Hugelkultur
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Permaculture Lectures At Finch Frolic Garden, June 2014
Tour Finch Frolic Garden! Permaculture Lectures in the Garden!
Learn how to work with nature and save money too
Finch Frolic Garden and Hatch Aquatics will present four fantastic, information-filled lectures in June. Join us at beautiful Finch Frolic Garden in Fallbrook, 4 pm to 6 pm, for refreshments and talks on…
Saturday, June 7: Introduction to Permaculture and Finch Frolic Tour: We’ll take you through the main precepts of permaculture and how it can be applied not only to your garden, but to yourself and your community. Then we’ll tour Finch Frolic Garden and show rain catchments, swales, plant guilds, polyculture, living buildings and so much more.
Saturday, June 14: Your Workers in the Soil and Earthworks: Learn the best methods for storing water in the soil and how to replace all your chemicals with actively aerated compost tea and compost.
Saturday, June 21: Aquaculture: You can have a natural pond – even in a tub! How natural ponds work, which plants clean water and which are good to eat. Even if you don’t want a pond, you’ll learn exciting information about bioremediation and riparian habitat.
Saturday, June 28: Wildlife in your Garden: What are all those bugs and critters and what they are doing in your yard? We’ll discuss how to live with wildlife and the best ways to attract beneficial species.
Your hosts and lecturers will be
Jacob Hatch Owner of Hatch Aquatics. With years of installing and maintaining natural ponds and waterways, and a Permaculture Design Course graduate, Jacob has installed earthworks with some of the biggest names in permaculture.
Miranda Kennedy OSU graduate of Wildlife Conservation and wildlife consultant, Miranda photographs and identifies flora and fauna and maps their roles in backyard ecosystems.
Diane Kennedy Owner of Finch Frolic Garden, lecturer, consultant, Permaculture Design Course graduate, former SDC Senior Park Ranger, Diane educates homeowners on how to save money and the environment while building their dream gardens.
Each class limit is 50 attendees, so please make pre-paid reservations soon before they fill up. Fee for set of four lectures and tour is $45 per person. Single session fee is $20 per person. Contact Diane Kennedy at dianeckennedy@prodigy.net for reservations and directions.
You will not want to miss this fascinating and useful information!
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The Albedo Effect: How Bare Earth Causes Wild Weather
This week’s 100F+ temperatures and high Santa Ana winds have fueled three fires close to us. It is May, not October. Albedo is a reflection coefficient. In layman’s terms it is the effect that happens when sunlight is reflected off of white areas. There is the high albedo of bare earth, snow and ice, and clouds, and the low albedo of water and vegetation. There is less reflection from dark areas such as off of water and green areas, and darker areas, just like dark clothing, absorbs more heat rather than reflects it like white clothing does. There are arguments that we should cut down all the trees to increase white space to stop global warming. NO! The plant life that occupies the green spaces transpire water and excess heat into the air, causing cloud cover. Clouds, of course, insulate the earth from the sun and their albedo effect is cooling to the earth, not to mention that clouds amass moisture and – bingo – you get rain. It is the loss of green areas and the desertification of large masses of Africa, and the in-progress desertification of the already drier areas of the world (such as California) that makes the albedo effect one that is helping warm our climate. Great tracks of land now reflect light into cloudless skies; water sources dry up and plants die so transpiration disappears. The loss of air-borne water (evapotranspiration) allows areas around the desert area to also dry out. The rapid change of climate due to desertification, loss of topsoil and the resulting erosion and the melting of our ice caps (creating larger oceans and thus larger thermal masses to reflect heat) causes severe weather patterns – weather patterns that balance out huge dry desert areas with destructive rain and wind storms in other areas. Drying areas ignite… here in San Diego North County there are five fires burning as I sit, and heavy smoke and ash rain down on everything between them. My house is not threatened at this time, but we may be evacuated. So many people are evacuated right now and the highways are packed. There is another fire near San Diego, and two between here and Los Angeles. It is May – usually we have these temperatures, wild winds from the desert called Santa Ana winds, and fire threat in October. Our lack of rain doesn’t bode well for California.
My point is that to help balance nature out again, we need to hurriedly lessen the amount of reflected light in areas where we were traditionally covered by plants. We need to plant. We need to plant native plants. We need to re-green our landscapes, in each backyard and vacant lot, as quickly as we can. Allow the plants to keep moisture in the soil, to slow flooding, to transpire moisture into our atmosphere so that rain comes back to the desert areas. We need to hold what rain that falls in our soil by burying wood (hugelkultur), by creating level swales and mulching, mulching, mulching. Yet on trash day I see bags and bags of leaves set on the street ready to go to the dump. We need to stop erosion areas by using whatever means we can to keep the topsoil back. We need native trees with long roots that will hold the soil, build topsoil and transpirate.
Of course you probably can’t afford lots of plants, so plant natives that will quickly grow large. Between the slower-growing oaks, plant sages, mallows, ceanothus, quail bush and other bushes that cover 10 -15 feet of dry earth. Under them will be moisture, protected soil with mulch from their leaves, and habitat for lizards, frogs, small birds and hundreds of insects. These bushes will help shade young oaks, sycamores, and other trees and keep their trunks from scorching.
