Growing a Chaos Garden: Mix Edibles, Flowers & Beneficial Insects Together

0:00 One of the concepts that's kind of fun to play around with when we talk about these mixes is to make a mix like this what we call the chaos garden and on this we just we put a lot of things in here that are edible for humans. We've got a lot of greens that you could eat.

0:13 All the way from mustard greens to collared greens to radishes and turnips but then we also intersperse in a lot of flowering plants like we've got mustards here. We've got actual flowers over here, we've got calendulas and marigolds and other things like that.

0:29 Flax in here that's flowering. Then we also put some vine crops like we've got squash in here. There's watermelons, there's cantaloupe in different areas. So it's just kind of, it's really fun to come out here and walk around. There's pumpkins out here so later in the season.

0:44 When a lot of this stuff freezes out, we'll have kids come out, we'll have people from church come out and they can search to see who can find the biggest pumpkin or the biggest squash or different gourds or things like that. So this is something that you don't want to.

0:57 Do on a large scale, but it's really fun to do this on the edge of your cover crop field or next to a pivot point or something where it's not going to be land used for other things anyway. And as Dale pointed out earlier, you can just you can.

1:12 Just hear the insect activity out here. There's honey bees, there's plenty of mosquitoes out here right now, but there's all sorts of insect activity. It's just a plethora of life and activity out here—everything from wasps to spiders to ladybugs.

1:30 Looking to see if we can do some strips like this throughout other fields to track attract enough beneficial insects to have a positive effect on the rest of the field. Dale what are you seeing out here?

1:40 Well I think the one of the most interesting things is what I'm not.

2:05 Between different plant types and leaf architecture, root architecture, root exudates, pollen timing, bloom timing, we think that you could probably actually get more garden yield of edible product from something like this than you could with everything in nice neat.

2:28 Rows planted in little small monocultures figuring out which combinations are beneficial and so forth is going to be pretty tricky but it's a lot of fun to come out here and just look and see what's happening. This is a great learning center if you

2:46 Want to observe plant interaction and which plants benefit which neighbors. And like right here, right where I'm standing, I didn't even move and I was able to grab a cucumber, which this is a yellow variety, very tasty cucumbers, a turnip, and one of.

3:03 These small little pumpkins that the kids will love later on. So if nothing else, it's just a great place to come out and walk around and just marvel at the diversity of all the different plants that God created. It's pretty fun to do.

3:16 Yeah, and this is a university education in itself right out here. If you just open your eyes and observe, it's a lot of fun.