Week 23 - Planting out the Butterfly polyculture

 Planting out polyculture in community garden

Here I will guide you trough all the necessary steps to plant out a desired polyculture into your most favourable location in the community garden, taking into an account the characteristics of chosen landscape and plants. I will give these instructions based on our knowledge, local landscape and the location, purpose and our selection of plants. 

The following content is something people can copy and do it themselves. But before planting out something like this, everyone should observe and analyse their area where they are going to plant and choose location for the plants and their position considering time of year, climate, water access, sun orbit, local people and animals behaviour (to avoid the destruction of your work) and the purpose of the whole polyculture.

Preparation

First of all you have to have a vision about what you are going to do. Actually this comes with most of the things you want to do or achieve in life. Our vision was to have a beautiful round shaped polyculture in the centre of Shipka, offering more biodiversity, attracting butterflies, adding colour and giving extra pleasure to the eyes of those people who stroll by. It will be surrounded by low fence weaved out of bamboo sticks and hazelnut branches using pegs as a structure and shape holders. In that bed there will be five different plants: 

1) Buddleia davidii - Butterfly bush

2) Phlomis russeliana - Jerusalem/Turkish Sage

3) Lavendula angastafolia - Lavender

4) Echinacea purpurea - Echinacea, Coneflower

5) Origanum vulgare - Oregano

We spent 2-3 days on the bamboo sticks because we wanted to split them vertically. I made the wooden pegs out of old apple tree that was lying in the corner of our garden. It was nice activity simply because the weather was good and I enjoy working with wood. It took me total of 6 hours to complete all the pegs. 

On friday we planted it out. It took half of the day and was pretty interesting.

First we measured out the area that we were about to use with a string attached to a peg. 

Then we saw the boundaries of the bed and I dug trough the area with huge metal fork tool. 

After this we planted out the plants. We added some manure and soil mix to the existing ground to make it more nutritious. Also we made little walls on the south side of every plant to make sure that water will go into the soil rather than flow away downhill. 

When we were done planting them out we gave them good amount of water. While it was setting into the soil we levelled all the earth on the bed and covered it with woodchip.

Then we started weaving, Ruxandra being our guide and teacher in this since it was her design and her idea. Me and Sophie did not have enough knowledge in this matter to complete the assignment on our own. Nevertheless we did it together successfully and also learned something new.

By Markus