Perennial Polyculture Garden Beds For Low Maintenance Harvests

Polyculture gardens are composed of different plants that are planted together to increase food harvests while requiring less maintenance than growing vegetables in long rows. They mimic nature’s plant guilds.

When starting this type of garden, use the guidelines for square foot gardening as your starting point. Consider adding flowering plants like sweet alyssum, marigolds and nasturtiums as pollinators plants for added benefit.

Vegetables

Polyculture perennial vegetable gardens provide an easy solution for home gardeners or small market or orchard gardens looking to extend the growing season and increase fresh food supply in late fall and spring.

Permaculture plant guild guidelines offer guidelines on which plants will fulfill functional niches of your vegetable garden, such as shade-tolerant, long-lived plants that support and shelter annuals, or nitrogen fixing trees like Alnus spp. that shed pollen in late winter/early spring that attract pollinators into your garden.

Other plants such as white clover, oats and buckwheat help maintain soil fertility by decreasing fertilizer needs, while herbs and legumes add essential flavoring elements to vegetable crops. Perennial ground cover plants like alyssum, parsley and dill can reduce weeds while adding visual interest – this polyculture unit can be located anywhere; from borders or islands to linear alley cropping systems or wider edible landscape designs for improved pollination coverage of fruit trees or perennial crops.

Herbs

Herbs can make great additions to polyculture gardens as many annual or biennial varieties only take up space for a limited amount of time in your garden, providing needed pollen for long-lived perennial vegetables as well as providing them with protection from insects.

Clover, comfrey, henbit and mint are perfect perennial edible ground covers that can be planted between or around patches of perennial vegetables. Not only can these perennial edibles provide ground coverage that keeps the soil free of weeds but they can also insulate root zones to keep plants safe from frost damage. Other perennial edible ground covers used as ground covers include cinquefoil, dandelion, Erba Stella ginger and Kinnikinnick plants.

Tarragon and parsley are great herbs to have on hand when it comes to culinary adventures, with both growing as tender rhizomes that are easy to start from seed purchased at supermarkets or nurseries.

These plants are vital in replenishing what we take from the soil by fixing nitrogen and detoxifying it, making a garden more beautiful while encouraging beneficial insects to inhabit it. Many can also add mulch as they grow, providing additional benefits in return.

Flowers

Flowers are essential components of a garden and serve many important functions. Flowers attract pollinators while providing aesthetic value, deter pests from attacking, provide shade to cover ground areas, produce compost crops and provide valuable nutrient sources for vegetables. In contrast to annual and biennial vegetables, perennial flowers last twenty years or longer and can thrive alongside more delicate vegetables in polyculture environments.

A garden planted with flowering plants is an easy and beautiful way to add both beauty and diversity. Some of our favorites are hardy perennials like dandelion, sweet pea, lupine, phacelia, orach, oregon grape, camas – easily grown perennials that provide variety in colour and form as well as nectar/pollen sources for native bees – providing this vital pollinator with food sources!

As part of our efforts to enhance fertility, we suggest including nitrogen fixing plants such as Alnus cordata or Trifolium repens in your hedges and trimming annually for biomass that can be applied directly to neighbouring fruiting plants.

Fruits

The fruit layer includes perennial vines like raspberries and strawberries, deciduous trees bearing blueberries and apricots, easy-to-grow pollinators such as dandelion and sweet pea, nitrogen fixing hedges such as alnus and corydalis and nitrogen fixing hedges like alnus and corydalis.

An abundance of vegetables is integral to achieving polyculture success, and for gardeners new to this approach it may be best to begin by growing one bed with multiple types of plants over time. If you are currently cultivating leafy greens in one bed, try including rows of carrots and broccoli for increased pollinator diversity while maintaining consistent plant spacing throughout.

Herbs and ground cover should ideally be located next to or beneath vegetables to ensure that soil erosion is prevented and nutrients reach vegetables as they develop. In addition, this proximity provides shelter for beneficial insects that eat bugs to hide out.

Accessing our garden for weeding, pruning, and harvesting purposes is of paramount importance, which is why we implemented two 1.3 meter wide raised beds with 50 cm wide pathways running between and parallel to them. This design allows us to reach polyculture from within the paths without trampling any plants. Including sufficient pollinator habitat by way of wildflowers or perennial plants will attract bees and other pollinators into the garden – though flowering times should not overlap significantly with main crops on site to maximize pollination benefits.