Throw down seeds of California fescue (Festuca californica var. parishii) to hold soil and cover the dry, reflective areas. This native grass is tough and doesn’t cause trouble like non-native grasses. You can seed it with California poppies, lupine and other native flowers. Aggressively weed out non-native species.
Since I was little, in the 60’s, I heard the mantra ‘plant a tree’. Obviously we haven’t been doing that. I think it should be changed to ‘plant a tree and don’t cut down any more because the earth can’t afford it’!
Please plant! And all my hope goes to you and yours who are threatened or have had losses from our severe weather.
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The Mulberry Guild
The renovated and planted mulberry guild. One of our larger guilds has a Pakistani mulberry tree that I’d planted last spring, and around it had grown tomatoes, melons, eggplant, herbs, Swiss chard, artichokes and garlic chives.
Mulberry guild with last year’s plant matter and unreachable beds. This guild was too large; any vegetable bed should be able to be reached from a pathway without having to step into the bed. Stepping on your garden soil crushes fungus and microbes, and compacts (deoxygenates) the soil. So of course when I told my daughter last week that we had to plant that guild that day, what I ended up meaning was, we were going to do a lot of digging in the heat and maybe plant the next day. Most of my projects are like this.
Lavender, valerian, lemon balm, horehound, comfrey and clumping garlic chives were still thriving in the bed. Marsh fleabane, a native, had seeded itself all around the bed and had not only protected veggies from last summer’s extreme heat, but provided trellises for the current tomatoes.
Fleabane stalks from last year, with new growth coming from the roots. Marsh fleabane is an incredible lure for hundreds of our tiny native pollinators and other beneficial insects. Lots of lacewing eggs were on it, too. The plants were coming up from the base, so we cut and dropped these dead plants to mulch the guild.
The stalks of fleabane are hollow… perfect homes for small bees! The stems were hollow and just the right size to house beneficial bees such as mason bees. This plant is certainly a boon for our first line of defense, our native insects.
We also chopped and dropped the tomato vines. Tomatoes like growing in the same place every year. With excellent soil biology – something we are still working on achieving with compost and compost teas – you don’t have to rotate any crops.
Slashed and dropped tomato and fleabane. We had also discovered in the last flood that extra water through this heavy clay area would flow down the pathway to the pond, often channeled there via gopher tunnels.
The pathway is a water channel during heavy rains. It needs fixing. We decided to harvest that water and add water harvesting pathways to the garden at the same time. We dug a swale across the pathway, perpendicular to the flow of water, and continued the swale into the garden to a small hugel bed.
Swale dug on contour through the pathway and across the guild. Hugelkultur means soil on wood, and is an excellent way to store water in the ground, add nutrients, be rid of extra woody material and sequester carbon in the soil. We wanted the bottom of the swale to be level so that water caught on the pathway would slowly travel into the bed and passively be absorbed into the surrounding soil. We used our wonderful bunyip (water level).
Using a bunyip to make the bottom of the swale level. Water running into the path will now be channeled through the guild. Because of the heavy clay involved we decided to fill the swale with woody material, making it a long hugel bed. Water will enter the swale in the pathway, and will still channel water but will also percolate down to prevent overflow. We needed to capture a lot of water, but didn’t want a deep swale across our pathway. By making it a hugel bed with a slight concave surface it will capture water and percolate down quickly, running along the even bottom of the swale into the garden bed, without there being a trippable hole for visitors to have to navigate. So we filled the swale with stuff. Large wood is best for hugels because they hold more water and take more time to decompose, but we have little of that here. We had some very old firewood that had been sitting on soil. The life underneath wood is wonderful; isn’t this proof of how compost works?
The activity under an old log shows so many visible decomposers, and there are thousands that we don’t see. We laid the wood into the trench.
Placing old logs in the swale. If you don’t have old logs, what do you use? Everything else!
This giant palm has been a home to raccoons and orioles, and a perch for countless other birds. The last big wind storm distributed the fronds everywhere. We are wealthy in palm fronds.
Three quick cuts (to fit the bed) made these thorny fronds perfect hugelbed components. We layered all sorts of cuttings with the clay soil, and watered it in, making sure the water flowed across the level swale.
We filled the swale with fronds, rose and sage trimmings, some old firewood and sticks, and clay. As we worked, we felt as if we were being watched.
Can you spot the duck in this photo? Mr. and Mrs. Mallard were out for a graze, boldly checking out our progress. He is guarding her as she hikes around the property, leading him on a merry chase every afternoon. You can see Mr. Mallard to the left of the little bridge.
This male mallard and his mate, who is ‘ducked’ down in front of him, enjoyed grazing on weeds and watching we silly humans work so hard. After filling the swale, we covered the new trail that now transects the guild with cardboard to repress weeds.
Cardboard laid over the hugelswale. Then we covered that with wood chips and delineated the pathway with sticks; visitors never seem to see the pathways and are always stepping into the guilds. Grrr!
