Any garden starts with the soil. We're lucky here at Brickhurst because Matt has been busy for the last 5 years making a mountain of compost.
Our neighbours have horses too so there's a ready supply of manure too but hopefully we'll only need external inputs to bring up the fertility of the soil here for the first couple of years and then with some luck and hard work we'll have closed as many of the nutrient cycles as possible.
It is possible to build up fertility without external inputs and we intend to create such systems and document it here. We already have some quite large comfrey patches which will be extended and green manures will be used but for some things like making a hotbed the only thing that will do is raw manure.
We will be using a number of hot beds. Although my bender has a small conservatory made of a mix of glass and polytunnel plastic, it won't be large enough to accommodate all the seedlings we will produce this year so our only option will be to create them.
The hot beds we use here are made of four sheets of 10cm thick (approx) polystyrene backed by aluminium sheets that came in as salvage from somewhere arranged to create a box that contains a layer of twigs at the bottom for ventilation, then a 1m depth of manure then compost on top sloped towards the south with old double glazing units as glass, again sloping south.
We'll first use them to germinate the seeds that need it warm and need a long season like tomatoes, peppers and so on. Once they are large enough and the polytunnel becomes warm enough for them cucurbits will be planted in the exhausted hot bed. The following year the contents will be used to fertilise the raised beds.
The picture is of my solar panels.
