- Animals, Chickens, Cob, Compost, Composting toilet, Fruit, Gardening adventures, Giving, Grains, Health, Herbs, Houses, Hugelkultur, Humor, Living structures, Natives, Natural cleaners, Permaculture and Edible Forest Gardening Adventures, Ponds, Rain Catching, Recipes, Seeds, Soil, Vegan, Vegetables, Vegetarian, Worms
San Diego Permaculture Convergence, Nov. 9 – 10, 2013
There is a fantastic, information-packed permaculture convergence coming up at the beautiful Sky Mountain Institute in Escondido.
It will be two days packed with great information for a very reasonable price; in fact, scholarships are available. Check out the website at convergence@sdpermies.com. On that Sunday I’ll be teaching a workshop about why its so important to plant native plants, how to plant them in guilds using fishscale swales and mini-hugelkulturs. Come to the convergence and be inspired!You May Also Like
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Tiny Hugels and Fishscale Swales: Small water catchment
In permaculture it is recommended to design long level, contoured swales throughout your property to catch rainwater. Long swales, however, won’t work when the property is small, or if it is already mostly planted, or if the hiring of large equipment or teams of diggers isn’t feasable, or if long swales aren’t part of a lovely garden. What then?
In the gardens for which I’ve written consultations I’ve recommended what Geoff Lawton (of the Permaculture Design Institute of Australia) calls fishscale swales. Small curved swales staggered up a slope so that rainwater can be caught and held. One overflows into another, just like a pinball machine.
Any swale, no matter how small, will help hold water. I put them in just above each plant, the width of the dripline of the plant. I also combine them with burying wood (hugelkultur). I don’t have a lot of branches or logs, but I do have a lot of extra pieces of lumber salvaged when the sheds were dismantled. These pieces are untreated (no paint or pressure treatment), and if they have nails and screws in them, even better! The hardware will mineraize the soil as it decomposes. This wood is already very old and dry, and thus will soak up water a treat. If you soak the wood in water, compost tea or a microbial brew before you bury it, that’s super. If not, don’t worry about it. The idea is that rainwater will accumulate in the swale, percolate into the soil and into the wood below it. There the wood will hold water as it breaks down, gradually irrigating and fertilizing the plant below.
Wood can be placed on top of the soil and buried as the swale is dug, or it can be dug into the ground and covered. The swale is filled with mulch o help retard weed growth; if by a walkway the scale filled with mulch then it may be walked on without fear of a twisted ankle.
This area right above the fig is small, but large enough to catch water. Here I have a Mission fig that has been slow to grow due to irregular watering (NOT my fault!)
I laid out a board right on the ground. Figs like a little water and this area has been on the dry side. In the direction from which rainwater would flow, above the tree, I laid out a few pieces of old lumber, nails and all.
Brewing microbial tea. I happened to be brewing a large batch of microbial tea, so I threw the wood into a bucket of the stuff and let it absorb some.
I soaked the wood in microbial tea for a few minutes. They happen to be the width of the existing dripline of the tree; again, any swale and and wood will help. I dug a small swale the same length, a shovel’s width wide, and threw the dirt on top of the wood.
I dug a swale, using the dirt to cover the board. Then I filled the swale with mulch and voila! the job is done. This will now catch rainwater, hold moisture, and fertilize the tree, as well as finding something useful for junk lumber. Burying the wood sequesters the gasses released in decomposing materials into the soil rather than the air thus helping reduce greenhouse gasses.
I filled the swale with mulch to keep down weeds. Presto! Done! Using fishscale swales and mini-hugelkultur beds when planting most native plants can really help them become established in a low-water situation. This wild rose (rosa rugusa) is being planted in a very dry area, and I wanted to bury the wood below soil level to keep it closer to the roots of the plant. I dug a small trench and laid out some boards, nails down.
I dug a little ways into the dirt and laid out the soaked wood. Then as I dug the swale I layered the wood with dirt and a couple more boards until buried. I filled in the swale with mulch and planted the rose on the downhill side.
Here you’ll see the rootball of the new wild rose in front of the wood. I threw in some coyote scat since it was lying there so conveniently. There’s quite a microbial boost for the rose!
Some coyote scat went in, too. Sorry! Remember that here in a dry climate we need to plant so that the root ball is even with the ground, or make the whole catch basin a little lower. Otherwise the roots will dry out. Planting so that the root ball is a little above the ground is a common practice is rainy areas.
Here is the planted rose, with mulch pulled up around it. Remember native plants have communities. Certain plants grow with certain others because they are mutually beneficial. This rose was planted within the dripline of an Engelmann oak, one place it is found.
Many native trees like the company of other natives. I planted this rose just outside the dripline of this oak, one of the places it would naturally grow in the wild. So swales don’t have to be gigantic earthworks projects. They can be small and alternated down a slope, or just individual ones above new or existing plants. Throw some wood into a mini-hugel between the swale and the plant and you’ll water less, fertilize naturally, and compost leftover wood. Don’t forget cotton clothing and bedding… that all works, too!
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Fruit Tree Guild, Revisited
In June I blogged about how to plant a fruit tree guild, and gave the example of one I was planting by the Fowl Fortress. I thought I’d show you how it matured.
Apple tree in trouble: heavy clay thoroughly shot through with Bermuda grass. Yuck! This was the area four months ago. Heavy, sticky clay taken over with Bermuda grass. A struggling apple tree begs for my help. A star jasmine climbs the side of the Fowl Fortress. A portion of the brown subterranean irrigation system lies aboveground.
