In this video, Richard Perkins uncovers a set of 100 no‑dig market‑garden beds that have been covered for four years with silage tarps and non‑woven geotextiles. He examines the soil condition, noting surprisingly good structure, limited weed pressure, and some wildlife activity (voles, slow worms) as well as occasional root intrusion and water‑logged wood chips. Perkins contrasts the performance of silage plastic (white side up for heat reflection) with long‑lasting non‑woven geotextiles, highlighting the latter’s breathability, durability, and aesthetic advantages. He details the dimensions of the beds (75 cm wide, 10.7 m long, total 750 m²) and provides a rough economic model for Swedish market gardening, estimating that a living‑wage farm needs over €100 k in revenue, implying a scale roughly three times larger than his demo plot. He demonstrates the tools and techniques he uses to restore the beds: a battery‑powered “Tilther” (Johnnys Tilter), an edging spade, and a machete for cutting roots, followed by a quick rake and plans to add wood chips. Throughout, he references his books on regenerative agriculture and promotes on‑farm trainings, masterclasses, and internships. The video ends with optimism about planting wheat and inviting viewers to follow future farm projects.
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Welcome back to another video, folks, and today's project is uncovering what we call the New North beds. Now these beds are no-dig beds, just like all the rest of them at the farm, and in today's video I want to start uncovering this and seeing what they look like after 4 years being under silage tarps. And there's some other of our non-woven geotextiles on some of the beds under there, as far as I can remember. I'm very curious to see what these beds they're going to be like. So I covered these beds up as we scaled down and focused on our animal enterprises, and in more recent years, as we're starting to shift our production towards purely the restaurant, we don't need so much vegetables. Vegetable production, as I've shown in my book, is very profitable on a small scale, but it's one of the most human labor input intensive enterprises. It's also one of the biggest plastic users of all the farm enterprises. Now I've spoken out about this for many years because the rise of market gardening is unparalleled, and that's because of the easy access. You don't need much land, you don't need much previous experience, it's very easy in terms of entry, and that's great, love that, But I've always been standing and pushing back a bit against that to show people that you can make a much better living with way less time with some of our border acre and livestock-based enterprises. But anyway, that aside, I'm going to uncover this and we'll see what the beds look like after 4 years of COVID and whether they're ready to seed into immediately. It's not so windy today, but there are gusts coming, and what I'm doing is just leaving the end rolled up and under weight, and that allows me to concertina this over. This is the third out of five sheets. Let's get this off. So long-term viewers of the channel will know I've never been a big fan of silage plastic because I can't imagine it's great for soil life underneath. But I started using it a few years ago when I left the farm for a year exploring whether I'd move closer to Stockholm, and it's been quite amazing to see how simple it is to manage overwintering. I do like these non-woven geotextiles. They're super handy for seasonal cover when you don't want to sow all the crops at one time, stopping weed seeds blowing in. And also it keeps biological life happening longer into the autumn and quicker in the spring. You know, like if you lay a piece of cardboard on the lawn, you get worm activity coming up to the surface. It's protected and covered. I do like these non-woven textiles. They're over 10 years old now and they probably last another 10 years because we're careful to use the same holes when we pin them down with landscape pins. But to walk away from the farm, especially when you're working with less people— I'm here on my own, it's just my partner and I living here, and I'm mostly taking care of all the farm, uh, these weeks, and I've got livestock to manage and kids to manage and stuff going on outside of this all too— but I've been so impressed with these, uh, silage tarps. I put them white side up to reflect some of the heat. I'm sure it doesn't make too much of a difference, but I'm just super impressed with what I see so far. I think by the time I get all these covers up, rake it all over, it's going to look as good as the gardens that are prepped on the other side that we use every year. So pretty amazing so far. So the area of the new north behind me is 100 beds, and we do 75cm beds, 10 7 meters long, 750 square meters of bed space. Now thinking about economics of market gardening, in Sweden a living wage is about 500,000 crowns, roughly around €50,000. To be able to pay that out of your company as a salary, you need in excess of 1 million crowns, or around €100,000 with Swedish taxes, etc. Now I think if you're starting off in market gardening, you've never gardened before, this is about the size you should start out at so you can learn and scale up with your customer base. However, you won't be able to make a living off it. I estimate about 3 times the size of this you need to be able to manage totally on your own and all the sales to get a living modern Swedish wage. And I can say of all the people I've met over the years, I only know a small handful of people that could actually achieve that. I think I could pull that off, if I was only market gardening, not running Pasture Poultry and all the other things that we do around this farm. But I just want to say that for context, because I think a lot of people coming into this space just aren't aware that there are easier options, like I've outlined in my book Regenerative Agriculture, in wider scale enterprises like Pasture Poultry or other animal enterprises, etc. It's all possible, it's all doable, and if you've got the passion and mindset, then you can make your dreams come to life. But it's good to analyze and see what your landscape capabilities are, how your