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Peaches for Breakfast.
This time of year is always an outstanding point in the growing calendar here at Eden. Not just because this morning during the daily round of feeding the chickens letting them out of their house and then checking on all the other animals, I plucked and ate fresh ripe peaches from one of our many peach trees. Also because this is the peak of the growing season for all the other produce too, we have harvested the main crop of potatoes Fiona and one of our interns are picking and preserving in one way or another every day of the week at the moment. Peaches are halved and bottled, made…
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A day in our life
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Poem by Lucie Bardos
The Seedling Here in the dark depths of the Earth’s finest loam death and decay are king, and all kinds of wrigglers roam. But here too birth and rebirth spring forth; a tiny whirring, stirring in a miniscule seed; as the first soft tendrils of life reach for the sun, soils nutrients bathe this delicate, new, young one. “We need each other” whisper the fungi that swap sugar for ions; for aeons they’ve hugged plant roots; mycelium webs weave through soils, humus and shoots. Then mycorrhizal bacteria fix nitrogen and shake hands with plants. An exchange of energy -a deal has been struck. “All this symbiotic magic down in this…
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A day in our life
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2015 Intern Photos
Here’s a selection of photos of our 2015 interns activities.
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A day in our life
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New Raised Beds
We have had an issue with wild rabbits for the last couple of years in part this is a success for us, when we arrived here in 2004 we would never see wild rabbits on or near our property. Travel five kilometres or so to near by villages and they would be all over the verges and sometimes in the road. On some of our land we have excluded domestic stock and let it naturally regenerate, and now we are seeing wild rabbits here for the first time, the natural regeneration is providing habitat. We have also planted hedges round our vegetable garden and this is now a wildlife corridor the…
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Mining Nutrients
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Grafting Heritage Apples
This year after four years of practising grafting my apple wood from one tree to another I have decided to expand my horizons to heritage varieties of apple. I have watched Stephen Hayes on YouTube for a few years now and each year he has encouraged others to graft heritage fruit trees and offering scions (small pieces of fruit wood the size of a pencil) to others for free. The idea is you help expand the range and number of heritage fruit trees, preserving biodiversity and of course England’s historical apples, many of which offer far better flavour and texture than their supermarket counterparts. Stephen asks in return that you…
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Breaking Ground Three
We are breaking ground on the third and last full natural building project here at Permaculture Eden. This is going to be a cob house with a living roof and stone stem wall. The first job is to mark out the foot print slightly over sized and remove the turf from the area. We will keep the turf stored off to one side on a tarpaulin for later use as the living roof. Now first the mark up, I want to mark two arks one of seven meters and one of five. First I have to choose the centre of the seven meter ark allowing for some space around the…
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Stuck on a farm for six months!
My name is Ellinor, I am 22 years old, and I come from Norway. A few weeks ago I took the train down to France and Permaculture Eden to have my very first “farm-experience”. I will live here for a whole season and learn from Fiona and Steve, who have been on a path towards self-sufficiency for a long time, and who are now harvesting the fruits of their efforts. (Or rather the milk, eggs, meat, vegetables, nuts and fruits of their efforts). I have the opportunity to learn from their experience in gardening, animal keeping, natural building and Permaculture Design, through working at the farm and participating in the courses. I…
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A day in our life
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A six month path to reconnecting
I am 50 years old, female and have been working in the dive industry for about 20 years. My name is Irene and I am in my path to reconnecting to the basics; which for me is food producing by working in a farm. More adventurous people would try for this the hunter gatherer path… don’t trust my potential to develop those skills that much and I don’t think that would fit my ultimate goal that is to go back to my homeland, live close to my lifetime friends and enjoy my beautiful nieces and nephews while they grow up before it is too late. In these coming six month…
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A day in our life
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Love and Gratitude
We received this in the post this morning, and we’re touched deeply that some people do understand our lives. Many thanks to all those who came here this year and invested themselves in our lives and our way of life, we hope you took away the same feelings as Michelle. Love and gratitude to you all.
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Castanea sativa, Sweet chestnut
Castanea sativa, sweet chestnut Sweet Chestnut is a species of flowering tree in the family Fagaceae, native to Europe and Asia Minor, and widely cultivated throughout the temperate world. A substantial, long-lived deciduous tree, it produces an edible seed, the chestnut, which has been used in cooking for millennia. Hardy to -29°C The tree is deciduous and grows to 20–35 m with a trunk often 2 m in diameter. The bark often has a net-shaped pattern with deep furrows or fissures running spirally in both directions up the trunk. The oblong-lanceolate, boldly toothed leaves are 16–28 cm long and 5–9 cm broad. The annual growth is sensitive to late spring and early autumn frosts…
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