Interview: Permaculture Gardening with Nigel Martin
Photo: Nigel and Shadow, Braes Friendly Growers (BFG)
Listen to Morag, from the FEL Food & Growing team, interviewing Nigel about his work at the Polmont Community Hub.
Full Transcript below:
Hi everyone, I’m here at Polmont Community hub with Nigel Martin and his glamorous assistant Shadow the dog here to talk about permaculture. So we will just go straight into the first question. What’s your name and your role here at Polmont Community Hub?
My name’s Nigel Martin. My role is, I think it has been referred to as gardenizer. But I am responsible for the outdoor area.
Cool. And why have you chosen to use permaculture here at the garden at Polmont Community Hall?
It’s something that I’ve been interested in and following for some years, and it just kind of brings true with a lot of the values that I have as well. Yeah, the importance of working with nature, as opposed to being against it. And I feel somewhere like at the hub, especially, is a perfect area and it gives other people in the area an opportunity to be introduced to permaculture, which a lot of people maybe don’t know much about.
Yeah, well, I’ll be honest, I didn’t before I started researching these questions, but I’m interested! So, what steps are you taking here at Pullman Community Hub to start a Permaculture Garden?
We have our plan set out for how we would like to see the growing area, especially. We have started actually planting our fruit forest. So that will be hopefully quite a big part of the garden. The other is just at the moment, because we’re at the early stages, it’s just gathering resources. So we’ve been in touch with local.. arborists to get wood chip and products like that. We’ve been in touch with the local community as well to pick up any old pallets, wood, stuff like that, that we can reuse again. A big part of permaculture is reusing old stuff, so that’s kind of key for not just the outdoor area, but the hub as well.
What are your plans for the future in the garden?
It’s row, grow, grow.
Yes. I saw the bullet notes up there. It seems like you’ve got a lot of growing planned.
There’s a lot of growing. There’s just now we’re hoping in the immediate future, we’re hoping to get to make some raised beds and get the raised beds out there. We’re still kind of held slightly because of planning permission. It’s still classed as a grassed area and we have to get permission from the council to change it into a growing area. So anything that we do on the site at the moment needs to not be permanent.
Right. So that’s a bit of a barrier right now.
Exactly the opposite of what we’re trying to set, permanent agriculture. But. So what we’re looking at just now is a few raised beds. Get them in, get them planted up for the summer and hopefully, over the summer we’ll get our permission and we can get started planting it, designing.
What are the benefits of starting permaculture gardens?
Low maintenance is one of the big things that attracted me, what people like to call lazy gardening. Once we’re up and running, the garden should take very little maintenance. It should be similar to the forest. It doesn’t require lots of weeding, lots of watering, lots of attention. It needs some attention through the season, but yeah.
That’s really sustainable, isn’t it?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
So what wildlife and biodiversity do you expect to attract with a permaculture?
Insects, we would hope. We’ve been in touch with some some local beekeepers as well, about bringing some bees in. We already have a bit of wildlife kicking around with our rabbits and there are deer in the area we don’t tend to see them around here, so that’s kind of how we would like to keep it. Well, I mean, growing veggies and stuff, yeah.
Awesome. Do you think they’ll be a lot of different wildlife and biodiversity that you currently see that you’ll attract?
It’ll attract more. Because we’re not just growing vegetables, they’ll be a lot of flowers and other plants as well, that will attract pollinators. So, yeah, when we attract insects, they’ll attract other wildlife as well.
What benefits does permaculture have for sustainable growing?
It’s permanent agriculture. That’s what really attracts me is the fact that a lot of this will just keep once we have a good base in the garden, this will just keep producing for us. Don’t have to rely on anything. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, looking at the size of the garden that we have here, the events that we’re planning to be running annually, there is no problem that we can be supplying all the events and soup and stuff for volunteers when they come on the day as well. Yeah, and this is all part of it, you know, that people can go out and pick something to bring in here and make a soup or whatever.
So what are the biggest challenges or barriers when starting a permaculture garden?
Well, for myself personally, I suppose it’s not barrier, but it’s more the learning. There’s a lot of learning to do. There’s a lot of people just now who are documenting their gardens and it makes it very easy to follow with the likes to YouTube and stuff like that. One of my – Jeff Lawton is one of the gurus of Permaculture that I follow – but also a friend of his who’s called the Weedie Gardener, is another resource that I use a lot. And it just, like any of these things are, when you see someone actually drain something and following the processes that they’re talking about. It’s easier. It makes it much easier to incorporate.
I’ll get the links from you the resources and I’ll have them available underneath this video. So what are advice do you have for community growing groups who are looking to start a permaculture garden?
Start small. Start small. Start small. Start with a raised bed or something like this and find what you like. You know, don’t go wild planting lots of things that you don’t even want to eat. You know, find things that you like. Plant them, see how well they do. Again, if you’re going back to resources, there are so many resources out there, and advice on plants that are good and healthy to grow in even different areas of the UK and Scotland, so find out what is good, plant that, and, yeah, look forward to the harvest.
Thank you. Are you okay if I leave your email for people to ask you some questions?
Yeah.
So I’ve just got a few more questions. So what advice do you have for groups who are looking to incorporate permaculture into their garden?
Yeah, I mean, it’s… go to the forest. Yeah. That is a big part. You know, go into the forest and see how the forest works because that’s basically what we’re replicating in the garden environment, is the forest law of what we want to try and replicate. The importance of good soil and part of that is good composting. So it all kind of comes down to some real basics kind of thing. But if you have a good compost, you create good soil, you create a good soil in your beds, you’ll reap the rewards from that.
Amazing. So the last question is just any final advice for anyone interested in permaculture?
Yeah, do your research. And, like I said, before, start small, start with just something small and achievable. See how that goes. There are lots of courses out there if it’s something you feel that you want to be going forward, I recommend looking at. There’s courses running in Edinburgh and Glasgow with permaculture design. It’s something that we’re hopefully going to be getting going on as well, to just get a better understanding of how we can design this area.
I’m looking forward to seeing that.
Well, it’s, you know, part of the local or the, especially the one in Glasgow, part of the design course there, is if you have an area like what we have here, then on the course, you design your area. So that’s your project on the course, is to design the area that you’ve got. So yeah, that makes sense to me.
Amazing. Well, thank you so much, and I’ll link all of the resources that Nigel was talking about. But thank you very much, Nigel, for your time here today and your expertise. And thank you for Shadow for being an emotional support dog.
Okay, thank you everyone, for coming and joining in.
Resources
- Geoff Lawton https://www.geofflawtononline.com
- The Weedy Gardener https://youtube.com/@theweedygarden?si=daYzDQQ4CP4F1LwF
- Nigel’s email for any permaculture related questions: