Our first summer proved to be a mixed bag, unexpected potatoes and generous amounts of tomatoes popped up everywhere from compost. With weather on our side we made the most of green cropping to prepare the soil and kept smaller productive gardens for our kai.
The Terrace Gardens ABC
We really challenged ourselves to give enough time and space for our green crops to provide the balance and nutrients they could to improve the soil for our new terrace gardens.
We started out with what we had on hand -lupins and mustard, before progressing on to try Koanga’s Wild & Free seed mix -a blend of oats, rye, vetch, blue lupins, and crimson clover.
We started the wild & free mix in tilled soil under strips of shade cloth which you can see above in Terrace ‘A’. Initially the take was good and everything germinated well without the birds taking the seed…then under the covers, the snails and slugs decimated the legumes!
This left us with the grass crops and the plan to take the covers off earlier next time around to let the birds in to control the slugs/snails.
The grasses (black oats and rye) grew tall and strong and we were able to cut them down several times to add back to the soil as a mulch. Each time we did this the grasses weakened ( I had thought they would thicken) until eventually, there was only a sparse cover.
Not ones to be defeated we underplanted with legumes again..only to discover the ground held secrets… Māori potatoes- urenika taewa, we hadnt seen in the soil started to shoot up everywhere!
Acknowledging they had chosen their place we stopped cutting the grass as mulch and just weeded out a few of the randoms that popped up like nightshade and ink plant. The new legumes didn’t come to much under the taewa canopy and we are yet to see what our unexpected crop of potatoes will bring us this Autumn.
Meanwhile the terraces above ‘B’ & ‘C’ followed the same routine however the legumes came through and we’ve let them sit for their two year cycle…and guess what we got there? Tomatoes, tomatoes and more tomatoes!
Perennial Patches in the Terrace Garden DEF
The perennial plants which were seedlings in spring really started to grow through the summer and we pretty much let them be.
Tea ( camelia senesis) worked well with spidery mizuna planted at its base, straggly earth nuts rose and died away while robust and green the lemon sorrel kept on growing. Perennial brassicas, nine star broccoli and a thousand head kale, went through waves of infestations that righted themselves, pawpaw and papayas took hold, and bananas used to create terraces emerged reaching out from the earth, asking to be given another chance. Pumpkins crawled through the trifid like tithonia and the ever so beautiful chicory flowers were reborn with every new day.
The Original Garden
Meanwhile in the original garden we watched the progression from soil, seed, flower and fruit.
As summer rolled on we enjoyed the last of the peas as we welcomed the beans and corn. The carrots came and went in our salads, as did the lettuce, spinach, beetroot, kale, chard, spinach and a myriad of other greens. Potatoes were harvested and replaced with green crops, kamo kamo sprawled, zucchinis hung on despite the humidity and cucumbers draped over concrete walls to ripen into plump and juicy fingers.
The Beetle Banks
Robbing the term and methodology from Tolly ( Iain Tolhurst – Tolhurst Organics) the ‘beetle banks’ and herbal leys amalgamated around the edges of every available patch a fruit tree stood, they gave us license for unruly spaces not to be disturbed where insidious vegetable sucking bugs and their formidable predatory beneficial counterparts could all hang out, encouraging the balance and continuity of good and bad.
Yacon and comfrey roots pushed through the hard clay soils, enriching and providing nutrients to the sub-tropical pineapples, pawpaws, babaco, bananas, cherimoyas, sapote and citrus -all of which apart from the bananas, were only put in when the soils were warm enough in the summer.
Weekend Permaculture 
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