A video from Jordan showing how Permaculture can work.

I've been not quite getting what this permaculture thing is until the last weekend course, we watched a video about this guy in Jordan (the country) changing desert into usable beautiful farm land.

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You watch this and then watch a few more of the permaculture videos there on youtube and tell me it don't work, if you dare.

I'd read somewhere that it wasn't good practice to make compost in a bin like I'm doing and then to put the finished product onto the land without covering it with a protective layer to stop the rain washig the good stuff ut of the compost into the soil. I'm getting bunged up with all these different people's ideas. Because that's what a lot of these people are putting forward as the "truth".

So yesterday me and Chris went out to the garden and started piling my newly finished compost out f te bin and onto the ground. Its going to stp the ground drying put. Approx. 15 years ago when all I had growing in the soil was Alpine plants the soil used to crack horrendously in the summer. I tried digging the soil over to sort of integrate the cracks, if you know what I mean?

But it don't make any real impression on the drying up of the soil. What that soil needed was piles of compost. Piles of vegetable matter. The surface applied compost locks the soil up, not allowing the sun to bake it off, of course the top of the compost will dry out but I'm sure that the soil itself will stay wet, well moist and thats got to be good for the plants growing in it.

Also the compost as it came outof the bin contained the usual slightly unfinished straw from the horse muck I had piled in to the bin. I think I simply ran out of veggie matter to add so filled the bin at odd times with pure horse muck. So the worst I threw into the new bin I'm just finishing off and the well rotted/worked compost went onto the ground around the newly planted raspberry sticks.

I've decided not to get too stuck with how I'm doing this gardening lark and simply play with the genre.

Yes playing with it seems right.

Also if you've got this far, you may notice that I've missed a goodly few letters out of my writing. This is easily explained- I'm now using my newly returned laptop with wifi (OMG dig Pip knowing all the terms of geekism) and the keys only need a small push down to get the letters up on the screen, and occasionally I'm failing to push the keys hard enough. My style of typing is to look down at the keyboard to see where my fingers are going and ignore the screen most of the time. Ack you prob. get the drift of what I'm saying.

Anyway watch the video.

Lets see if I can find the 2nd video from Jordan that follows this one up.