The cardboard was covered with wood chips and the pathway delineated with sticks. Where the trail curves to the left is a small raised hugelbed to help hold back water. At this point the day – and we – were done, but a couple of days later we planted. Polyculture is the best answer to pest problems and more nutritional food. We chose different mixes of seeds for each of the quadrants, based on situation, neighbor plants, companion planting and shade. We kept in mind the ‘recipe’ for plant guilds, choosing a nitrogen-fixer, a deep tap-rooted plant, a shade plant, an insect attractor, and a trellis plant. So, for one quarter we mixed together seeds of carrot, radish, corn, a bush squash, leaf parsley and a wildflower. Another had eggplant, a short-vined melon (we’ll be building trellises for most of our larger vining plants), basil, Swiss chard, garlic, poppies, and fava beans. In the raised hugelbed I planted peas, carrots, and flower seeds.
In the back quadrant next to the mulberry I wanted to trellis tomatoes.
This quadrant by the mulberry needed a trellis for tomatoes. I’d coppiced some young volunteer oaks, using the trunks for mushroom inoculation, and kept the tops because they branched out and I thought maybe they’d come in handy. Sure enough, we decided to try one for a tomato trellis. Tomatoes love to vine up other plants. Some of ours made it about ten feet in the air, which made them hard to pick but gave us a lesson in vines and were amusing to regard. So we dug a hole and stuck in one of these cuttings, then hammered in stakes on either side and tied the whole thing up.
Tying the trunk to two stakes with twine taken from straw bales. Love the blue color! The result looks like a dead tree. However, the leaves will drop, providing good mulch, the tiny current tomatoes which we seeded around the trunk will enjoy the support of all the small twigs and branches, and will cascade down from the arched side.
The ‘dead tree’ look won’t last long as the tomatoes climb over it and dangle close to the path for easy harvesting. We seeded the area with another kind of carrots (carrots love tomatoes!) and basil, and planted Tall Telephone beans around the mulberry trunk to use and protect it with vines. We watered it all in with well water, and can’t wait to see what pops up! We have so many new varieties from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and other sources that we’re planting this year! Today we move onto the next bed.
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More Spores: Planting Garden Giant and Shaggy Mane Mushrooms
Breaking apart the large square of inoculated sawdust. The last scintillating post was about how we distributed oyster mushroom spawn in the straw in our new vegetable garden. Today we planted more shrooms… but not the last! “Where will it end?” you cry. I’m not sure myself; I guess it depends on how well we can grow mushrooms here in the drought-stricken west. It is the last week in February and we’ve had 70 degree – 90 degree daytime temperatures all month long, and less than a 1/2 inch of rain this year. This is our rainy season. Some mushrooms do grow here, although they aren’t very apparent this dry year. We certainly don’t have the high humidity, frequent rain and acidic loam that characterizes areas such as Northern California and the Pacific northwest where mushrooms are everywhere.
Shaggy Mane spores growing all over the bag. I bought two bags of spores, of Giant Mushroom and Shaggy Mane mushrooms, both of which are edible and can stand warmer climates, as long as they are shaded and receive water. My daughter and I strolled all over the property considering different spots. There aren’t a lot of areas which are shaded all day, which receive water or are close to water, and where shrooms would be safe from nibbling animals. We decided upon the small group of old lime trees (and one orange) that are between the fenced backyard and the Fowl Fortress.
Limes look so very pretty, until they draw blood! I’m not a fan of lime trees. When I was 11, my parents moved me and my sister to a four-acre lime grove in Vista, CA. I grew up enjoying the smell of lime blossoms, walking through tens of thousands of bees (pre-Africanization), climbing up the few avocado trees and pretending I was a spy and bad guys were looking for me. But when I was older I was paid to care for the lime trees. I became disenchanted. They are nasty. Their thorns and small dead twigs scratch and catch, they are often full of ants which are harvesting aphids on the leaves, and they are short trees, so to pick limes or do anything for them you have to duck under the canopy and usually end up losing some hair and bleeding from the thorns.
A group of citrus trees, with logs cut for mushroom inoculation and some old chicken wire that is ready for a hugelkultur burial. So of course as an adult I moved onto property with a lot of lime trees on it. Limes aren’t very profitable, either. I keep the trees because I don’t water them yet they thrive, and I don’t believe in killing trees for no reason. Now their canopy can be put to good use.
We always find some lost treasure from the previous property owner. I purchased organic mycelium from Paul Stamet’s Fungi Perfecti. He wrote many books on growing mushrooms and has had startling results using oyster mushrooms for soil remediation and with turkey tail and other mushrooms for fighting cancer and other illnesses. Mycelium Running is an incredible book.
Clearing a level area under a lime tree. For the Garden Giant shrooms, we hacked through dead branches and pulled away a lot of red apple iceplant that has slowly been taking over from the neighbor’s property. We dug about two inches into the ground to help insulate the wood chips that would be placed in there, and watered it in well with what was left of the rain water from our large tank.
Mycelium is already busy around the roots of the lime and ash trees, even in this dry ground. We’d just received a truckload of chipped oak from landscapers, and that was perfect for this variety of mushroom. We spread out a couple of inches of chips, watered it well, spread the inoculated wood chips on top,
Spreading the mycelium… so many little spores! spread a couple more inches of chips over, mixed them up with our hands to spread the spores throughout the chips, and watered again. With luck, they should be up in a couple of weeks.
