet.
If you would like to browse past polyculture research from the project, you can find records and reports here. We're looking forward to taking this aspect of our project to the next level.
Our Forest Garden Nursery
As always, It's a real pleasure to send our plants, seeds, cuttings, and bulbs to gardens across the world and we are grateful to our customers for giving our plants new happy homes. To show our appreciation we are providing all of our previous customers with a €20 discount voucher for all new orders over €300 and a free copy of our Essential Guide To Growing Fruit and Nut Trees: Compilation.
All new customers can take advantage of a 10% discount for all orders over €500 and, all new orders (of any value) placed between now and the 15th of March will receive free packs of green manure seeds including White Clover - Trifolium repens and Sainfoin - Onobrychis viciifolia. Just Type NEWS23 in the subject line of your email when you place an order and we'll know to apply the rewards. Send your order to balkanecologyproject@gmail.com
New Plants in The Nursery
We've been continuing to expand the diversity of plants we offer from the nursery always focusing on plants that are beneficial to wildlife, provide fertility to the gardens, and of course produce delicious fruits and nuts. New plants this season include the below. (click to view full plant profile.)
Edibles
Amelanchier lamarckii - Snowy Mespilus
Rheum palmatum - Chinese Rhubarb
Rheum rhabarbarum - Rhubarb
Ribes rubrum cv. - White currant
Hosta seiboldiana - Siebold's plantain lily
Cymbopogon flexuosus - East Indian Lemongrass
Ground Cover
Delosperma cooperi - Pink Carpet
Delosperma nubigenum - Hardy Yellow Ice Plant
Heuchera sp. 'Fire Alarm' - Coral Bells
Symphyotrichum ericoides - White heath aster
Kniphofia uvaria - Red hot poker
Trees and Shrubs
Syringa vulgaris - Common lilac
Rhamnus cathartica - Common Buckthorn
Quercus rubra - Red Oak
Climbers
Wisteria sinensis - Chinese wisteria
Campsis radicans - Trumpet vine
New Cultivars for 2023
We have a new selection of Honeyberry cultivars this season
You can order your plants at any time and we'll be starting our Spring deliveries in the last week of March through to the 4th week of April. If you would like to take delivery of plants for Spring 2023, please send us your orders before March 15th. Orders received after March 15th will likely be delivered in the Autumn. It's best to order early to make sure you get the plants you would like as our stocks are limited.
For our full selection of fruit and nut cultivars click here. For bulbs, tubers, seeds, and root cuttings you can "click to buy" all year round from our online store.
New Fruit Growing Guides
We enjoyed writing our growing guides and here you can find probably everything you need to know to grow and use Apricots.
Polyculture Profiles
In line with our mission to develop and promote practices that can produce food and other resources for humans while enhancing biodiversity, this year we have started a new section on the blog profiling polycultures that we are growing in our gardens and that we have designed for other projects or are intending to plant in our gardens shortly.
Each polyculture is presented within a templated format to provide all of the necessary info a grower would need but it's worth noting that the polyculture plans we present are offered as a starting position as opposed to a finished article. How a polyculture performs will vary considerably from site to site due to climatic/microclimatic and edaphic factors, the plant material used, and your establishment and management practices.
You can find an introduction to our Polyculture Profiles here along with the first three polyculture profiles. We hope you try them out in your gardens!
Spring Open Day - April 23rd, 2023
On April 23rd we'll be holding a Spring Open Day where we invite you to come and take a look around our gardens, enjoy a cup of tea and talk all things polyculture!
Come along, we look forward to meeting you!
Blog Posts and Articles
We've been quiet with the weekly updates on the blog this year but here are a few posts including some consultancy and design we've been working on, a project in Wales, and some plant observations, from travels in Egypt, Italy, and Spain.
Regenerative Landscape Design - Site Visit/Consultancy - Sardinia - 35.2 ha
Egypt - Winter Trip 2022 - Luxor - Nile Horticulture and a Sugar Cane Harvest
A Welsh Project, Pathways and Pollination Support
Street Trees and Plants of Rome - Italy 2022
Jardi Botanic of Barcelona (Barcelona Botanical Garden) - Spain - Barcelona - Summer 2022
Street Plants of Barcelona and Park Güell - Spain - Summer 2022
You can also follow our day-to-day observations, largely related to plants that we come across, during travels and of our work at the project in Shipka on Instagram here.
Thanks, as always, to Permaculture Research Institute and Permaculture Magazine for continuing to publish our articles and blog posts and for sharing our work with a wider audience.
That's all from us for now, wishing you productive seasons and happy growth in 2023!
Thanks again to all our friends, family, volunteers, readers, and customers that make our project possible.
Until next time!
The Polyculture Project Team