Using permaculture design, I created a plant guild with herbs and vegetables that would build the soil and help the apple tree.
A guild is planted. Strawberries went around the trunk of the tree for groundcover and grass competition. Comfrey, a valuable nutrient accumulator in there, too, for slash and drop fertilization. There is also a perennial basil, marjoram, gourds, golden runner bean (a nitrogen fixer), garlic chives, a prostrate rosemary and a tomato, along with other flower seeds. This is how it looks now from the same vantage point:
The guild in September. 
Layers of plants protect the ground and produce food. 
These gourds can be dried and made into bowls. 
Perennial basil, Amish paste tomatoes smother the weeds and enrich the soil. 
Nasturtiums reseed and fill in as the other vegetables die off. Polyculture beds produce abundant, insect-confusing food guilds which help fertilize and water each other and improve the soil quality. Meanwhile the apple tree has a few apples on it and looks healthier than it has been. Next year’s growth should be drastically improved, and the amount of invasive grasses should be nil. If I don’t grow consecutive annual crops here around the perennial plants, I will sheet mulch the bed.
- Compost, Gardening adventures, Health, Hugelkultur, Other Insects, Permaculture and Edible Forest Gardening Adventures, Soil, Vegetables, Worms
Don’t Clean Up, Dig It In!
Use old vegetables to grow new ones! Tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, fennel, carrots, string beans, three kinds of basil, and probably other things I’ve forgotten about! In January of this year I wrote about Lazy Composting. Frost had killed off sweet potato and tomato vines,
- Frosted vegetable stems are perfect.
and the soil in the raised garden beds were becoming very low.
- Soil level is very low on the raised beds.
Instead of hauling all the vines to the compost heap or bin, I thought I’d create soil in place. The raised beds are lined with chicken wire to protect veggies from gophers. Although I didn’t want to disturb the microbes and fungus in the soil, I dug out half the beds down to the wire.
- I dug out half the bed down to the chicken wire. Miss Amelia and Chickpea checking out the worm situation. I had to kick them out…the worms stay!
Then I layed all those vines right on the soil and covered them up.
- I piled on the old tomato vines, then covered them up with the soil I’d removed.
Then I did the other half…
- Spent tomato vines, with some green ‘maters still attached.
- You can see bits of the vines sticking up out of the first half. That’s okay!
… and then did the other bed. Any thick stalks in other beds which didn’t need extra soil I simply cut close to the ground so that their roots can decay in place and feed the wormies.
- Snip off vegetables at the surface and allow the roots to decay in the soil. Use the tops for mulch, or dig them in, too.
I sprinkled the whole thing with a little Epsom salts for the magnesium sulfate, and a little sugar to start the disturbed microbes feeding and reproducing heavily, which would cause them to decompose the vines more quickly.
In one bed I planted cold weather crops right away; peas, brassicas, garlic, onions and more. I am a firm practicioner of polyculture, or integrated gardening , which means that I plant an assortment of seeds of plants which will help each other in small areas instead of planting all one thing to a bed. I can still plant a row of peas so that I can string them up easily, but I’ll plant all kinds of other plants around them. Usually I don’t plant in a line at all anymore, but rather stake the plants as they need them. Often they’ll use taller plants as support. This is why planting peas and sweet peas next to trees and bushes is a great idea (they fix nitrogen in the soil which helps the tree).
In the other bed I waited to plant until March when the weather warmed up, because I was planting early summer crops. Here it is the beginning of September, and here are the beds, still producing. Even the winter veg one.
- Two of the beds, one still with winter brassicas in them in Sept.
In the bed to the right there is a yellow current tomato blocking the view, and growing into the tree. You can see a Japanese eggplant, and behind it the red is a pepper. Under the tomato and along the bed are three kinds of basil, many string bean plants, some of the sweetest carrots we’ve grown, fennel (one of which we allowed to be the host plant for the Anise Swallowtail, which ate the tops. The bottom of the fennel, which is the part we eat, will still be harvestable). In the bed to the right is the January plants still alive and kicking. Collards, kale, garlic, celery, onions, brussels sprouts, kohlrahbi and more. We’ve harvested most of the garlic and onions. We’ve harvested kale, collards and celery by cutting leaves and allowing the plant to continue to grow. The stalks are now so thick that it is hard to cut them. Out of season, these plants have had attack by cabbage moths and other bugs, but because of the integration of plants and the health of the soil, they’ve bounced right back. I’m harvesting the plants now to feed to the chickens so that I can use the bed for something else soon.
So what happened? A teaspoon of great soil has a billion microbes in it, a million fungi, tens of thousands of amebas, bacteria and all kinds of things we don’t even know about yet. This is a good thing. This is the secret to continued life on this planet. Healthy soil doesn’t wash away, doesn’t erode, feeds the underground waterways, grows excellent food for healthy wildlife and healthy humans. If we feed the soil, we save the planet. That simple. That means no Roundup, no GMOs, no chemical (even organic) fertilizer. Just compost. Very cheap and easy.
Vegetables tend to like a soil that is heavier in bacteria than in fungus, although both should be present. Woody plants such as bushes and trees tend to like a more fungal soil. The vines that I buried had both dry (stems) and wet (green leaves and tomatoes) on them. The stems made the fungus flourish in the soil, and the green bits made the bacteria active. There wasn’t enough matter to become anaerobic, or to rob nitrogen from the soil. The vines weren’t compacted so lots of soil surrounded all the parts, aiding in quick composting and keeping the soil aerated. Water could be absorbed better as well.