The final Garden Giant bed. Next to another tree we dug a 3×3 area just an inch down. Shaggy Mane lives in vegetative compost rather than the highly fungal wood chips, and can live in a variety of stuff.
Vegetative compost mixed with straw and leaves for this long-term mushroom. We removed the more composted stuff from our cold compost bin and mixed it with very poopy straw from the chicken coop (thanks, girls!), and ash leaves. The spores were mixed well into this combination and watered in.
Mixing in Shaggy Mane spores with the compost. I topped it with leaves just to help keep the moisture in. We won’t see production from these until next winter when the temperature drops to below 60 degrees F. When they do ‘fruit’, as the mushrooms are called, we can add new compost alongside and the spores will creep over for another year’s growth.
To assist with the moisture I’m going to have the greywater empty along these trees to keep the ground moist and the humidity up. Also, there are drip lines from the well along here and I think the addition of some above-ground sprayers will handle our watering needs without using domestic water.
The white tables are set under an orange tree, and are where inoculated logs will go. Under the orange tree, which is a fine tree but very neglected and hidden by the vicious lime trees, we decided to set up for our next installment of mushroom growing. We’ll be drilling holes in oak logs and growing four kinds of shrooms on them. I’m sure you just can’t wait!
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Planting Spores in the Garden
The mycelium is white in the sawdust and ready to go. If you remember the trenching, filling and designing the new veggie patch, then this post will make more sense to you.
The next step was to cardboard the pathways where Bermuda grass has been taking over, then mulch them as well. The mulch makes it all look so nice!
Covered with mulch, the cardboard is only a memory. Next it was time to plant. We’d already transplanted three-year old asparagus, and hopefully not shocked them so much that they won’t produce well this year. The flavor of fresh asparagus defies description.
Asparagus popping up some feather shoots from its new home. The strawberry bed was older and completely taken over by Bermuda grass, so it all was buried and I purchased new organic and extremely reasonably priced bareroot strawberries.
A bundle of twenty-five strawberries. I purchased two June-bearing types and three ever-bearing, heat-loving types, from www.groworganic.com. When they bloom this year we’ll have to nip off the buds so that next year when their roots have taken hold and fed the crown, we can have lots of strawberries.
Soaking the strawberry roots for a few minutes rehydrates them. We planted some in the asparagus bed, which will do nicely as groundcover and moisture retention around the asparagus, while the asparagus keeps the heat off the strawberries. Some we planted around the rock in the center of the garden. The rest will be planted around fruit trees as part of their guilds.
Strawberries surround the rock. We also planted rhubarb in the asparagus bed; these poor plants had been raised in the greenhouse for several months awaiting transplanting.
Rhubarb, really eager to be put in the ground. Hopefully the asparagus will protect them from the heat. I plan to raise more rhubarb from seed and plant them in other locations on the property, aiming for the coolest spots as they don’t like heat at all.
With a strong knife (weak blades may snap) cut a cross in wet cardboard the pull aside the edges. The way to plant through cardboard is to make sure that it is wet, and using a strong knife make an x through the cardboard. Use your fingers to pull the sides apart. Stick your trowel down and pull up a good shovel full of dirt (depending on how deeply your plant needs to go.
Insert a trowel through the hole and scoop out some dirt. The base of plants and the crowns of strawberries should all be at soil level. Seeds usually go down three times their size; very small seeds may need light to germinate). Gently plant your plant with a handful of good compost, then water it in. You won’t have to water very often because of the mulch, so check the soil first before watering so that you don’t overwater.
Don’t forget to water in the plants! For the first time in years I ordered from the same source Jerusalem artichokes, or Sunchokes as they’ve been marketed. They are like sunflowers with roots that taste faintly like artichoke. We planted some of them in one of the quadrants, and the rest will be planted out in the gardens, where the digging of roots won’t disturb surrounding plants.
The oyster mushroom kit, or H.U.G. You’ll have to visit Fungi Perfecti to read up on it. Most excitingly, we’ve purchased mushroom spores from Fungi Perfecti, which is Paul Stamet’s business, the man who wrote Mycelium Running and several other books about growing mushrooms for food and for health. We bought inoculated plugs, but that will be another post. Almost as exciting are the three bags of inoculated sawdust to spread in the garden! They sell an oyster mushroom that helps digest straw and mulch, while boosting the growth of vegetables and improving the soil. You also may be able to harvest mushrooms from it! Talk about a wonderful soil solution, rather than dumping chemical fertilizers on the ground!
We’d already covered our veggie beds with wet cardboard and straw.
Really good soil from what is now a mulched pathway. To give the mycelium a good foundation I dug up good soil from one of the field beds, which needed an access path through the middle. By digging out the path I created new water-holding swales, especially when filled with mulch.
We pulled aside the straw. In the veggie garden we raked back the straw and lightly topped the wet cardboard with soil. On top of that we sprinkled the inoculated sawdust.
Good soil over cardboard. On top of that we pulled back the straw and watered it in.
