The Tree Mugger

thesustainable:

Growing Basil: How To Grow Basil In Your Permaculture Garden

I’m feeling the need to document my progress and random experiments in growing food in small spaces. 

So far I go to a community farm,  have a tiny balcony space for potted plants at home and acess to some shared yard space.

This is not as awesomely full on gardening as it sounds, not at all, because I can only make the farm at erratic times due to the usual ‘everything important being on at the same times’ phenomenon, and the yard space is marked to have a busway built over it some time in the next 2 years.   

So, I’m all about adapting small spaces: spaces in time, spaces in balcony corners, whichever.

This week brought some unexpected success with basil and tomatoes. Our prior basil plants went down to a plague of leafhoppers, who nommed them back to the stalks despite our efforts with [organic] pest spray, complimentary planting, moving them and killing the hoppers by hand*.

Then I went to a workshop about food permaculture in the semi-tropics last weekend, which mentioned different species of basil that attract more bees and are hardier than the Sweet Basil traditionally planted with tomatoes. The presenter even gave us tomatoe and basil bits to try cuttings with. I already knew about the importance of growing varieties best suited to your climate for less hassle food resilence, but it was encouraging after the hopper losses.

This week the cuttings finally put down roots. Just as the teacher had said they would if I had some patience. Small victory for the amount of herbs in the yard, big leap in my acceptance of permaculture learnings.

*Leading to offending a vegan acquaintance who I mostly agree with, but we live in very different local ecosystems and relations to food markets. But that is another post!