How Our Gardens REALLY Look in Mid Winter – Permaculture Gardens and Evergreen Oasis

A Winter tour of our UK Permaculture Gardens, Winter Plantings & Winter Jobs. Watch until the end for a look around our Secret Evergreen Oasis 💚

We are Dan & Laurie and our land is called Freedom Forest – Its 3 acres in the South of England where we are creating an edible oasis and trying to provide as much for ourselves, from our land as possible, where we are completely off grid.
Our food growing journey began together in 2017 when we created our first No dig lasagne bed. Every year we grow more and more and now we are currently around 60-70% self sufficient in our food needs.
Our style and methods are inspired by permaculture and we try to be thoughtful about how and what we do, to be as gentle on the planet as possible.

In our videos you can follow our journey as we share our experiences and what we get up to at Freedom Forest.

We are MASSIVELY grateful that you choose to watch our Videos and support us in this way, however, If you appreciate and get value from what we share and would like to help us a little more, you can become a Freedom Forest Patreon (link below).
It takes us about a day to film some video and another few evenings to edit it, Patreon provides a way you can support what we do with any size donation you wish, it could simply be the value of a packet of seeds! We have many projects coming up, as well as wanting to improve our videos with better camera equipment… maybe even a drone one day to make our videos even more detailed and better quality for you to enjoy! You can help make it viable for us to keep putting the time into making these videos by becoming a Patreon. In return your name will appear in the end credits of our videos and we’ll message you a password for the ‘members area’ of our website where we share more of our favourite recipes exclusively for our Patreon’s 💚

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Enjoy & Thanks for Watching

✌️🌿 Peace and Plants

#Forestgarden #gardentour #permaculturegardening

Welcome to Freedom Forest guys the 3 Acre edible Oasis that we’re creating here in the south of England where we like to try lots of new things and push the boundaries with what we can grow using permaculture and no dig methods absolutely no chemicals we Killers or synthetic fertilizers just what nature

Provides hi folks and welcome to Freedom Forest on this beautiful but really cold morning and it is about as cold as it gets today for us we went down to aboutus 4 last night that was what was predicted our little Pond has been frozen for a few days

And today I thought it would be nice to show you what our Gardens here really look like in Mid Winter and I’ll also share a few of the upand cominging jobs that I’m going to be working on about the place as well so let’s head up to

The Food Forest first of all and we will take a look in there and we don’t tend to film as much in the winter at this time of year just because obviously when it’s cold it’s a lot harder to kind of get things done and I personally really suffer with

Getting cold hands and feet so when I do get some time in the garden I just need to make it as quick as possible murf come on boy come on murf’s gone off somewhere yeah and so when we do film sometimes it’s just really easy to find the places

That look the best um for obvious reasons so yeah I just wanted to show you midwinter at Freedom Forest so this is our food Forest obviously all the fruit trees are completely bare but there are some signs that spring is coming we’ve got the buds forming up on this cherry tree

Here and I did get in here a couple of days ago and start doing some work we have what I call trip wire Bramble that grows all around this area here and it’s just always right down low on the ground so I started having a clear out of this

Area of the Bramble and there is plenty more to do um but actually I didn’t think it would make that much of a visual difference to the area and I was really surprised pleasantly surp surprised how much clearer and tidier it looked from just doing a few um piles of

Brambo and it was just about an hour so yeah I’ll keep chipping away at that but the next thing I’m working on in this area and I did start with a couple of these fruit bushes is again clearing any Bramble from from these These are black

Current bushes here these two and I want to get them tied up because we’ve got some big bags of um mulch it’s actually from our hot bed that we made last year that we’ve dug out and so yeah I want to tidy up around all the fruit bushes and

Get the mulch down around them so they’ve got a nice layer of feed ready for the season ahead and as you can see this this is actually a gbury bush in Disguise here with all this grass and bramble around it so yeah that’s the

Next one that I need to get onto um but yeah you can just see brambles need clearing just everything needs a bit of a tidy upart um but yeah once I actually get stuck in I know it won’t take too long because come because yeah an hour the other day

Just doing Bramble made a really big difference which was nice to see and then one of the other jobs that we’ll be doing in the food Forest over the next four weeks or so is actually cutting down all of these Autumn raspberries and with the Autumn raspberries you can take them right down