Sprinkling spore-filled sawdust over the soil. The fungus will activate on the wet soil, eat through the cardboard to the layers of mushroom compost and pidgin poo underneath that and help make the heavy clay beneath richer faster.
The fungi will immediately begin to colonize the wet soil. We treated the two top most beds which have the worst soil, the sunchoke bed and the asparagus bed. In four to six weeks we may see some flowering of the mushrooms, although the fungus will be working even as I sit here. There are several reasons why I did this. One, it is just totally cool. Secondly, there is no way for me to purchase organic straw. By growing oyster mushrooms in it, I’m hoping the natural remediation qualities of the oyster fungus will help cleanse the straw as it decomposes. Oyster mushrooms don’t retain the toxins that they remove from soil and compost, so the mushrooms will still be edible. Fungus will assist rebuilding the soil and give the vegetables a big growing boost. I know I’ve preached that vegetables like a more bacterial soil rather than fungal. This is true, except that there are different types of fungus. If you put wood chips in a vegetable bed, you’ll activate other decomposing fungus that will retard the growth of your tender veggies; the same wood chips around trees and woody plants will help them grow. However these oyster mushrooms will benefit your veggies by quickly decomposing compost and making the nutrients readily available to the vegetables. Their hyphae will help the veggie’s roots in their search for water and nutrients, too.
Straw is over the top and watered. We can continue to plant in the beds as the fungus does its magic. The other two bags of inoculated spores are for shaggy mane and garden giant, which we’ll find homes for in compost under trees. More on that as we progress. It is so nice to be planting, especially since these are perennial plants where the most work is being done now. Now we just need some rain!
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The Sunken Bed Project… Finis!
Maybe they can see this from space? To take up where we left off in this exciting saga, we had the hugelkultur trenches buried, the pattern outlined in gypsum, and a boulder moved. On top of the beds I spread the cleanings of a pigeon coop, courtesy of our good friends and neighbors who raise and rescue many pigeons.
Pigeon poo and coop gleanings all over the garden beds. Yum! The high nitrogen poo, feathers, and leftover pigeon peas and other food items will make a wonderful breakfast for microbes. On top of that I spread a pickup truck bed full of mushroom compost. Jacob was nice enough to clean out his truck and help me get a load. The nearby mushroom farm raises shiitake and button mushrooms on logs of compressed sawdust. This is a high fungal compost, and slightly acidic. Since we have a high alkaline soil, this is okay.
The garden beds covered with mushroom compost. After the compost begins to make its final decomposition, the worms thrive in it. I managed to wheelbarrow down the entire load and spread it just before we had the first rain event of the year…less than 1/4″, but enough to give the garden a small soaking.
Cardboard is on all the garden beds. How nice to clean up all that cardboard and newspaper that we’ve been collecting! Today my daughter and I started in on the final treatment. We covered all the beds with cardboard, and all the pathways with newspaper. This thin layer will hold in moisture, and help retard the growth of the dreaded Bermuda grass.
Spreading damp newspaper on the pathways. I’m really hoping so, anyway. Another small storm was blowing in for tonight, scattering our newspapers although we wet them down thoroughly. We’re still using water from the 700-gallon tank that catches water from the house’s raingutters. We’re trying to use some up so that fresh water can enter the tank with this storm.
Watering down the newspaper with rainwater from the tank to keep the wind from undoing all our work, and starting the decomposition process. Although we were both very tired and getting cold, we needed to cover the paper. I hauled down about fifteen wheelbarrows full of mulch; this had been dumped in the driveway courtesy a landscaper with a chipper. Miranda spread the mulch over all the pathways, which looked just great.
Paths covered in mulch. We almost stopped there, but I was driven to finish this project today. We pitchforked used straw from out of the Fowl Fortress, broke open some other bales, and mulched the garden beds heavily with the straw. And…. we’re done! Yipee! The rain tonight will give it all a good soak, and soon we can begin planting in our snazzy new garden beds.
The beds covered in straw! Hurray! I admit that I thought the beds would look more sunken, but with three 2′ deep x 30′ long trenches underneath there is a lot of underground moisture for the topsoil to absorb. Also the beds are below the pathways, but with the height of the cardboard and straw they don’t look it. With the garden on a slope we had to make some adjustments.
The next exciting project that we’ve already begun working on is growing mushrooms! Stay tuned.
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The Sunken Bed Project, Part 3
The un-raised bed as of this morning. Today my daughter and I made good headway in the completion of the garden. In the morning the bed still had some veggies that needed transplanting, the ground needed smoothing, the giant clumps of asparagus plants we’d hauled out needed to be planted right away because they were already trying to come out of dormancy, and we certainly didn’t want to lose this spring’s crop.
Transplanting and some fine-tuning by the girls. We let the girls loose since we were watching out for coyotes. They loved the grubs and unfortunately, the valuable worms too. Lark, the barred rock in the foreground, was up to her old tricks of jumping onto my shovel and quickly kicking half the dirt off in search of bugs. Miranda painstakingly dug up lots of salad greens for transplanting. We both dug up and pulled out lots of Bermuda grass as we went. The trash cans are full of it.
