How to practice regenerative agriculture in your home garden

I’d been thinking about how to best explain regenerative agricultural practices to people who may not be farmers, and then had a light bulb moment - how about describing it in a way that makes it relevant for those of us who love to garden at home?

It’s something I have been working on in my own veggie patch, as a regenerative veggie patch does take a bit more effort and investment to set up than your average mint bed. But once you have it up and running, it becomes a beautiful network of living organisms that support each other and produce resilient plants who in turn produce tasty, nutrient dense food!

 At Dirty Clean Food, we look at 4 Principles of Regenerative Agriculture when working with our farmers - Soil Health, Biodiversity, Water and Nutrient Cycles and Committing to a learning journey. Those main principles are then broken up into 10 sub principles, and under those principles we record 52 regenerative practices that are considered best practice. Over the next few weeks I’ll be delving into some of the sub principles that sit under soil health! These are minimise soil disturbance, keep the soil covered year round, maintain living roots in the soil year round, and feed the soil food web (not the plant).

 As these practices are all intertwined and can get quite complex, I’ve decided to draw it all together with some pretty pictures by following my journey of growing my second crop of glass gem corn on our patch of soil here in Wandering. I’ve set it up as a zero till veggie bed going forward, and we’ve just harvested the last of our corn!

It is a very pretty coloured variety for milling or popcorn, rather than eating fresh like sweetcorn. So far we’ve made popcorn and polenta, and next on the menu are tortillas and corn chips for nachos!