What is a cottage? For someone, a place of rest, for someone it is a great help, and for someone it is a platform for experiments.
No matter how small the territory is, it is possible to organize any type of dacha on it if you plan the territory correctly.
Today I want to talk about one farm, this type of farm is not at all like our dachas, because they don’t even live there temporarily.
They just come to work, do their business, and go home in the evening. Although, I suspect that the residential building is located somewhere nearby, and the «hacienda» itself is only the economic part of the yard — a small garden.
The owner of this farm is Joanna Gaines. I don’t know what this woman does in life, but she organized the garden to the fullest. Judging by the amount grown, it cannot be said that the crop provides year-round nutrition for the whole family, but it certainly copes with the task of supplying fresh herbs for the summer table.
I was struck by two things at this hacienda: the perfect order and … the organization of walking for chickens. But, perhaps, about everything in order.
In order for you to have the opportunity to see the details, I intentionally did not reduce the pictures, each of them can be viewed in an enlarged format, just click on it.
It all starts with a gate, from which you can go through the arch into an old but solid building.
There is a whole breeding station inside. A large table for eight people is a convenient place to arrange gatherings with lovers of flowers and new varieties of garden crops.
A convenient wall-mounted tabletop with a sink is a great place for planting seeds in cassettes, diving seedlings …
There is a working area for processing, selecting and packaging seeds … A hanging cabinet with shelves — an organizer for pots of different calibers.
There is a mini-library: all useful information is always at hand…
There is air conditioning for comfortable work and a fireplace for the soul — a creative nature sometimes requires privacy.
The garden itself is organized extremely simply, although not without cost: only raised beds (all mulched) and gravel backfill between them.
The sides of the beds are low, and the layer of backfill and mulch is thick. All this helps to reduce the risk of overheating of the soil and, as a result, drying out.
Sterile as in a pharmacy. In this highly organized space, there is absolutely no place for ornamental plants, except for a small patch of land at the threshold of the house and flower beds.
It is very likely that the territory we are considering is only part of a large farm, because a paddock for grazing is visible nearby.
But what fascinated me the most chicken coop. It bribed the fact that the chicken house itself (Joanna raises guinea fowl) is more like a fairy tale, very compact, and at the same time it has everything.
A vast area extends beyond the fence, but the chicken run is made in the form of a long corridor made of mesh. Such a chicken coop can be organized on any, even a very small site.
HOW TO SAVE SPACE IN A SMALL GARDEN
Optimization is the key word for any small spaces. And if in relation to the interior this arrangement podium and mezzaninethen in the dacha economy — the vertical direction of growth.
Any of the beds can be adapted for growing greenhouse varieties of garden crops. They are tall, about two meters. The yield per square meter automatically increases two to three times.
Not only cucumbers and tomatoes are grown this way. Melon, watermelon, pumpkin, zucchini, eggplant, asparagus beans — all this can be grown in a very small area.
Naturally, tall varieties require supports. It is better to make them reliable (wood, metal) and removable so that they serve for more than one year. It is easy to cover such a structure with a geotextile cover and vo-a-la in front of you is a greenhouse where it is warm, sunny and calm. Ideal conditions for growing capricious crops.
Growing root crops can be combined with salads. For example, sow salads between rows of radishes.
Sow dill between rows of onions or parsley. The latter will leave the garden in August, the onion will remain growing in the same place for another couple of years, and parsley will delight you with a harvest of fresh herbs in the spring.
In general, you can experiment with combining cultures as much as you like, however, there are also incompatible cultures:
- potatoes and cucumbers
- cabbage, strawberries, tomatoes,
- tomatoes and pumpkin,
- beans and onions.
The secret of the absence of weeds lies not only in mulching the beds, after harvesting each of them is sown with green manure (for example, mustard) and as soon as the green mass appears and develops, the beds are treated with glanders, burying this juicy and rich in nitrogen compounds biomass into the ground. An ideal way to prevent weeds from settling and enriching the soil.
IMPORTANT: the blowing of the site by all winds contributes to the drying of the soil and a decrease in yield due to the difficulty of pollination.
This «disaster» is fought in two ways: green spaces and the cultivation of self-pollinated varieties of garden crops.
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