The difference between the heavy clay and the good garden soil is striking. While digging those 2 foot deep trenches we unearthed a lot of clay. On the surface the colors of what had been good garden soil next to what lay under it was very clear. With the deep hugelkultur beds and the sheetmulching, all this clay will be turned into microbial rich soil.
We measured off and marked the pathways and beds with gypsum. Finally we were able to measure off and draw out the design of the garden. We used gypsum which is good for the soil. So many people use spray paint to mark the ground… just don’t! Toxic fumes and toxic chemicals in the soil. If you don’t have gypsum, use flour! The light is bright in the above photo so you can’t see the design so well. We had carefully drawn out several designs on graph paper. An intricate Celtic design was the most favorable one until I’d realized the garden wasn’t square but rectangular. It was just as well because it would have been a nightmare of measuring. This one has 2′ wide pathways from prime entry angles (a wheelbarrow can fit), each planter bed is easily reached from all sides, and the circular design is pleasing and fun.
There was this rock…. There was a big flaw in the plan. There was this boulder that had been placed during the original construction of the garden. It didn’t serve a purpose, it was always in the way, it was a shelter for Bermuda grass, and it wasn’t attractive. Now it was at the head of one of the pathways. It had to go. My daughter and I decided to move it to the center of the garden. After transplanting the heavy batches of asparagus, we dug out a hole for the rock to sit in; when placing boulders it is visually more attractive if the boulder is buried at least a quarter of its size into the ground to look natural. We placed wet newspapers around the hole so that the boulder would sit on them and they would block Bermuda grass from emerging.
One of the methods used to move the rock, and build up good bone density and muscle. Although the garden was sloped down from the boulder, the rock wasn’t round and didn’t want to roll. We dug out a pathway for it, and using a long crowbar and a digging bar we managed to turn it over. We pushed and heaved and balanced and flipped it until it was right at the rim of the hole, and then things became difficult because it wasn’t positioned in the way we wanted it. The rock has a flat side, and is long. Miranda suggested that the tall side should stand up for birds to perch on, and I liked the Half-Dome look to it. We heaved the rock into the hole, then walked it around, tipped it up, centered it, and eased it into place, using the bars and all of our strength. Luckily the boulder didn’t roll on a foot, or the bar slip and break my collarbone. Finally we tiredly decided that the position it was in was good enough and we were both happy. Exhaustion had much to do with this decision. Miranda propped it up with clay chunks as I held it in place with the digging bar, then backfilled around it. It looks fantastic; a good central point for the garden, and a source of thermal retention.
The rock in place, gathering positive cosmic forces and good karma. At least, I hope so. We messed up some of our pathway lines, but we can easily redraw them. The sun was setting and the mosquitoes humming; the Pacific chorus frogs began calling by the hundreds, and the wigeon came in to feed on the pond. There were still chores and dinner to be had, but exhausted as we were, we were pretty darn proud of ourselves for moving that big guy by ourselves. Next comes the sheet mulch.
A Maxfield Parrish sunset. - Compost, Gardening adventures, Hugelkultur, Other Insects, Permaculture and Edible Forest Gardening Adventures, Pets, Rain Catching, Soil, Worms
The Sunken Bed Project, Part Two
Old wire can be buried! 
Remember the trenches? We lined the trenches with old rusty wire, to rot, add iron to the soil, and discourage rodents. Mostly just to get rid of it. 
Inside the wire we lay old wood; in this case, the half-rotten sides of the old raised beds, nails and all. 
Fabric can be buried, too! Pet bedding no longer fit for man nor beast. Except for microbes of course. 
Around the wood we packed old fabric, most of which had been dog or cat bedding after long use in the house. 
There was also this futon! It had been a bed for years, and then it was the bed for the dogs for years. And for some mice. 
It took a little cutting and pulling to separate the cotton batting and the foam. Although the foam isn’t made from a natural material, it will eventually rot, but meanwhile will function like a ginourmous buried sponge for rainwater! 
The futon slices layed in the trench. Yipee! The stinky old futon is gone! 
Lots of branches, twigs, and woody materials were added, as was some year-old humanure, urea, and fallen limes. Nasty prickly lime tree branches, too. Serves them right for scratching me! 
After layering the trench materials with soil I used palm fronds for the top organic layer. 
Every step was watered in. Our 700-gallon water tank, formerly an organic fertilizer tank which Jacob managed to have donated, catches some of the roof rainwater. It has more than enough to water in this project, and then if it ever rains again the tank will be empty and ready for fresh water. 
The trenches filled in. Futons, scrap wood, woody bits, old stinky fabrics, manure… its all buried and ready to turn the clay into a microbial wonderland. 
We hauled chunks of extra clay up the hill and staged it by the upper pond, which needs to be resealed. Good leg exercise. 
The long hugelkultur strawberry bed was above ground, so it had to be reworked. We dug out the wood, wrestled out the wire, dug down about a food then lay the wire back down. 
There were gopher tunnels under the wire where they had come up and smashed their little noses against the wire. 
The wood that had been buried for a year was full of life! There were many very cool fungi. 
Tiny centipede-type decomposers eating away at the wood, all of which had been underground. 
