Episode 131: The Garden of Equal Delights with Anni Kelsey

This week’s guest is forest gardener Anni Kelsey. Anni is an experienced grower of edibles and she follows the principles of forest gardening - if you’re not sure what that means, all will be revealed. Her latest book The Garden of Equal Delights sets out principles for managing a garden in order to maximise its productive yield but it’s much more than that, it’s about gardening sustainably and using techniques that many conventional gardeners might find unusual but which work. Dr Ian Bedford’s Bug of the Week: Signalling This episode is brought to you by our friends at Natural Grower. Launched in 2019, their award winning liquid fertiliser and plant feed and soil conditioner is made entirely from maize.  Naturally rich in nitrogen, potash, phosphate and other trace elements that plants and vegetables love, it is approved by the Soil Association, Vegan Society and Organic Farmers and Growers. Their concentrated natural fertiliser can be poured around the base of plants, whilst the plant feed and soil conditioner can be mixed into the soil or compost and used as a mulch on the surface as a long-term slow-release fertiliser. The fertiliser can be used for all outdoor and indoor plants. As a special offer for listeners, Natural Grower are offering 15% off all of their range. Listen now for details.  What we talk about: What is a forest garden? Anni writes in her book "how would I describe or explain what I do in the garden to someone else?”. Given her gardening style is very intuitive and site specific, find out how she manages to communicate her principles to others The practice of bringing nothing in and taking nothing out of the garden  How Anni brings uncultivated areas into production Dealing with weeds  Why she doesn’t compost  Why all plants are special About Anni Kelsey “Anni Kelsey has been passionate about gardening and the natural world for as long as she can remember. As her concerns about the unsustainability of our present food system grew she began to 'edibilise' her garden aiming to find a way of growing food that required as little time, effort and skill as possible. She based her experiments on forest gardening but adapted this to fit in an average sized back garden. This led her to focus on experimenting with perennial vegetables, obtaining and growing as many as she possibly could. As she gained experience and enthusiasm for this style of gardening she wanted to convey what she had learned to others which in turn led her to write Edible Perennial Gardening or the book she would have liked to have been able to read years ago, if it had already been written! She hopes that it will inspire and enable others to grow perennial vegetables which are little known but tasty and rewarding crops. Anni's garden is in a challenging situation high on a hill facing Wales in one direction and England in the other. When she is not in the garden she loves nothing more than exploring the local countryside and coffee shops” - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anni-Kelsey/e/B00N8XJMPK/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_ebooks_1 Links Anni’s Veggies Blog  The Garden of Equal Delights by Anni Kelsey - Permanent Publications, 2020