Permaculture is about growing plants together in beneficial combinations - where the characteristics of one plant benefit another, and vice versa. A simple idea is to ensure you have habitat for pollinating insects (e.g. lots of different flowering plants) so you can be sure there are lots of the right kinds of insects around to pollinate your fruit trees when they come into flower too. Another is to use ground covers that don't directly compete with your trees and shrubs, but instead act as a barrier to weeds and grasses especially, which can compete for nutrients in the same soil layer with establishing produce trees.

A machine gets you only part of the way with earth works - the next step was to finish things off by hand...

The challenges of trying to make a bed completely level was also a very useful lesson to learn!

So, the house is a mess, there's soil pretty much everywhere, but we made huge leaps and bounds with our garden implementation this week!