If you are starting a garden and want to buy compost, be careful of what stores sell you. In August I was asked to look at a few raised beds that hadn’t succeeded. The soil was low in the beds, there were a few straggly pepper plants, a poorly tomato and some brassicas of some sort which were so stunted that they were just green balls of leaves. When I pulled one up there was white stuff on the roots. A couple of strawberry plants looked very healthy but unproductive. I tried the soil and couldn’t get my finger into it because the roots from those poor peppers had made a thick mat just under the surface of the dirt well beyond their dripline. Two major things were wrong. One was the dirt in the beds. Splinters of shredded wood made up the bulk of it. The woman who had asked me to look at the beds said that she had described her project at Home Depot and they’d recommended two kinds of bagged stuff. I say stuff, because it isn’t soil. What they recommended would be appropriate for hardwoods such as bushes and trees, or acid-loving plants. That is why the strawberries were healthy, only they were in the full sun in a searing hot place and would have done much better under the shade of other plants. I showed the white stuff on the brassicas to her; it was fungal net, which showed the high fungal activity in the soil. Perfect for trees, not perfect for vegetables. Also the brassicas are cold-weather plants and just won’t develop in our summer heat here in San Diego County. They should be planted from October through the beginning of March. The spongy soil… honestly, I’ve never before felt root mat so thick that I couldn’t wiggle my finger into the soil… was the result of desperate plants and poor watering. A custodian would occasionally hose water the beds, which meant that he’d shoot some water on them for a few minutes every day or so. This topical water didn’t sink into the bark-heavy soil. It was only enough to water the top, so the plant roots couldn’t go deep. It was often enough that the plants didn’t die entirely, but survived stunted and striving for water and nutrition that the fungal soil wasn’t providing. Vegetables (and roses!); indeed, most plants except grasses and seedlings, need deep watering less frequently. This allows the roots to go where they want to go, deep into the ground where they can mine nutrients and stabilize the plant. My advice for her was to dig in the few plants that were there, use the compost in the compost bin next to the beds, even if it wasn’t decomposed and add some vegetable-friendly soil to the beds to bring up the heighth. I recommended mixing seeds and scattering them, making sure she planted winter crops, not corn or tomatoes. I also recommended a long watering twice a week; none when it starts raining. If it ever does.
Recommending permaculture techniques to people makes me want to work in the garden! That is because there is so much life, so much success, so many happy surprises and such great feelings that come out of naturally planted gardens. Rows of veggies look so neat and peaceful, but beds chock full of veggies are more fun, better tasting and far more productive.
I just wanted to follow up on the old post about digging in the vines and show you how well the plants did. I have never fertilized these beds after burying the vines and sprinkling on the Epsom salts and sugar. All this growth is due to the happy microbes making nutrients available to the vegetable roots. If you think about it, plants in the wild shed their seeds and then either completely die off or drop leaves. The seeds naturally grow up through the debris of the last generation. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
When these beds are done (if they ever are! They keep producing!) I will practice no-dig gardening on them and simply cut all the plants at the soil surface and drop the tops. I’ll plant seeds for winter crops right in among the debris of the summer crops. They’ll use the nutrients, shade and support of the old crops to grow. October is a good planting time for winter crops because the weather finally changes and the daylight hours are shorter which these plants need. What to plant? Potatoes, garlic, onions, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, peas, broccoli, cauliflower, rhubarb, kohlrabi, celery and much more. Cover crops when it frosts and allow good drainage for the potatoes when it rains. Be sure if you buy starter sets that they are guaranteed organic! Best of all plant organic seeds… they do the best of all and are the best value.
Have a happy, easy Fall garden!
- Bees, Gardening adventures, Other Insects, Permaculture and Edible Forest Gardening Adventures, Seeds, Soil
Hairy Vetch
Attractive flowers and seeds. Hairy vetch (Vicia villosa), also known as winter vetch is a nitrogen-fixing plant that is used mostly for cover-cropping in monoculture fields. Native to Europe and Asia, it is a winter plant sown in the Fall and, in places where it snows, is killed off with the cold or tilled into fields. When a nitrogen-fixing plant dies or is cut back, roots die and release the nitrogen nodules into the soil. Here is sunny San Diego the vetch thrived since I sowed it in Spring of last year. It is a pretty, vining plant, with lovely dark purple blooms that bees and other pollinators love. It produces pea pods like its edible relative the fava bean, but I wouldn’t eat them. The seeds may be bad browse for livestock as well. The roots help hold soil during winter rains, too.
Hairy vetch clamboring all over the place Vetch can be hard to get rid of because it reseeds easily. It will also climb up bushes, competing with the bush for sunlight. If I didn’t know about the nitrogen-fixing properties and if the bees didn’t like it so much, I’d suspect it of being an invasive.
To control it I take my trusty hand scythe and cut the vetch out of bushes and close to the ground. I leave the vines to decompose and protect seedlings that I plant to take advantage of the newly-enriched soil.
A mass of sweet peas climbing a lavendar. If you don’t want a cover crop that is so aggressive I suggest sowing a mixture of lupine, sweet peas, edible peas and fava beans in the Fall here in Southern California, and again in early Spring. In cold areas check with your farm advisor on when to plant.
