Day 3, part 1 - Ecology, cycles and patterns

If you haven't seen the power of community yet (see yesterday's post) I HIGHLY recommend it. A lot of food for thought (literally!!) and very inspiring and thought provoking.

But back to today - This morning we started with a couple of sessions on patterns and cycles in nature. We had a mini-exercise looking for different types of patterns in the environment just outside the meeting room (layers, cracks, spirals, branching, symmetry, repetition). We also looked at how these different types of patterns can be used in the garden eg a zig zag fence gives you more area to plant up, plus can create microclimates. A circle has the smallest surface area of edge, but a crennelated (wavy) edge gives you twice as much edge for the same diameter. THis can be useful for ponds, as many pond plants like to be on the edge - so by making a wavy edge (think corrugated iron on it's side) you get more edge space for planting. This is a great idea and one I will be using on the planned pond. Other pattern types we looked at were keyholes, spirals (herb spirals near the kitchen door were discussed) and hexagons.

My top "aha" moment was actually something very simple. Beck talked about using triangles to help in your planting - Lets take beetroot which like sto be about 10cm apart. You make a triangle with 10cm sides. Place it on the soil, plant one seed at each of 2 edges. Flip it over, then plant seeds on the next 2 edges...keep going flipping it on the point that has no seed. This helps you maximise planting area. Genius! Of course, you can make different sized triangles for different spacings. The idea came from a book but I didn't ge the name. It's a great idea for use in community settings too where people might not know much about gardening and planting.

Jerry - get your tools ready, you're going to be making triangles!!

Next ecercise was small group work where we tried to come up with a garden cycle and look at all the different kinds of relationships we could find eg tree gives pollen for bees and insects, and birds, fruit for us, waste fruit goes to chickens that poo and feed the soil etc. We also talked about the different types of relationships that can be found incl parasitic, symbiotic / pollination, competition, facilitation, inhibition and so on. It was a really interesting session - I'm just glad we had an artist in our group so the pictures in our poster looked great :*)

The only complaint I have so far is that there isn't enough down time to process and reflect - particularly for people like me that need to get away for some quiet 'me' time to do this. I've only had 10 mins to do this post and now it's already dinner. I will try and blog about the site visit after dinner / after the evening session.