Last winter, I read a book by Sepp Holzer,
Sepp Holzer's Permaculture: A Practical Guide to Small-Scale, Integrative Farming and Gardening (2011)*
The guy is a famous figure in the permaculture scene.
I was not impressed by the book.
The guy talks mostly about himself and his Kramerhof.
There is very little practical advice.
There seems to be something that Mr. Holzer delibaretely misunderstands; Commercial farmers grow their plants in rows and in monoculture mainly to reduce costs of labor.
Of course you can have better harvests of random stuff when you just plant everything randomly and integrate all sorts of ditches and hills into your farm.
It just makes harvesting and caring for the farm a nightmare.
...
There was however one idea, that I wanted to copy this year;
In one chapter, he explains how peas and grain can complement each other, and since I would have to harvest these things by hand anyways, I do not care about how hard that would be to manage with a commercial harvester.
I was going to dry the harvest and mill it as quail feed.
So, this spring, I planted, what I came to call the Sepp Holzer Disaster.
I planted 500g of bushy peas, oats and wheat each* on a 20 m² patch some time in April.
* 8€ for the lot
That was way too many seeds, but I expected the mice and birds to steal a lot.
All around the patch are perennial flowers, and I filled the gaps up with poppy seeds, which make good bird feed, too, and also look nice.
Everything sprouted well and just a couple of weeks later it looked promising.
I had planted a bit too dense, perhaps.
There was enough rain in spring and it kept looking promising.
In this picture, you can even see the peas.
And then disaster struck in the form of mice.
Like a biblical plague, they ate through everything.
The peas were all gone after only days.
I always had a few voles, but this year I could not control their population.
I have stocked up on traps since and went on a killstreak.
Meanwhile, Sepp Holzer's advice to voles is to let them be.
They are territorial and (he claims) they will stop breading at some point, if you do not hunt them at all.
That might have worked, if there had been moles in my garden this year.
Voles and moles do not seem to get along very well.
I, however, have at least one dead mouse in a trap every single day.*
* I have pictures ... but decided not to include them here
The kill count is easily over 100 this year and there would have been absolutely no harvest of anything, if I had not stepped in.
Though it looked kind of nice at some point, my Sepp Holzer Experience was mostly about mouse breeding. Maybe there is a market for that one day, but meanwhile I call bullshit on most of Sepp Holzer's theories.
I have not harvested any peas, they are all gone.
I have not harvested any wheat.
There was some oats ...
I have spend 1,5 kg of seeds to harvest 1 kg of products in the end.
I have also harvested shovels of mouse meat and fed it to the hedgehogs, or whoever shows up at night.
I conclude, that Sepp Holzer has some nice ideas, but it does not simply translate into any context.
I have adopted some simple tips, but I doubt that having hogs or chickens in the field (his favorite advice) would have helped the situation or made the harvest any easier or better.
His favorite rodent distraction (Jerusalem artichoke), which I planted 20€ worth of, did not even sprout before it was all eaten.
I feel like this year, I have only fed the mice during my Sepp Holzer Experience.
I have plenty of other stuff to harvest, but those are proven concepts and have worked well before I had ever heard of permaculture.