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Fruit Tree Guilds: Making Your Trees Healthy and Happy
An unripe Buddha’s Hand citron. When bright yellow it freshens a room with a citrusy floral fragrance; is zest is wonderful in cooking and it can be candied. Or simply stuck up a sleeve and used to frighten people. A guild in permaculture terms is, as you know, an arrangement of symbiotic plants that serve as a plant community for the benefit of the whole. Visitors to Finch Frolic Garden often remark that planting guilds sounds so difficult; that they’d need to study so much about plants that it would be impossible for them to do. Not so. However, it isn’t just a whole bunch of plants planted so that they are stepping on each other’s shoes. The typical permaculture plant guild is defined by plants which do these functions: an upper canopy tree (shade, mulch from falling leaves, deep tap roots, roosting for birds which poop, hunt, etc., traps humidity, catches and filters rain and fog moisture), a lower canopy tree (same functions but shorter), a ground cover (habitat for small hunters and moisture trap), a miner plant (deep tap root to bring nutrients from deep in the soil to its leaves which deliver said nutrients when they decompose, and tap root breaks up soil and gives passage for water and worms), a nitrogen-fixing plant (works symbiotically with bacteria to trap nitrogen from the atmosphere on root nodules, which release into the soil when the top dies), and a pollinator-attractor (flowers for bees and all the tiny native bees, wasps and flies).
Buddha’s Hand citron (Citrus medica) happy in a guild of yarrow, sweet peas, artichoke (the leaves of which are regularly slashed and dropped), Cleveland sage, scented geranium and a variety of bulbs. The formula isn’t that complicated. I challenge you to come up with an example of each right now. Yes, you can do it. (Dum dee dum… I’m waiting for you to be done before I move on. ) Have it? Okay, here’s a quick example. Mulberry, dwarf peach, strawberries, carrots, sweet peas, dwarf yarrow and fava beans. The canopy trees will lose their leaves allowing sun to warm the understory plants in the winter. Strawberries make an excellent ground cover that grows food and loves the fungus-rich loam made by decomposing leaves. Carrots like cool weather and will thrive until ready to be pulled (and tops broken off and thrown on the ground) about when the trees fully leaf out. Sweet peas attract insects, smell great, and as a bonus are nitrogen fixers, and can twine up the tree trunks. Dwarf yarrow helps choke out grass, is used for many purposes including as a dye plant, and its flowers are clusters of small flowers perfect for the tiny pollinators, and bush peas are completely edible and also fix nitrogen. See? Easy.
Just in time for summer’s heat, a kabocha squash is rapidly covering the ground around the variegated dwarf orange and a young pink guava. I have to pull squash out of trees because they think they own the world, and it hurts to hit your head on a dangling pumpkin. I leave the vines to decompose in place after harvest. I have many, many trees which were all planted at the same time, and some of them have been neglected. A combination apple tree had been planted in extremely heavy clay and it hasn’t grown much in two years although it keeps trying to produce fruit. Bermuda grass (I cross myself when I mention it) has infiltrated the area to about four inches down. It is helping to break up the clay, but it is also choking out everything else. Plant guild time.
Bermuda grass in heavy clay right next to the trunk: no good. Last weekend I spent about three hours in the morning (mercifully before the June gloom dissipated so I didn’t roast in the heat) digging up and pulling out as much Bermuda grass as I could from the clay. I’d even soaked the area well the night before. That was the stuff of cob ovens. When I’d finally cleared past the tree (I’ll continue another day; there’s only so much of that my hands can take!), I shoveled in some pigeon guano that my good friends up the street deliver to me (tied with a ribbon! Christmas comes all year for a gardener!). The guano is very high in urea… you can smell the ammonia, but it also has feathers, corn and pigeon peas in it. Pigeon peas are a perennial legume that set nitrogen and produce wonderful pea pods for stir-fry. I watered it in well.
This apple was planted in clay in this planter. Never create a planter around an existing tree; mulch around the trunk will kill it. I had purchased some plants for the area, but to keep costs down just chose some that would fill out and help choke out the angry Bermuda grass bits yearning for revenge. Also, the tree is close by Harry Mud, the cob oven, so I wanted pizza-themed plants for easy picking. I planted strawberries right by the trunk inside the gopher cage in which the tree is planted. They will help retain moisture without compromising the bark of the tree. You never want to pile mulch up around the base of a tree above the root ball because you will rot your tree.
I also planted a tomato, a perennial basil, garlic chives all around the edge (bug protection), sunflowers, a prostrate rosemary and French tarragon. The pigeon peas and corn will very likely sprout. What I didn’t have was an upper canopy, but the tree is on the east side of a shed which protects it from the worst of the summer afternoon sun, and there is a grapevine nearby which produces leaf litter. When daffodil bulbs are readily available in the late Fall I’ll plant a ring of them around the drip line. Gophers don’t eat them, they help keep away the grass, they break up the soil and they are one of my favorite flowers (ranking second to sweet violets). All these plants as they grow up, down and across will help the apple tree, and the apple tree will help them. All of them produce food within easy reach of the cob oven and outdoor dining, are attractive and smell good, too. The tree should flourish. I don’t kid myself that I won’t be pulling Bermuda grass in the future, but the plants will help control it by shading and crowding out.
It doesn’t look like much now, but there are eleven support plants/seeds to help the apple tree now. Friends! If you have citrus trees you should plan a little differently. When trying to understand a plant, think of where it came from and in what growing conditions it thrived. Avocados are from South America, with humidity, rainfall, protection from intense heat, deep leaf litter and adequate drainage. Stonefruit are from areas with cold winters; their leaf drop keeps the roots protected from the freezing that triggers the trees to set fruit (chill factor).
