Kitchen Garden

Can Vital cares for you

Our organic kitchen garden can supply you with seasonal fruits and vegetables, always picked fresh at the right time for optimal flavor.

Why permaculture in the Can Vital kitchen garden?

The word permaculture means “permanent agriculture”. Permaculture gardening is a way of gardening that aims to complete the cycle. Watering with collected rainwater, fertilizing with our own compost and sowing the crops from our own seeds. Growing the best fruits and vegetables with absolutely no chemicals.

We strive to make gardening as sustainable and healthy for the naturally occurring systems as possible.

Permaculture is a proactive approach to sustainability. We’re aiming to help revitalize soil life, build complexity and diversity in the soil-food web and develop biodiversity that yields abundance and stability.

How will you create the raised beds and why in this way?

The soil here was not very fertile for growing an abundance of vegetables and fruits to begin with. By making raised beds it was possible to fill them up with very fertile and nutrient dense soil, making the top soil a lot thicker and therefore allowing the roots of the plants to grow longer.

The raised beds are also practical because they serve as a barrier for some weeds, slugs and snails. The beds also have better drainage than growing directly in the ground.

This helps prevent root rot and allows for a longer growing season due to the soil warming up faster in spring.

Another wonderful benefit of the raised beds are that they help keep the garden organized and looking aesthetically pleasing.

Strategy of planting:

In the garden we use a method called companion planting. It means that certain plants are beneficial to plant next to each other for optimal growth. For example planting basil in between tomato plants helps repel insects and disease from the tomato plants and even improves growth and flavor of the tomatoes. We use this method with all crops. A few other examples of beneficial companions are:

Melons and Marigolds
Cucumbers, lettuce and radishes
Carrots and onion
Beans and lettuce
Peppers and aromatic herbs

Long term philosophy and plan for getting our own and strong seeds:

At Can Vital you will get to experience different varieties of fruits and vegetables than the ones you’re used to from the grocery store. We focus on using old heirloom seeds mainly from Catalonia. This keeps old strong varieties of fruits and vegetables alive and gives the garden an abundance of different varieties of each vegetable or fruit. Old heirloom seeds are generally also stronger and more disease resistant than those used in large scale farming.

We also use the lost art of seed saving. Seed saving was part of the way our grandparents were gardening, but has slowly been forgotten in our busy modern lives. It’s often more convenient to get the widely available seeds from stores. But saving the seeds from the best fruits and vegetables in the garden year after year is an amazing practice.

This improves and adapts the seeds and plants to the microclimate of the garden and makes them grow stronger and more resistant to disease and pests. It’s beautiful to witness the full cycle of each plant from seed to seed.