Lyttleton Gardens: a Wholistic, Productive Garden Project
Just thought we'd show you some photographs of our ongoing productive garden project in Lyttleton Gardens. A few months ago, Cam and I (Manu) embarked on a mission to turn the side garden and the little orchard behind the shop into a healthy, productive vegetable patch and food forest.
The space was very overgrown and grasses had taken over much of the side vegetable garden. The entire site is on a slope and rainwater had eroded much of the soil along paths. The mini-orchard has a wonderful variety of established fruit and nut trees, and our aim is to slowly transition from an orchard to a food forest system by incorporating a diversity of forest layers: edible or medicinal ground covers, shrubs, climbers and leguminous nitrogen-fixing plants.
We also enriched soils with compost and covered them with thick layers of woody mulches in the orchard, and grassy mulches in the vegetable garden. We're on a very small budget, and are gathering materials from local stables (lucerne, horse manure), coffee shops (coffee grinds), and kind customers (leaves and clippings).