This citrus was planted before the bamboo grew up to shade it. Notice how the leaves grow straight up, and none below? It is aiming to collect light at noon, which is the only direct sun that it receives. He needs to be moved. We think of citrus trees perfuming the air of Spain, Greece or Arabia, but actually they come from Southeast Asia and before that, New Guinea and Australia. All of these places have warm or hot temperatures and plenty of sunlight. Although you can plant stonefruit close together, for citrus it is best to ensure that the trees receive lots of direct sunlight or they will drop leaves and have stunted growth.
This citrus receives sun all day, and is very happy with the tomato, roses and sage that surround it. Raking all the leaves out from under your trees is so wrong. The tree drops leaves because it needs them on the ground around its roots, not because its careless or its waiting for a human to come by and clean up its mess. Leaf mulch makes the ideal conditions for microbial growth and perfect soil, so let it sit. Augment the mulch by giving your tree company of other plants. Unless the tree is allelopathic (secretes a substance that keeps anything from rooting nearby so that it doesn’t like competition, such as walnuts and eucalyptus) then in nature it reseeds close by and allows other plants to grow under it. Give your trees some appropriate company, and you’ll be rewarded with lots of food, medicine, habitat and very little work except for harvesting. Can’t beat that with a stick.
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Protecting the Little Guys… and a little about diatomaceous earth
Current tomato seedlings When transplanting little plants out into the big garden it feels like sending your child off to their first day at Kindergarten. All kinds of things can happen to them in the big world. For children… that’s too large a topic for me (Kindergarten mother survivor here). For plants I can give you some advice.
Besides watering too much or too little, and root disturbance while transplanting, little guys can be eaten by bugs, birds or other animals, or simply get lost and overlooked. (Here is a container growing tip: as your seedlings sprout and grow, gently pass your hand across them every time you are with them. It will make for stronger stems.) (And its fun!)(And you can pretend you’re ruffling their hair and say things like, “Hi, Sonny.” Or not.)
Celery sown in a flat. Don’t let the small top size fool you. A day before transplanting out of a container or from a nursery bed, water the sprouts well. If they’ve been in containers for awhile those roots may be going in circles and the water can’t penetrate from the top very well. If that is the case, put the pots in water for half an hour until moisture is wicked into the pot thoroughly, then allow to drain. I say to do this the day before because if you water just before planting the soil around your root ball will fall apart, breaking fine hair roots and shocking your poor little guy. Some plants hate their roots being touched so much that this would kill them. By the next day after watering the container will still be moist, but the soil should be solid enough to stick together when tipped out.
That same celery plant…roots five inches long! Dig a hole twice as wide and twice as deep as your plant, then backfill with a mixture of good compost and the soil from the hole. This will help acclimate the roots to the soil change. Water the hole, and if you’re really industrious water with compost tea. Set your plant into the hole and firmly press the soil around the plant. If you are planting tomatoes, eggplant or peppers (all in the same family) you can set the plant more deeply into the hole; they will form more roots from the stems and become sturdier. The rule of thumb otherwise is to plant so that the soil level of the hole is the same as that of the transplant; many plants will rot if soil is up against their stem. If it is too low, the roots will be exposed and dry out. Potatoes can be trenches and hilled up as they grow, or maybe you will try trashcan or crate potatoes. If you live in an arid area, plant in shallows so that rain can accumulate around the plant. If you live in a wet area, plant on hills so water can drain off. Or if you’re practicing permaculture, plant on the swales!
So your little guy is in the ground and gently tamped in. To keep off the birds and bunnies and mice and rats and whatever else is looking for dinner, I use plastic berry cartons turned over and set in place with sticks or with rocks on top. Reuse and repurpose! They are also good for protecting figs . The cartons allow enough sun in, and also makes it very obvious where the seedling is so that you don’t step on it, or weed the little tomatoes out with the almost identical ragweed sprouts. For larger plants, turn over a milk crate.
Chard and eggplant with cool hats on. I have no native quail in my yard. Due to nearby houseing developments, there aren’t many quail around me anymore. Quail would fill the niche of beetle and sowbug eaters. My hens want only worms, spoiled things, and their big feet do a lot of damage if not watched.
Madge and Chickpea: Nothing like a dirt bath on a warm day. Sowbugs cluster under mulch and do damage to stems and fruit.
Sowbugs waiting for strawberries to nibble. I use a little food-grade diatomaceous earth around the seedlings, new sprouts in the garden, around the strawberry plants, and also around plants such as artichoke, corn and chard where ants have begun to farm aphids.
Ants farming aphids on chard. I use it around the trunks of my stonefruit trees to stop the ants, and have been told that it works well around the legs of beehives in lieu of or in combination with cups of oil to keep out the ants. Diatomaceous earth is the finely ground bodies of ancient sea creatures (diatoms). The powder on a microscopic level is full of sharp edges.
Aphids on chard. When a sectioned insect such as an ant, flea or sowbug crawls on it, it rasps their tender areas and dessicates them. Not something I really am happy about doing to the bugs. I’m only using it on a very small scale. Remember that any insecticide, even DE, kills many kinds of insects not just the targets. You don’t want to eradicate your insects; most of them are helping your plants and your soil. DE will melt into the soil when watered, but only reapply if you still see the target bugs. The problem might already be taken care of.
