This video features a collection of practical permaculture gardening advice, tips and tricks for growing your own food at home from natural composting tips to saving space in your garden!
0:00 – The Polyculture Idea I’ll Never Forget
The moment that changed how I see mixed planting and failure.
6:00 – Why Polyculture Makes Gardening Easier
Abundance, pest masking, and why small losses don’t hurt.
13:40 – Why a Garden Needs Pests
Balance, predators, and letting nature do the work.
25:46 – The Power of a Messy Garden
Self-seeded plants, free food, and hidden value.
34:28 – Growing More Perennials
Saving water, compost, time, and stress.
44:54 – How to Water for Health and Resilience
When, how, and why watering technique matters.
55:15 – Stacking Functions Explained
Getting multiple yields from one plant or structure.
1:13:23 – Compost, Waste, and Nutrient Cycles
Why “waste” food isn’t really waste.
1:23:21 – Crops That Give More Than One Harvest
How to get far more food from the same space.
1:43:13 – The Permaculture Principles in Practice
How all of this fits together as a system.
2:01:03 – Preparing Beds for Winter Without Compost
Protecting soil and setting up spring success.
Get my permaculture book: https://geni.us/ThePermacultureGarden
#permaculture #gardening #vegetablegarden
21 Comments
Huw, are you vegetarian by chance? Just a curious fan.
Another great video. Always enjoy watching 😊 keep up the great work 😊
14:08 what microphone are you using? Truly amazing how it picks up your voice as if in a studio and none of the wind blowing around you 😳
🤔 letting a plant die. I like to wait till the bugs are fat and juicy than feed the plant to the birds.
Huw, watching from Nagaland state, Northeast India. Big fan of yours!
As a kid, i liked collecting and rearing caterpillars as pets. I was really excited by the sawflys on the gooseberry until i found out they weren't caterpillars!
I gave up trying to grow rows of plants, I now have mixed tomatoes with butternut squash, marigolds and sweet peppers, sage next to sacred basil, oregano next to borage which is next to sunflowers, which has tomatoes and marigolds intertwined. I have butternut growing over the polytunnel,rosemary in between marigolds. Zinnies protecting sweet peppers, daisies hiding tomato plants, marjoram under my marigolds. My nasturtiums are growing next to my strawberries with borage as a protector. My borage is popping up all over and I am encouraging it. My Echinecea is sitting with sweet peppers and marigolds and looks beautiful. I started planning the veg garden and then threw it to the wind. My French thyme sits next to the bee bath and my bee hive is at the end of my path with a huge sacred basil bush.
I am still planting , loving the colours and more than that meandering through the plants and watching their development. My adverse foe are monkeys and hiding my veg in my marigolds and flowers is proving quite successful.
I love the compost pathway idea. Even though we have ample space, we're going to try it anyway.
Nice job. And our foodforest does a lot of this work for us.
Love watching your videos as a home grower myself. Aside from your tips on being self sufficient, it is a good escape from all the worlds violence and looming collapse. As I do weekly, this is a good escape and stress relief video(s). From British Columbia Canada.
A very enjoyable way to spend bleak winter days! 😊
Last year I lost 5 kale plants to the cabbage butterflies. I was livid!! It was my first year growing kale and we'd done well with it until the butterflies came along. It's so delicious growing your own. I never hated butterflies before lol. I am netting my leafy veg this year.
We had 6 and a half bowls of strawberries last year out of 2 40cm x 40cm beds that the bugs, birds and my dogs didn't steal. I rooted several runners last year and will plant those somewhere this spring. I'm wanting to save some for us and plant some others around that I'm not upset about the critters getting.
Slugs are massive a-holes. There's a bird that visited us last year that ate through all the snails she found, but didn't touch the slugs. We left a flat stone for her and she'd bring her snails there to crack them open. We chuck all the snails and slugs we find- don't want the dogs eating them.
We let some carrots go to seed and the hover flies LOVE the flowers.
We had some wasp issues and hope to keep them away this year. We welcome the honeybees and bumblers.
The biggest pest I wrestled with was brambles. My dogs kinda go wild outside and explore and play through all the shrubs and brush. Some plants have sharp seeds that stick and the brambles catch on the dogs so I was on a mission! The largest ones I dug up were around 13 feet long. I'm 5'6" and they were more than twice as tall as me.
Also, it turns out I love trimming my hedges. I injured my thumbs doing it with hand snippers so we got a battery powered hedgetrimmer and I love that thing.
I wish I'd gotten into this decades ago, I sometimes feel overwhlmed and frustrated. But I also love it and want to get better and better. I was so surprised how much I love eating what I grow.
Always so grateful for your generosity with your content and the information you share. Thank-you Huw. Your videos are so good ❤
Here's my latest gardening act of craziness. I don't drive and I have a circular drive that takes up a lot of what could be gardening space. And because a neighbor caught vagrants on my property recently, I've been wanting a fence but can't afford one. Plus the city only allows a fence that's 4' tall. So I got the bright idea of planting a row of THORNY Cumberland black raspberries on the front of my property including across the driveways. And once they get to a mature height (very quickly) I'll put a locked gate at the front walkway.
The only downside is that once I block off the property I'm going to want to fill in the entire area with MORE plants. 😆
Mixing things up is absolutely the way to go. I had two sprouting broccolis and another one in a pot about 20 feet away – that one was smothered in blackfly and the others weren't, however the other two also had a huge nasturtium growing next to them covered in blackfly, so my deduction is not only splitting things up, but that sacrificial crops work really well.
No, if you’re gonna do, you know a big mix like that plant stuff that’s gonna keep rodents. Mosquitoes passed away there’s perennials plant flower that this shit that I keep eighths and all that stuff away or use some a box of ladybugs do you wanna get really all natural you know hope you fight off things lemon grass good stuff. Laman is good to keep stuff away. Yeah I’ll get you a eucalyptus tree you get a baby our plant that in the middle of the yard I mean you’re gonna get big you want some goofy boards you don’t want these little critics eating your shit right especially when end times is coming
Thank you so much, you are getting my gardening heart going. It's still icy cold here and Frozen but I'm getting ready.
Has anyone had any dealings with honey fungus? I'd love to hear of resistant varieties. So far over 20 years, we've lost a walnut, 2 apples, an apricot, a greengage, maple, cotinus, roses, hibiscus, gooseberry, redcurrants – some of the loss may be age related as some were here 20 years ago when we moved in.. There's no way we could remove all the soil. So far peaches, hazel, pear, fig, bay tree, xanthoceras and ash (fraxinus) all seem to survive. Silver birch seems to be short lived.
Also, how do you stop those tanks being full of algae? We have one for horse water, but it's completely unuseable now due to the algae build-up. It seems impossible to clean the inside of the tank unless you're a heavyweight wrestler who can turn it over to be pressure washed!
2 of those raised beds are the size of my entire garden 😭
T-two hours…. (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*.✧ TWO HOURS!!!
I'm so happy!! I've got my cup of tea, time to cozy up and enjoy myself!!