More great fungus. 
On top of the wire went some more old textiles, then most of the old wood. 
Bunches of herbs that had been gathered for wreathes and not used were tucked in around the wood. Worms love thin woody stuff. Pigeon guano, thanks to our neighbor who delivers, was sprinkled over it all. 
Everything was well watered with rainwater, and then covered up. Next time: design, replanting asparagus, and perhaps even the final product! - Compost, Gardening adventures, Hugelkultur, Permaculture and Edible Forest Gardening Adventures, Rain Catching, Soil, Vegetables, Water Saving
The Pros and Cons of Raised Beds
The raised beds. Raised garden beds can be wonderful things. They also can be inappropriate. I’m in the process of taking ours down and replacing them with… well, I’ll describe it later on. Let’s get back to the pros and cons of raised beds.
Here are some of the pros:
Raised beds look just great. They are neat, tidy, organized and restful to the eye.
If raised high enough they are accessible to those who can’t work on the ground or bend over, and to those who are non-ambulatory.
If lined with hardware cloth they keep gophers and mice from tunneling under your food and making it magically disappear.
They help with some weed control.
If you live in a rainy area, they help with drainage.
If you have miserable soil, you can garden anywhere by building a raised bed without having to dig.
If you live in a cold area, depending upon what materials you use for the sides of the raised beds you can tap into the thermal heat and have warmer soil longer.
You can build reusable covers for the beds and turn them into cold frames, or shade structures.
Now here are some of the cons:
You need to fill raised beds with a lot of soil, and if you have to buy it, that is a large expense. The soil will compact and disappear over the course of a year, so you have to keep topping up the beds to keep the soil level high. Heavy work that is expensive.
Wire underneath the raised beds will last a few years and then will be compromised by rodents, so the bed will have to be emptied and rewired if rodents are a problem.
If you live in a warm, dry climate, the sides of the raised bed acts like a clay pot. It will wick moisture from the dirt and heat the dirt up so that plant roots around the perimeter will cook.
If you live in a warm climate you have to pour on the water because of the point mentioned above; a raised bed dries out much more quickly than in-ground gardens.
We are wealthy in clay. A Bermuda grass root hangs like a piglet’s tail from this clump. I built raised beds from old bookshelves many years ago, and that was my only veggie garden on the property as I raised my children. I’d grown plants in-ground before that, trenching and turning, and losing the fight against gophers and Bermuda grass. The raised beds were lined with wire. For awhile it worked, but the Bermuda grass took over and infiltrated all the beds. The wire began to rot and rodents chewed away at the sweet potatoes. Worst of all, the soil level would decrease, and since the beds weren’t very deep, then root veggies would grow into the wire and I’d lose half of them as they broke off during the harvest. I couldn’t keep up with refilling the beds. I composted in place, buried wood and vines, and that worked well, but I still needed to add compost. The beds drank up water during our long, hot summers.
The trenching begins. This summer I realized that I was using a gardening technique that was best suited to rainy climates. Here in the dry Southwest, a traditional gardening method was to plant in sunken beds. We need to capture water, not make it run off. Also, the Bermuda grass became so invasive that I realized that only sheet mulching would make any difference in controlling it.
Of course I decided that my daughter and I couldn’t possibly have an easy winter, but must rip out the beds and start digging.
In the trenches. I’m an advocate of no-dig gardening; however sometimes you have to dig bad soil to create good soil. The no-dig policy can happen once the infrastructure is in place. So here’s what I’m planning on doing: I’m combining hugelkultur with sunken gardens and sheet mulching to create what I hope will be a veggie garden with a much lower water consumption, and weed-free.
First we determined the direction of water flow down the hill, and planned on creating trenches that would capture that water. The trenches, or swales, would need to be level on the bottom so that any water flowing in from the downhill side, would travel all along the swale even to the drier side, where the surface soil was higher. We created a bunyip to estimate the difference in slope between the top and bottom of the garden. Although I had drawn up intricate plans for a square garden, that shape just wouldn’t work so we went with a rectangle. Then we began to dig. The first ten inches wasn’t bad, but after that we hit clay. I had to buy a mattock. I also ended up icing my back for a couple of days. Some of the clay we’ll save for use on any future earthworks we may want to do, and some we’re saving for an artist friend.
The soil was good for about ten inches, then we hit clay. The trenches are two feet deep, and about one to one and a half feet wide. It is amazing how you start out large, and then after a few very hot afternoons scraping clay and throwing it up and over four feet, the trenches become more narrow. My plan is to fill the bottom foot of the trenches with old wire, wood, branches, old textiles and other biodegradable debris. The old wire will rot, and will also help repel gophers. On top of all this will be layered some of the clay, and watered in with compost tea brewed in the 700-gallon water tank that is full of rainwater from the last rain (two months ago!). On top of that will be good soil, smoothed below the surrounding surface level. Water from the road will be diverted into the swales, which will allow it to flow across the garden and be absorbed by the fill materials. But what about the Bermuda grass? There isn’t a mountain of cardboard all over my garage for nothing! The entire garden will be sheet mulched, and all veggies will be planted through the cardboard and newspaper. The existing asparagus bed will need to be carefully relocated, but everything else can either be harvested or dug under.