A sprout, a squeeze and a hat. Use food-grade DE, not the kind that is sold in pool supply stores. FGDE is used in graineries to keep weevils and other bugs out of grain and beans, so you’ve been eating it for years without knowing it. It doesn’t hurt us, nor is it bad to breathe (some people wear masks that they can get from https://accumed.com/n95-mask-for-sale-respirator-safety-face-mask-z1.html, just in case). It is a great, natural and inexpensive way to fight fleas without paying big money for poisons to put on your pet. I have it all over my cats’ bedding.
They sell DE sprayers, but they become clogged. The easiest and least expensive applicator (which can be repurposed)? A condiment dispenser. You know, the plastic mustard and ketchup squeeze bottles in diners. I bought a set of two for $2. You can practice a little to dispense a finer dust.
The plant guild into which I’m planting the little guys. So I plant my little guys, give them a drink, squeeze a little DE around them, give them a berry basket hat until they outgrow it, then take it off to use elsewhere. If there is still a threat to your plants from critters (somebody was eating my eggplant leaves last year! I mean, really…ick!), then turn a wire gopher cage over the top or make a wire cage to fit and use sticks or landscape staples to fasten into the ground.. These, too, you can reuse yearly.
In this plant guild, the combination of other plants will also help hide the scent of the new little guy, until he turns into a full melon vine and takes over! You May Also Like
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Strawberry-flavored Hugelkultur, Please
A few months ago my daughter and I thinned out the raised strawberry bed.
Way too many plants. I planted the extra strawberries under the passionvine arch,
Under the passionvine trellis. using well pooed and pecked and rained-upon straw from the Fowl Fortress as mulch.
Good yucky straw. However the soil level in the raised bed has become lower, and the Bermuda grass has grown higher. Time for a re-do.
When I’d originally planted the bed a few years ago, I’d heard about burying wood to hold moisture and improve the soil. Some little thing we call… hugelkultur. I laid old lime tree logs along one side. They began to break down and some really cool mushrooms came up.
Cool mushrooms. Strawberries sent runners out and they rooted right in the wood. A great success.
Strawberries rooted right in the wood! Since I don’t have ready compost to fill such a large bed right now, I decided to do the hugel-thing in the entire bed. I spent several hours digging out the strawberries and the Bermuda grass.
Making the bed: everyone out! Then I pulled the soil back and was simply amazed.
Beautiful soil It was crumbly like prime worm castings. I lined the bottom of the raised bed with the logs on top of the wire I’d laid across the bottom to deter gophers and mice.
Old lime logs. Then I shoveled heavy clay out of the new bog area and threw that in and around the logs; the wood would decompose and turn the clay to great soil, and the clay already had a lot of interesting microscopic creatures in it from being at the edge of the pond.
Heavy clay. And I do mean heavy. On top of that I sprinkled some pigeon guano I recently received from some wonderful new friends who rescue pigeons. (They are wonderful even if they hadn’t given me the guano. I have many friends who, in fact, are guano-less. Just to clarify.) There were a lot of pigeon peas in the guano, but if they sprout its all good because they are nitrogen fixers and will only help things along. Some sugar was added to help stir up the bacteria in the clay.All along I watered everything in, including hosing down Lark the fat, barren Barred Rock hen who just wouldn’t take no for an answer and kept jumping into the bed to steal the worms!
Get away from my worms, hens! My hens are such prima-donnas that they refuse to eat sowbugs and just go for worms. Geez! Lark got back at me later by making me come after her when it was time to shut them in for the night.
The last layer on the bed (and I don’t mean a chicken) was the good soil into which I replanted the strawberries. I did this process in thirds and ended up with a lot of extra strawberries.
A third section done. As it was nearing sunset and I was becoming chilly in my shorts and sleeveless shirt, I hurriedly planted the extras up under the passionfruit trellis, in with the others from the previous planting. Most of them had happily survived.
Finished! The leftover soil I sprinkled on top, laid the soaker hose back on top, and voila! A somewhat shocked but hopefully soon-to-be-happier strawberry bed.
There are a couple of wild mallards that come to the pond and have grown trusting of me up to a point. I throw game bird food by the pond for them. I don’t want to tame them, but I like it that they don’t fly off in a fright every time I come near. Its better for their health not to be so stressed. Makes me feel good, too.
Hen line-up. But what is in the coop behind them? While I was digging I looked up to find my hens all in a row watching me, and beyond them inside the Fowl Fortress (the door of which I’d propped open) were the two mallards! They were perfectly content to be eating what the hens hadn’t eaten, and were even sitting in there enjoying… I don’t know… forbidden territory?
Just make yourself at home! The alluring and romantic smell of chicken poop? After awhile Miss Amelia wandered in there and the mallards wandered out. They’re welcome in there, but if they want me to build them a castle of their own, forget it. They already have the floating duck house, after all!
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Rain Catchment Awesomeness (and some BSP)
Water flowed over the stone steps First, a little BSP (blatant self-promotion). There is a wonderful ezine called San Diego Loves Green featuring topical local articles and snippets that reflect on the growing green community here in, you guessed it, San Diego. The San Diego Permaculture Group has an ongoing column, and yesterday I was the guest writer. My article is on the importance of planting natives , with some information that you might find surprising, or that you may have already read in my blog about the same subject. Also (more BSP) if any of you attended the Southern California Permaculture Convergence this weekend, and still yet, if any of you listened to my talk on soil, first of all I’d like to thank you for your attention and attendance, and I hope I answered your questions and solved some problems for you. You can search on my blog for many posts concerning nitrogen -fixing, or 50 Ways to Leave Your Compost , and see my composting toilet (I went to a Garden Potty).
