Permaculture – RHS style

Wow – what a week – I did promise to write some more about the show but the truth is I didn’t manage to get off the stand to have another look round until the end of Saturday. We had a pretty good week too – but more of that anon.

What’s interesting is the steady drift towards a more integrated approach to gardening. One of the show gardens and at least 3 or 4 of the small gardens were focused on the “potager” approach to growing vegetables as ornamentals and integrating food production with the flower beds. There was a complete Grow Your Own tent with some smashing displays – and the we came to the RHS kingpin – “The Edible Garden”.

From a certain point of view this was a pastiche of how we imagined the 50s to be – with a man in a weskit and stilts pretending to pick hops, an old fergie in an apple orchard and exhibits about bee-keeping, a duck pond and a lavender still. Not to mention the usual mixed veg and polytunnel for growing peppers and tomatoes and a selection of megacabbages in raised beds to rival Findhorn in it’s pomp.

And yet. On the farmer’s markets that we do sales are down at this time of year because the people who want fresh produce have got their own gardens kicking in and – it seems – there’s a real hunger for this type of knowledge in the teeth of the seemingly remorseless trend towards GM and Junk Food and the systematic outlawing of anything that’s not “owned” by the corporates.

To see the RHS promoting the vision that John Seymour kicked off with his original book on self-sufficiency is really weird -but also inspiring for the distance we have travelled in that time.

I’ve written before about the “mainstreaming” of some organic approaches – particularly the use of predators instead of sprays and away from NPK towards farmyard manure – at least by some of the field vegetable growers.

Probably a case of the public being ahead of the political classes as per usual and the RHS being more closely in touch with its constituents than the average MP.

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Here’s a few pics of how it looked. Impossible to do it justice really. Quite a vision.

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