Ep. 82 - This Year it's Perennials Over Annuals

Thriving The Future Podcast

It's mid-May. I've already planted 90 plus plants. I've already had some transplanted grafted trees fail - cedar, apple, rust gets them, even if the book says that this variety should be resistant, (I guess the tree didn't read the book). So this year I started to convert some of my garden, the peripheral parts, into perennials, with annuals in the middle.Regular greens in my garden bolt quickly when it gets hot in early summer.

• Options to augment those with perennial greens - dock, sorrel, lambs quarters, both narrow leaf plantain and a wider leaf plantain. Perennial are more bitter than annual greens. Dock and sorrel have a slight lemony after taste.

• Hazelnuts, goji berries around the outside edges. Walking onion, Solomon seal, plantain, dock, with annual lettuce in the middle of one bed.

• Another perennial bed has hazel and elderberries around the outside edges, walking onion, plantain, dock, lemon balm, horseradish in the middle.

• Planting Milpa garden or regular annuals in the middle.

• More info on how I am using Milpa gardening to start new beds, cover crop with produce in the first year. I used a broadfork to turn over grass, spread Milpa seed, covered with a layer of wood chips. It leaves a natural mulch and builds soil.

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