We had almost two inches of rain on Thursday night. In San Diego we rarely receive the long soaking rains that we really need. Instead we must be ready for flash floods. If you are familiar with Finch Frolic and the labors we’ve been undertaking in the last two years to hold the rainwater, then you may be curious to find out how the property survived this last middle-of-the-night flooding and hailstorms. If you remember, not only is there the water flowing off the roof and falling onto the watershed property, but also an unmeasurable amount that is purposely channelled runoff from all the neighbor’s properties that runs through mine.
All basins full! Since the permaculture project was installed I haven’t had any of the erosion that plagued the site. As of last year I’m pretty sure that every drop that falls on my property is caught, in rain catchment basins, the ponds, and in the loam and compost in the guilds. The challenge was to also keep all the neighbor’s water on my property as well! I’m thrilled to say that we almost did it!
There is a new bog area being designed by Jacob Hatch just above the big pond.
The new bog area This area had been designed to channel overflow water from the rain catchment streams around the pond and down a black tube to the stream bed below. Greedy me wants all that water! With the creation of another silt basin, and now that there is vegetation in the stream to hold onto the silt, I’ve made the water now flow directly into the big pond. There are planned overflows from the big pond, and water did overflow where it was supposed to.
The big pond was filled to capacity, making the duck house do a sinking ship impression because of the length of the rope attached to the anchor wasn’t long enough. The first rain catchement basin was enlarged a lot so as to catch water higher on the property.
The first catchment basin was deepened There is decomposed gravel in that one so the water perculates quickly, thank goodness, as most of the other basins hold water due to the clay composition of the soil.
Water following the basins. Also, a rain catchement basin was created along the top of the cement channel that normally funnels water off the property.
New basin, empty A series of these will be created all along the channel, allowing water to slow, gather and perculate along the length of the property, with no outlet at the end.
Full! This will take some of the flow pressure off of the water diverted down into the main series of basins.
The only area breached was actually due to a gopher hole whose origin must be in the stream. I could tell by the swirls in the mulch where the erosion happened.
Swirls tell of a breach. There is also the slight problem of water flowing down my own driveway and then down the trail.
Water funneled down my driveway. I think a small hugelkultur bed might slove that problem.
The verdict? Almost all the water was retained on the property,even that of the neighbor’s! A few tweaks and we are well on our way to total rainwater dominance! Mwwahahahahahahaha!
Mwwahahahahahahaha! - Compost, Gardening adventures, Hugelkultur, Permaculture and Edible Forest Gardening Adventures, Rain Catching, Soil, Vegetables
Hugelkultur: Irrigating with old wood
Hugelkultur is a joy forever. Hugelkultur is a German word (pronounced hoogle culture: it should have some umlauts over the first ‘u’ but I have no idea how to do that) which translates as hill culture. It is a process of building raised beds with a core of old wood. The benefits are that as the wood decomposes it not only releases nutrients into the soil, but it holds water like a sponge. Rain water is collected inside the bed, then as the warmer weather sets in and heat dries out the outer shell, it will wick that moisture back out. Presto! Irrigation in the dry season. As the wood decomposes it creates air holes into which deeper roots may penetrate and absorb nutrients that aren’t being washed into the ground water. Also, growing on a tall hugelkultur bed makes harvesting easier because vegetables are often located higher off the ground. The process was popularized by Sepp Holzer, although he didn’t actually call it that.
Hugelkultur may be started flat on the ground, by hand or by machine, dug into the ground, stacked very tall or short, or even level to the ground. The best way to build a bed is to place it on contour where rainwater will collect, preferably facing North and South so that both sides receive equal sun.
I have areas of ground that are either very heavy clay, or are decomposed granite with stones left over from the building of the house. Some trees don’t receive the drainage they need from irrigation because of the clay, which causes the roots to suffocate, or else plants dry up because water perculates too swiftly through the soil.
This brush pile against the fence was reduced to a quarter of its size. I also have stacks of brush that were left when the garden was created as hiding places for animals while the garden grew. I don’t need that many brush piles anymore now that the garden is large. I have three wire cages filled with woodier weeds and prunings that are in ‘slow compost’ mode, and leftover trimmings from bamboo used in bridge construction. Perfect hugelkultur components!
I targeted an area between the pathway and a plant guild with two apricots and vegetables in it. When it rains that area has standing water on it because of the clay content. The area should become part of the guild, but the soil needs mucho amending. I have areas like this all around the property. How to amend two acres of soil? How to get rid of the ever-rising mountains of prunings? How to make the rain water permiate the soil and perculate down rather than sheet across? One guess. Yep, hugelkultur. I bury that wood!
I had made a small hugelkultur experiment a year ago with a raised strawberry bed. There was old lime firewood rotting on the property, so I placed several of these logs along the side of the bed, then covered them with soil and planted strawberries. It worked very well. The strawberries loved the acid, even growing into the decomposing logs, and the logs held the moisture. Some wonderful showy fungus came up, too. I will be reworking that bed and this time I will cover the ground with logs, throw on some llama or horse manure, cover with compost and replant the strawberries. I shouldn’t have to fertilize that bed or add soil for a long time.
For the big hugelkultur bed I wanted a deep hole that would capture rain and allow the wood to absorb it. My faithful assistants Lori and Steve and Jacob work on this project with me. Steve and Lori dug this ginormous serpentine pit about 2 1/2 feet deep and the same wide.
