I thought the magic orchard was going to be my last winter pruning job this year but I was visiting another neighbour who I hadn’t seen in ages and realised I had another pruning job left to do. I had tended to these trees once (maybe twice) before and I actually grafted the younger ones in my own little nursery back in 2018 or thereabouts. So I was very interested to see how these little trees were getting on, and in particular how they were shaping up.
I was orchard pruning recently for one of my neighbours and here are some of the photos. The trees are overly shaded to the south by some big Cupressus Leylandii trees making the situation not ideal from a fruit growing perspective but there is an absolutely magical feeling in there. The farm itself and setting is beautiful but stepping into the orchard is like like entering another world. Most of the work I did was cutting off dead dying and diseased wood (very little disease given the circumstances) and thinning and restructuring the trees to a natural shape. In some cases I kept branches that didn’t fit the future structure I was setting but were healthy with plenty of fruiting wood – they can always go later on as the replacement branches are developing. You can see in one of the photos I have splayed potential new scaffold branches from Continue Permaculture Story
You can fix all the worlds problems in a garden – Geoff Lawton To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail – Emerson Garden You can fix all the worlds problems in a garden, you can solve ’em all in a garden. You can solve all your pollution problems and all your supply line needs in a garden… and most people actually today actually don’t know that and that makes most people very insecure – Permaculture designer Geoff Lawton from “Greening the Desert“ Lawton’s statement was made while narrating a video showing how permaculture design and implementation was rehabilitating a patch of desert and growing fruit – an amazing achievement. For millions of people – more so in the western consumer countries – permaculture design and ethics are a revelation and Lawton’s statement rings true. Where we are masters of our own destiny much of what is Continue Permaculture Story
Study review by Paul Lynch A new study by Andi Wilson of the Sustainability Institute in Mayo on food security and climate change has concluded that Ireland may currently be only producing a quarter the human food consumed domestically. Click here for study. Agriculture In this broad-ranging study and preliminary action plan Andi Wilson examines the consequences of continued global warming & climate change for Irish food security. The study finds that a restructuring and reorientation of Irish agriculture away from export driven beef and dairy towards domestic self-sufficiency in a plant based diet could meet over 100% of our protein and calorific requirements and massively decrease green-house gas emissions. In Ireland agriculture currently produces one third of the gasses emitted nationally that cause global warming, which is more than both the residential and transport sectors combined. Indeed the study finds that such a shift would turn agriculture into a Continue Permaculture Story
