A jumble of colourful edibles
10 July flowers for wildlife | Where are the butterflies? | Polyculture
Variety is life - everything above is edible
Polyculture is the term used to describe growing multiple different crops in the same space at the same time. Poly means many, and culture refers to growing. The opposite is monoculture, where a single crop is grown on mass, such as fields of wheat.
It’s not a new idea, old fashioned potagers are polyculture gardens, mixing edibles with flowers. Various indigenous communities have farmed like this for millennia.
My aim is for polyculture, which I’ve been doing for years in areas around the farm, because it’s more interesting from a soil and wildlife health perspective, and we know monocultures can be bad for that. But I don’t think the world is fully there with some essential crops, and we still need rows of some veg, such as carrots or beans.
In the above photo I’ve included a selection of edible ‘things’ we grow on our farm that I harvested yesterday (you might spot the odd one out…) From left to right, they are:
Free range eggs: for protein…