Universal Garden Smackdown

(posted September)

The universe just smacked me down big time and I've had a demoralizing morning.
Last winter around November I got together with a couple of volunteers and we removed a lot of goutweed from the strawberry patch of Studley Garden. It is now August of the year after and I returned from a trip away to find the patch not, as I had hoped, taken over by strawberries but that the goutweed had returned, along with rampant blackberries and an abundance of sow thistle (sonchus).
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Operation Strawberry part one a success!

(Posted at Sep. 7th, 2011 06:55 pm)


Today I tackled the bed that has failed to become populated with strawberry runners. I was pleased to discover that the goutweed was not so thick as I had feared. Indeed it was not sufficient to cover the ground in its first year and most of those were annual weeds. In fact, some strawberry runners had managed to establish. I divided the bed into quarters and started on those section by section, to avoid laying bare the ground again without enouth time to cover it the same day. While I weeded, I had a hose running at a trickle to saturate the parched ground. While I was at it, I made a low swale out of the path, and filled it.

It was my plan to chop whole carpets of strawberries out of the strawberry row where I wanted to put keyhole paths, because we don't have full access into the row which is about 7 feet wide. Some of these displaced path strawberries would go in the new square patch, the rest on a rooftop garden, now that the drought has broken and it is better planting weather. To my delight the strawberries did come out in a whole sheet. After making sure they had good contact with the ground and watering them in well, I had a near instant strawberry garden.

I will link to pics soon as this is probably nearly impossible to picture without them. While I was working, the landlady came out and told me that since strawberries produce more heavily on their runners, it would make sense to use the paths when they fruit in July, then let the established plants runner into the path area in August, then in September cover the first plants with new paths to kill them. I will do more research to see if this is necessary.

Aiming for the lawn free landscape

(Posted at Sep. 13th, 2011 06:55 pm)

The neighbors have gently reminded me that it's time to tidy up the landscaping around the house. That is an evolving situation with which I am lucky to have Aaron help me out. I was in need of motivation to make the property presentable anyway. If I am to be serious about consulting then the place should be an example of what I am capable of.

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The front will probably take another three hours. I am mulching some properties this week as well as my regularly scheduled shifts so that should bring in some badly needed income. Next week I've discovered someone is interested in having me consult and (permaculture) design for a large rural property in New Brunswick, an exciting opportunity

Food Forest possibilities

(Posted at Sep. 27th, 2011 07:28 pm)


I had a good talk this morning with friend and permaculture practitioner. Right now I am modifying a list Verge gave me for food forest species from zone 3 to zone 6A. Let me know if you want a copy! The differences are striking. If we push the envelope in Halifax we can grow figs. It's ok, Alberta has much better topsoil!

Happy new year!

(Posted on Oct. 2nd, 2011 10:37 am)


October feels like it's involved many wrap-ups on what worked and what didn't. Autumn has always felt like the beginning of a new year, even before I was doing the pagan thing. I had a meeting yesterday with the members of my community garden and it felt like we came to some good agreements about what to do next (although that came along with some sprinkled "I can do better next year I promise, I just need to *apply* myself". Which doesn't work. I wasn't trying to get people to work harder or feel guilty, just think about what to do with some of the empty fallow land). Someone from the Transition Initiative also wants to do a post-mortem about what worked and what didn't, and I promised someone in Way of the Preserver to do the same.

I gave a permie consultation in St John this week. It turned out to be about a 5 hour drive with breaks so they had a spare room prepared for me and then I drove back on Friday. It's always a tough call deciding how much work is too much and how much is needful for their satisfaction. The clients are a young couple who bought the house and property not long ago. They also own an organic hops farm. They are looking to produce food on their house's property and spend less time maintaining grass, and replace some brush. The property is waterlogged and overrun with Water hemlock, which it will be important to eradicate or control before they have children. Verge had a lot of dryland strategies, being in the prairie, but not a whole lot on drainage (perhaps because draining land is a mainstream strategy that most of dominant culture already does quite well, but that doesn't mean I know how to do it yet.)

Hurricane Ophelia is offshore of us, headed toward offshore-of-Newfoundland. Rob at Verge told us that extremely wet events are good opportunities to watch how water behaves, especially in land that is well vegetated and not prone to obvious erosion.

Berkley pile postmortem

The Berkley pile has been pitchforked into a raised bed. I've planted it out with a green manure of white clover. My consultation clients had good results from putting sheep manure straight into raised beds and I think I will do this with the rest of them.

After four weeks the pile was still at 30C! It was then that I learned that my thermometer had broken. So I picked out weed plants from the centre and set them aside with the other ever-growing pile of weeds that will be killed off with more fresh horse manure. I think "done in 18 days!" meant done the thermophilic phase in 18 days, with the fungal phase of breaking down woodchips and making the compost look like soil taking the usual 6 months to a year. We'll see what it looks like by spring. This is another reason I might not do it again, I'm not sure it's worth the work except to achieve high temperatures, which is not necessary for horse manure.

Amoeba colonies mimic road maps

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/science/04slime.html?pagewanted=all

When food was placed in Madrid and Barcelona on a map of Spain, slime moulds echoed the resource paths of the Spanish highway system almost perfectly. They also most likely played a vital role in creating Earth's first soils, before plants, animals or even fungi crawled ashore one billion years ago. They still are vital to soils today, bridging the food web between bacteria and macrofauna.

I've seen two in my life, in situations where there tended to be an overabundance of decaying nutrient (in a compost pile and on a strawbale that was under a birdfeeder). Certainly very weird, colourful and gross looking!