These first two trenches will collect rainwater from the pathways and channel it the length of the garden. That’s the plan, anyhow. I’ll let you know how it goes.
- Arts and Crafts, Gardening adventures, Hugelkultur, Permaculture and Edible Forest Gardening Adventures, Soil
Bunyips: Fun to Say, Easy to Make and Use
Making a bunyip. Hi! I’m back. Its not as though I’ve been vacationing. Someday I might tell you about how important it is to question your doctor, about how under-producing thyroids affect every part of your body, about neighbor’s in-laws who skip their meds for a day and crash through your gate, and about strange and fatal chicken illnesses, but not today.
My big garden project for the winter is to turn the raised vegetable bed area into a sunken hugelkultur sheet-mulched vegetable area. I’ll go into details about that in another post as well. What I am going to describe is how to take measurements using a bunyip.
A bunyip is a water level that you can make very inexpensively and quickly, which relies upon gravity to give a reading. It even works around corners. I really don’t know how it came to be called a bunyip… its an Australian thing. A bunyip is an ancient aborigine water monster. More recently the name has come to be synonymous with imposter. Maybe this simple home-made water level is impersonating a laser level. Maybe bunyip is just so gosh-darn more fun to say.
Anyway, if you need to measure the difference in elevation, use a bunyip. If you want to find level ground, for instance if you are building a level swale on contour, use a bunyip.
The equipment for your bunyip are: two slim boards with at least one end flat, and at least 5 feet tall. You also need about 30 feet of clear fishtank hose. A waterproof marker, a ruler, a level and six pieces of wire to tie around the posts, and you are ready to go. If you have a couple of corks or stoppers that fit in the tops of the tubing, it will make it easier to carry without receiving a surprise shower.
You will need two slim posts, 30′ of tubing (the only kind I could buy in town was for cleaning fishtanks, hence the threaded ends. You don’t need these!), a ruler, wire and a waterproof marker. Be sure at least one of the ends of each board is flat, which will be what touches the earth when measuring. Along one of the boards begin to mark off inches (or centimeters) from the top. Make the marks readable from a short distance. Number the inches beginning with 1 at the top of the post, down to at least four feet (if you are measuring more dramatic slopes you’ll want to mark off more). Numbering from the top down allows you to do simple subtraction easily without becoming mixed-up, especially when you’re tired.
Using a ruler or yardstick (or meterstick), mark inches down from the top of the post. Next, stand the two posts together on level ground, making sure they are straight. It doesn’t matter if the tops aren’t exactly even, just the bottoms. Now with the two posts standing on even ground, mark the second post in one spot evenly with a mark on the first post; it doesn’t really matter which inch you mark because you can then use the ruler to fill in all the others.
With the bottoms of each post level, begin to mark the second post from the top, even if the tops of the posts aren’t even. So, using that mark and a ruler, mark inches all along the second post. The point is that the measurements are even from the bottom of the posts, where they will be resting on the ground.
You will have two posts with inches marked from the top. That done, tie the tubing onto the posts, allowing the tubing to reach a little higher than the top of the posts. The tubing in the photo is all I could find in town, and it is an extension for a fish tank cleaner, hence the threaded ends. You don’t need threaded ends, just the tubing.
Wire the tubing onto the posts, allowing the top of the tubing to be above the top of the post. With the tubing tied to the marked posts, you are almost ready to measure. Having someone to hold a post really helps here. With both posts straight up, fill the tubing with water. You can use a watering can (with the spray end off), or a hose. A funnel might help. Fill the tubing as completely as you can, but don’t worry about having the water go end to end. A gap at either end is okay.
Miranda holding the completed and filled bunyip. Work the air bubble out of the hose by lifting the bottom. Take out the air bubbles by lifting the center of the hose and feeding the air bubble through.
You are ready to measure!
The tubing doesn’t need to be off the ground to work; it can even work around corners. One person stands with their side of the bunyip at one area you want to measure, and the other person stands at the other. You don’t need to make the tubing lift off the ground; it will accurately measure with the tubing in almost any position. The water in the tubing will bob around; tap the top of the tubing with your finger to help it settle faster.
Tapping on the end helps make the water settle faster. Then take the readings from each post. Subtract the readings and you will get the distance in elevation between the two points. For instance, if the water level on one post is at the 19″ mark, and the water level on the other post is at the 7″ mark, then there is a 12″ difference in elevation between the two points. So easy!
If you are building swales on contour, keep moving one side of the bunyip until you find a spot where both readings are even, then mark those spots and repeat farther on. In this way you can find what land is level.
My daughter and I used our bunyip today to measure the change in elevation in our vegetable bed. We won’t be leveling the bed itself, but we will be digging deep, level swales, and we now know just how radically, and in which direction, our slope lies. This reaffirms what our eyes tell us about how rainwater flows across the veggie area and therefore how we’re to dig the swales to best catch rainfall.
Best of all, bunyips can be quickly disassembled and the parts used for other projects, or emptied and carried to other locations. Just add water, and you get a bunyip!
