Boris Bublik and "Edible Forest"

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

When 80-year-old Boris Bublik is called a lazy gardener, he is not offended. On the contrary, it is proud. He is perhaps the most famous of the domestic permaculturists - people who believe that a good harvest can be grown simply without disturbing the land with excessive care.

- Everything that we do with a shovel and a hoe is to the detriment of the garden, - says Boris Andreevich, - We loosen, dig up, break through and think that we are doing well, but in fact we interfere with nature. You just need to help the plants to love each other - to look for connections between them and make these connections work without our participation. This is the main principle of the permaculturist.

In his garden in the village of Martovaya near Kharkov, the “smart sloth” works only three or four days a summer, the rest of the time he just harvests. His garden grows according to the principle of "edible forest" - almost without the participation of the owner. You can hardly call it well-groomed in the usual sense: the weeds, which most gardeners pull out on the vine, here have the same "rights" as potatoes and tomatoes. Sometimes the "smart sloth" even sows them on purpose.

The older a person becomes, the more his body is saturated with a variety of harmful substances, which further leads to a deterioration in health. But there are ways to cleanse the body with different herbs, and each herb is responsible for its own organ, and when taken multiple times, it cleanses it.

- The earth, covered with a birch tree, perfectly retains moisture. And note: I have no beetle or aphids. This is because the smell of weeds "masks" all other smells, and pests are not interested in flying into my garden. At the same time, I do not need to pickle vegetables with any "chemistry" - it is enough to sprinkle Aktofit once, at the beginning of summer,”says Boris Andreevich, demonstrating absolutely clean bushes of potatoes, peppers and eggplants.

Guests from all over Ukraine come to Boris Bublik to learn the principles of "lazy farming", and he willingly conducts an excursion for everyone:

- For some reason, people have got it into their heads that they need to sow only in rows, and when asked why, they explain: then it is easier to break through. I sow in such a way that I don't have to do this extra work later, - says Boris Andreevich.

For sowing without rows, he uses ordinary plastic bottles, only with holes in the bottom. This simple 'device allows the seeds to spill out evenly. The holes can be made with an awl or a nail, then cleaned from the inside so that the size of each is less than two sizes of the seed - then it will turn out without clots. For radish, radish, daikon there may be one bottle, for cabbage, mustard, rapeseed - another. In total, there should be about a dozen such seeders on the farm.

All my work is to scatter the seeds over the beds, and then wrap them with a flat cutter or a rake, at the same time removing the weeds. Is this a job? - Boris Bublik smiles.

Another of his "lazy" planting devices is an ordinary wooden peg, with which the gardener makes small holes. In them, he throws seeds of corn, beans or sunflower - through a tube a meter and a half long.

- I sow without even bending over, and then I just slightly trample the hole - that's all the effort. And no holes needed! "Eternal" beds are another pride of the permaculturist. Onions and garlic, poorly harvested in August, give seeds, which, scattering on their own, give a ready-sown garden by spring.