Permaculture Garden: Will It Work for Us

Reader Contribution by Michelle Martin
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Why do we want a permaculture garden? Living here in sunny Spain, trying to become self-sufficient becomes problematic when the rains do not come. This past year (2013) has been particularly hard with next to no rainfall. Our land and garden are so dry and watering is becoming a massive problem as we only have the water we can collect in our store.

Another problem for us is our soil. It’s light sandy soil, not very deep, with outcrops of bedrock dotted around. We have a mixture of bedrocks, sandstone, limestone and some igneous rocks too. This bedrock allows the rainwater to run off of our land at record speed. The igneous rock does not allow the water to penetrate and so we can see dips in our garden where the water runs, carrying the fine soil with it.

We tried breaking the bedrock up (back breaking work) to ensure our plants had enough depth of soil to grow in. We added lots of sheep and goat dung to the raised vegetable beds we built. This did improve the soil to an extent but we will have to keep adding every year to keep the nutrient levels up.

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