WattsOFF GRID
Start where you are

Pillar 03

Grow

Soil before seed. Then the bed type that suits your ground, your water and your space.

SoilBeds & systemsPermacultureHydro & aquaponicsWhat grows here

The short answer

Soil is the whole game and it is the cheapest thing to fix. A worm farm is two stacked crates and turns kitchen waste into the best amendment available to you; biochar can be made from wattle you are legally obliged to clear. Fix the soil before buying a single seedling.

Nearly every gardening failure in this climate traces back to soil, and nearly every fix was cheaper than the thing we tried first.

This pillar runs in that order. Soil, then the structure you grow in — and bed type is not a style choice, it is a function of your soil, your water, your slope and your space. Only then, what actually grows in inland South Africa conditions rather than what the seed packet from a Californian catalogue promises.

Guides

In this pillar

Each one names its sources, and says plainly where a figure could not be sourced.

Cross-section diagram of a stacked worm farm showing the upper working crate with bedding, food layer and cover, drainage holes, and the lower crate acting as a leachate collection sump with a tap.

Grow

Building a worm farm that actually works

Two stacked crates, roughly twenty minutes a week, and it turns the thing you currently throw away into the most valuable soil amendment on the property.

Cross-section of a two-barrel biochar retort showing the inner sealed barrel containing feedstock, the outer barrel with the fire, the annular gap, and the vent path where pyrolysis gases are drawn back into the flame.

Grow

Making biochar from invasive wattle

A feedstock you are legally obliged to remove, turned into a soil amendment with a buyer — and the step everyone skips, which will cost you a season.

Comparative cross-sections of five garden bed types — in-ground no-dig, raised timber bed, wicking bed with reservoir, keyhole garden with central compost basket, and container growing — with the constraint each addresses.

Grow

Bed types: which one suits your soil, your water and your space

Bed type is not a style choice. It is a function of your soil, your water, your slope and your space — and one of the options was invented in Lesotho for exactly our conditions.

The other six

Where this connects

Nothing on a smallholding is a closed system. These are the pillars this one touches most.

The Dispatch

One email a week, from the ground

What we are building, what we have sourced, and what it costs — with the supplier named and the quote dated. No affiliate padding, no doom, no filler.

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