The most counterintuitive fact about cool-temperate vegetable gardening is that more crops are sown in autumn than in spring, even though the popular gardening calendar treats spring as the central planting season. Autumn-sown garlic, broad beans, winter brassicas, salads, peas, cover crops and several roots all benefit from cooler establishment temperatures and produce earlier or…
Permaculture as a design philosophy was developed for land – specifically, for hectares of degraded Tasmanian farmland in the 1970s, where Bill Mollison and David Holmgren could spread seven functional zones across real topography. An apartment is not that. A Paris studio of 28 square meters with a north-facing balcony of 1.4 square meters will…
Most home vegetable gardens consist almost entirely of annuals — tomatoes, lettuce, beans, courgettes — that need replanting every spring and produce for a few months before dying. The annual approach is not the only option, and in cold climates, where the planting and growing season is short, an over-reliance on annuals reduces the proportion…
Roughly one teaspoon of healthy garden soil contains more living organisms than there are humans on Earth. The figure, repeated often enough that it has become almost cliché, is approximately accurate: a gram of fertile soil contains between 10^8 and 10^10 bacterial cells, several million fungal hyphae fragments, hundreds of thousands of protozoa, and tens…