To the ground you can do that every year if you would like we tend to only do it every other year we find that that works really well um but last year or this the season just gone they weren’t quite as productive and yeah I think cutting back

Every other year seems to be a good method for us we’re doing a bit of work over in this area here um but our share more on that with you at a later date but yeah it’s just all crunchy and Frozen and the frost actually isn’t as

Heavy as I thought it would be today but the ground is absolutely frozen solid and I think there’s just maybe not quite so much Frost um where it’s been so dry over the last few days so you can’t there’s not been the moisture on the grass and everything

So over here is our yakon bed and you may have seen one of our videos we did towards the back end of last year where we showed how we tuck all the yakon up for winter and we’ve actually only harvested a few of these plants so far

As soon as this top layer is defrosted we really must get in and do another big Harvest but all of these plants are super happy they’re normally fine down to about minus5 like I say – 4 -5 is about as cold as we get but they have got a really really

Deep layer of wood chip on top and if I cracked through this this top layer the soil would be absolutely beautiful and not frozen down there so we’ve been doing this for a few years and it works really well for us and here’s some of the mulch I was

Telling you about that Dan has put here ready for me to move into the Food Forest so yeah that’s mostly come out of our hot bed but it’s got quite a lot of wood chip in there but as well that’s going to be brilliant though for all the fruit

Bushes okay so up into what we call our main growing area or Dubai and I’ve got a lot of work to do up here but I’m not getting stressed about it yet because I know as soon as the weather warms up and the days get a little bit longer I will be

Really excited about getting stuck in up here the next thing I probably will do up here which is a relatively easy job is get a really nice layer of wood chip all over our strawberries again this is a method that we found works really well we literally just mulch over the whole

Lot the stronger plants grow up through they love rooting straight into wood chip and obviously it breaks down and gives them a really good feed garlic is coming along really well this is mostly French garlic along the top here uh there are a couple of elephant garlics you can see the difference these

Fat ones here these are elephant garlics and then here it changes to French garlic so these ones were planted in October if I remember rightly lots of clearing to do all of this needs clearing it all needs REM mulching underneath the um thermac crop Frost cloth I have got it’s all

Beetroots and then up there is turnips now if you saw my recent Facebook post you will know that I did actually Harvest all the bigger um beetroots and turnips the other day so really the cloth is just there cuz I haven’t got around to taking it off yet there are

Some smaller plants under there but I don’t expect that where we harvesting them um they may well just break down and turn back to compost on the beds by the time I get to them our leaks however when it’s not when the ground’s not frozen we are still harvesting our leaks up here

And they sat really well for us last year we had a much colder winter last year and we just kept harvesting them even after everything had uh thaw out they were still all good so the other day they were absolutely glist in with frost um which I think I may have a

Photo of but today I can feel that they’re frozen right through but there’s no frost on them so yeah like I saying I think it’s where it’s been a bit a bit drier and I’ll just quickly show you our elephant garlic bed because it looks lovely seeing the

Fresh green growth in the middle of winter and we’ve got a little bit of sun on it right here but as you can see yeah the Elephant Garlic is coming along nicely and I did plant this out a little bit earlier than the French garlic uh the

Elephant Garlic went in at the end of September and actually you can see in the size of growth that it’s put on that the few weeks difference between the two plantings and obviously with the soil temperature being a lot higher in September it has made a really big difference for

How they’ve come on so yeah I think I’ll definitely try and do it um sooner rather than later in the future so we’re going to have a little Wander over this way now you coming murf or are you still foraging come on then boy oh going to walk all along the

Garlic and all of this here is usually beautiful orange cannas that we have growing up here in the summer and we actually leave these I know a lot of um traditional gardening methods would encourage you to cut these down at the end of the season when they’re done but

We actually leave them like this uh because we find that this fr framework actually offers really good Frost protection um to the ryom the tubers below and helps to keep the frost off the soil where they are just a little bit so um yep that’s one of our methods that we use

Here these were once our beautiful big Leaf bananas but they’re looking a little bit worse wear now again this is something we’ve been um trialing over a few years when all of these bananas were a lot younger we used to wrap them every winter with bubble wrap and frost cloth and anything we

Could find to kind of insulate them and help keep them warm and sometimes they would still be Frozen inside so as they got a little bit bigger we decided to stop doing that and now we don’t wrap them at all and even like last year again we had two

