Garden notes

Although the forest garden is still young I've learnt a lot of lessons along the way. Below are some of the details that might help others avoid some of the obvious pitfalls. Hopefully they give a picture of what's involved in setting the garden up:

• Planting - digging holes, planting, staking and mulching
  
• Growing on chalk - coping with a thin chalky soil
• Pruning
  
• Nitrogen budget

Time lapse photography

I use photography to capture snapshots of the garden as it develops. However, some processes evolve gradually over time and I have been using time lapse photography to record them. I post some of these on the blog as well as my YouTube channel. It took me a while to perfect the technique so I have put together some notes and a timing calculator here:

• Examples
• Workflow
• Calculator

Forest Garden Sketcher

To produce the plan for the forest garden I messed about with the Processing visualisation language. I wrote a little tool that could take a list of plant locations, sizes and names to produce a plan. I wanted something that I could update as the plan evolved and that could produce a plan for the website. Recently someone was asking after similar software so I updated the tool so that you can add a base image and click and drag to add plants. It's still at an early stage but if you think you might want to give it a try you can read more and download it here.

Alpine strawberries