lifestyle you want it to be, what time of year you want to have more or less work, etc. And it's always good to dig deeper into these things. Pause for a quick ad read. Most of my subscribers here and followers on social media haven't actually read my books, and this is the most condensed practical information and knowledge that I can share with you. You can find them in the links in the bio. Check them out. Okay, stage 1 complete. There are a couple of anomalies. Looks like vole activity here. You see there's compost on top of the covers and there's even a hole there, but I imagine they've moved out of here. It's probably old damage. And lots of slow worms, I've seen about a dozen, obviously enjoying basking under the COVID in the heat. This is a weird anomaly, the wood chips in these two rows have just totally disappeared. Looks like it's been waterlogged perhaps, and maybe they've just rotten down. Maybe there was a— it's a bit depressed there, so maybe water collected there. But generally everything looks in absolutely lovely condition. I mean, this just needs a little rake over and it's good to go. I mean, it's beautiful. So next step is getting all these covers off. That'll take a little while, but I've got a meeting now, so we'll see if we get around to that later. But very, very nice. Definitely a bit more vole activity here. You can see quite a lot of digging has been going on here and also here and in the far corner there, but really not a big deal. I can fix all that up pretty fast. Okay, so starting to take covers off and got delayed in the meetings, but it's interesting to see here adjacent to the forest a lot of root intrusion. From the trees here, obviously, and I can see it even coming into the beds here. Not a big deal. What I do is I do my edging technique, which needs doing again, with an edging spade. And whenever I find a bigger root, I chop through that with a machete, and I can just sever all those roots and they'll break down. Typically we do that every year or second year in the beds that we're using, like on this side. I've made videos about it in the past. This needs doing again, but no big deal. And yeah, probably have to finish this tomorrow now.
So it's 4 AM and the Great Tit is waking me up every single morning at the moment.
I love it, but there were no birds when I moved here.
It was distinctly quiet. After moving from the UK. And as we've built up this habitat and created an oasis for life, it's just become noisy. And right now it's a few different species, but it's that little great tit that is waking me up. Unreal.
So people always ask me what we use to cover our beds. These are non-woven geotextiles, and I like them because they let air and water through, but they also look nice, unlike shiny black woven plastic that frays and breaks down and ends up all over the farm. These look nice on the ground, is aesthetically pleasing, but I'll show you close-up because we've had these over 10 years, but despite having them 10 years, we're very careful to use the same holes again. So you can see these haven't been used there, but there's pins there, and so they hold up incredibly well after 10 years use. This is as good as new, essentially, and we really like them. I prefer this to a Silage Plastic. I've only used the Silage Plastic because I was putting these to sleep not knowing when I'd be back, and I didn't want it to get turned out into weeds. But they do a remarkably good job. And I like to have individual bed covers so that you can selectively uncover the beds you're actually planting and then put them to sleep when you finish cropping individually, so there's less exposure to weeds, etc. As you can see, not a lot of weeds going on here. Okay, everything's uncovered, and given that it's sat for so long, I'm going to go over everything with the Tilther. This is the Johnnys Tilter. I think the best one on the market. I'm using a 12 amp-hour battery on a higher-powered 18-volt drill, setting 1, speed 1, higher torque, and on the drill setting. And I'll give it a quick pass all the way over the beds. Well, there we go, finished tilthing. Looks great. Let's get a view from the sky. Okay, so it's looking pretty sweet. Very happy with how it's looking after so long out of use. I want to add some wood chips in places, and I want to go around the edging with the edging technique I use on our no-dig beds, which you can see in older videos if you're interested in how we keep that nice and neat and tidy and reduce the likelihood of rodents and things coming in. But that can wait. The soil is warming up now. It's time to get wheat seeded. And yeah, I look forward to bringing you along on the journey, so don't forget to hit the subscribe button if you want to follow the farm, learn all about pastured poultry, market gardening, agroforestry, holistic plant grazing, virtual grazing, farm design, etc. There's going to be a lot of fun stuff going on this summer. So 100 beds, that took one and maybe a quarter of these 12 amp-hour batteries. So pretty good going, and very happy with the result. Well, that's about it for the video, and I hope you found that interesting. I thought it was fascinating to just to see what these beds looked like after 4 years of covering. I really was expecting all the wood chip to have broken down a lot more and the beds to be in worse condition. And very, very happy. The soil is warming up now. We can get ready to plant, and I'll bring you along on the journey. And if you're interested to come to the farm, we still have spots on all the trainings that are listed in the links below. Our Market Garden Masterclass, we've got our 9-day Regenerative Agriculture Design training, Farm Design training, as well as a couple of spots left on our 6-week internship, which is a life-changing springboard for people just about to go and start their own enterprise and learn all aspects of farm design and enterprise planning and economy and marketing and sales— everything to do with this. And that's been a springboard for people going off and setting up incredible projects all over the world. That's 6 intensive weeks, and you can join us for that if you're interested. Check the links below. Thanks so much for watching, folks, and I'll see you in a video soon.