Lots of um tday frosts last year which is really un usual for us to get periods that long we only normally get maybe three or four days in a row of heavier frosts and yeah these trunks froze absolutely solid and we weren’t sure if they were going to come back but a lot

Of them did still regrow from the existing trunks rather than from the ground up uh so yeah really cool love the bananas and they look so beautiful and then up here I’m not sure if you can see from the Sun this was actually my very first vegetable bed growing area that we put

In here um and then it kind of became a wild bed as we moved into the area where we’ve just been and so now this um this area here we are in the process of generating another Food Forest so last winter we put in about six or eight fruit trees

Into this area and obviously just to get them going as soon as possible and some current bushes all along this bank here as well that they are here somewhere here there’s some some gbury it’s a gbury bush so there is gbury and black currents that a lot of them were from uh

Cuttings that I took last year and from self-seed Plants as well with the gbur there’s 20 hinar red and 20 um black currents there I don’t know if you could hear that but Dan said there’s 20 hinaki red gurries and 20 black currents um in

This front area here so yeah if they all take or when they all take we’re going to have an absolute abundance of berries which would be amazing and yeah this area is a little bit of an ongoing project um we’ve got lots of plans for

Up here but it’s just when we get time to kind of chip away at it but we will share more about that project as it unfolds um this is a beautiful I forgotten the name of the this tree now mury dad thank you it’s a beautiful mury tree and it’s only been

In a couple of years um it’s actually got Dan’s granddad’s ashes underneath it and we’ve got two mury trees here exactly the same variety the other one is a year older but I think this tree really likes his granddad a lot because this one is growing so much better and

Has been fruiting already for us so amazing some fij joas which I think Dan is only just recently planted down here and then come down through this gate murf is already knowing where we’re going and where I wanted to show you today was the area that we call the

Jungle and we don’t often bring you guys in here very often but this area we have two favorite times for this area area in the middle of the summer when it is really hot and the Sun is beating down we come in here and we have some hammocks set up and get

Some beautiful shade but in the middle of winter when everything else is looking a bit Bleak our UK jungle looks absolutely beautiful because Dan’s vision for this area was for it all to be Evergreens so this area really po at this time of year and you get all the beautiful red

Berries against all of the really glossy green leaves so it just looks amazing and there’s a few things that we have in here they often flower in January as well so it’s just beautiful like here we’ve got these lovely mahonias with their little yellow flowers which are just starting to come out and

Normally they have a really really strong scent to them as well so they smell absolutely beautiful so sometimes you can just walk through here in the middle of winter and get all of the lovely sents and smells of of the plants we come down this way it’s actually

Quite hard to find the path through here now because there’s some bits that we need to clear and then over the years everything has just grown and filled in and so we have lost some of the paths so yeah I sometimes get lost in our jungle as well but you can see

This area just looks absolutely stunning for the middle of winter with these lovely palms and all the Evergreens we’ve got Magnolia here I’m getting this right down am I yeah Grand Flora Magnolia grander flora and the main canopy for this area is actually eucalyptus trees and and they are just beautiful the

Noise of the wind going through the leaves oh we do love them we absolutely love them and there was another plant that I love at this time of year that I’m just trying to find I think it’s around here might have to climb over here we’ve

Got a bit of a bit of a Faller hopefully Dan’s okay following me with the camera and over here is another one of my favorite winter flowers we’ve got more Mahonia here but then up here got a big chunk of Bramble for you to climb over there

Down up here is acaas and again they have this beautiful delicate yellow flower at this time of year which again smells really really fragrant and it just adds such lovely color for this time of year when everything is looking quite Dar and Bleak we got a bit of

Clearing to do here I’ve not chosen a good path and if we come back through the depths of the Jungle if I can take you through this way I might need to hold some leaves out of the way for Dan to come through as well you okay there Dan

Yeah really is like being in the jungle you have to fight your way through and then we’ve got this lovely little area here a little thatched heart that Dan and his friends built and then yeah sometimes we put the fire on and we came here for new Year’s Eve and it’s just a

Really lovely space to be in amongst all this beautiful Greenery and all these plants in the middle of winter so yeah I hope you enjoyed having a little look at how our Gardens look on one of the coldest days of the year for us here in the

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