Lori and Steve digging a huge trench. Since the paths had just been covered with mulch, the dirt was piled on top of plywood layed over the mulch for protection.
Plywood over the paths helped keep things neat and tidy. Then we began filling the bed with the largest wood first.
The empty trench with still-intact drip systems over it. We didn’t have large logs which would have worked well, but we had lots of thick branches. This hole took a lot of prunings and we jumped on them to compact them down.
A bear trap! There are a lot of branches in this pit. The hugelkultur bed was left for a few days to settle (and we had run out of time and energy that first day!), and then we worked on it again. Extra dirt from the rain catchment basins that the men were enlarging was hauled down and thrown into and around the wood.
Dirt was added to the mix The mound was watered well. In dry areas it is important to water the wood and the soil well as you are building or else the bed will want to draw water from the area around it, drying up any seeds or plants planted on it.
Some of the long pieces that really stuck out were pruned off. Of course if this is a temporarily boggy area, the hugel bed would help dry it out. There were subterranean irrigation lines across the area already, and since we have a dry climate and the wood I used wasn’t old spongy logs and would take some time to become absorbant, we reestablished the drip system across the top of the hugel bed.
Steve reconnecting the subterranean drip, which runs from a well powered by solar. Because there weren’t large logs, there were a lot of spaces to fill with dirt. Gradually the mound grew and was sloped down to the pathway. Finally a couple of inches of dirt was packed on top. Unfortunately this was mostly clay from the excavation site, but if it had been good soil to begin with, I wouldn’t have needed the hugel bed now, would I? Yes, I did give it a sprinkling of sugar just to get the microbes feeding.
All topped up! There was so much clay that this could have been a big fire pit! The next day I dug up soil from the bottom of the wire cages that were now empty of branches, vines, and sticks. In less than a year since making the wire beds they’d begun to decompose and there was several inches of nice soil at the bottom. I hauled it over to the new bed and topped the clay with the compost.
Guess which half has the good soil on it? I want to break up the clay soil so I threw around a cover crop mixture of peas and wheat. The peas will fix nitrogen in the soil, the wheat roots will stabilize and break up clay, I can harvest food from both and then slash and drop the plants to bring nutrition to the soil surface. I also had a bag of mixed old veggie seeds. Last year or so ago I pulled out all my little envelopes of veggie seeds that were very old and mixed them all up. I planted batches around the property and had many things germinate. I still had about 2 cups of the seed left so I threw it around the new hugelbed along with the cover crop. Why not? If the seed isn’t viable, no loss. If it is, terrific! I can always transplant the sprouts if there are too many of any one thing.
Organic cover crop and a bag of old mixed veggie seeds. I watered the seed down, and then raked out the old straw from the Fowl Fortress. Here is a warning about straw: it will germinate. People say straw doesn’t have seeds in it because the seeds are all in the tops which is cut as hay, but they lie. They live in a dream. Straw still has seeds in it and I had a nightmare of a time weeding pathways the first year of the garden because they were all strewn with straw mulch. However if you put straw down for your hens first, they will eat all the seeds, poo on it, kick it around in the dirt, and then you will have a much better quality straw to use. Straw is difficult to get wet, and it needs to be wet when placed on the bed unless you live in a wet climate or have timed the planting to be just before a long soaking rain.
A thick layer of wet straw went over the top of the scattered seeds. Even then it is good to soak the straw first and then apply it to the bed. Some people soak the straw in an enriched liquid, using manure tea, kelp, microbial brews, organic molassas, etc. The mulch acts as an insulator for moisture and warmth (the decaying wood will eventually produce some heat to warm the little plant feet), and a suffocator for weeds. It can also be a home for sow bugs if too thin. In wetter climates the straw layer can be an inch or so thick. In drier climates the straw or whatever you use as a top mulch should be several inches thick or else it will just wick moisture out of the bed. The same rule applys when using newspapers as a mulch. TIP: don’t let your chickens near the new bed! They will ‘rediscover’ their old mulch and start kicking all your work apart!
If I had wanted to plant established plants on the hugelkultur bed rather than seeds, I would have forgone spreading compost and just covered the poor soil on the mound in wet newspaper or cardboard, and then piled on the straw mulch. To plant I would have cut a hole through the paper, added a handful of good compost and planted in the hole.
So the bed was done, and just before a predicted rain event, too. As it rains the water will roll into the bed, be absorbed and held by the soil around the branches which will eventually begin to absorb the moisture as they decay. The seeds will sprout through the mulch and their roots will hold and amend the clay on the mound. Eventually the roots of the apricot trees will reach over towards the hugel bed, and that patch of icky clay soil will become beautiful. All the while I can still grow crops on the raised bed. My three wire bins are empty, an enormous brush pile is reduced to a small mound, and extra dirt found a new home. Plus we all had some fantastic upper body workouts. A winning situation all around.
More hugel beds will be created in troubled spots; some may only be a couple of feet long below a tree’s root line to help with soil drainage while amending the planting bed.
Wire cages filled with old weeds, prunings and vines are terrific for hugels! If you are in an area where the top mulch might wash away in heavy rains, make a latticework of sticks held down with landscape pins or more sticks over the top of the straw. Or cover with wire until the plants begin to sprout; you don’t want the wire to remain on the bed.
So try a hugelkultur bed, big or small. You’ll wonder why you never tried it before.
