mini yard update

Well I know things have been quiet around here lately but around our house they have been hectic! Tons of planting, transplanting, pulling of more spurge from the yard and lots and lots of work on the Permaculture Project. There aren't any pictures tonight, should be some tomorrow, but here's the deal anyway...

We finally had our first pollenated female squash blossom, it was a lovely spaghetti squash and I was so looking forward to eating it, but the squirrels got it. I won't lie and say I wasn't bummed, kinda makes me wanna take the lid off the compost again. The good news is that there are finally tons of female flowers so we should be getting lots of yummy stuff very shortly, better late than never right?

We have started harvesting our bush beans and the edamame and pole beans should all be ready in the next few days. We haven't decided whether or not we're just going to mulch the edamame, either way the plants are going to be chopped and dropped. It ended up being too late in the season for the snow peas, it was just too hot and only one plant still survives, I'm just glad they got their little roots into the soil.

It also ended up being too hot for the artichoke this year, and I'm pretty sure the ground was just too hard for it as well. It stopped growing entirely a few weeks ago and is now definitely done. I planted a bunch of chard and kale seeds in the area that was supposed to be taken up by the artichoke and pumpkins, the ground is ridiculously hard there as well, all of the wild plants were going at the soil though, hopefully they broke it up a little and left some organic matter as well.

Last thing, our zinnias are blooming! hooray for planting in the grass! Actually I think that the plants that were planted in the grass are the happiest ones in the yard. I'm sure that location also factors into that but the grass as ground cover idea has really seemed to work, and if it gets too long I just rip a bit off the top by hand, super easy. Besides the zinnias we have a bunch of basil, cilantro, dill, sunflower and lavender hyssop, and a few sage too, that bee mix has turned out to be quite awesome.

That's all for now, the next post is going to be on identifying and using our lovely native and naturalized "weeds", enjoy the outdoors tomorrow, there's really nothing like it!

Permaculture Media Blog: Book Giveaway - The Quarter-Acre Farm

This book looks fantastic! Check out this give away from one of my favorite permaculture sites, Permaculture Media Blog: Book Giveaway - The Quarter-Acre Farm: This month we’re giving away The Quarter-Acre Farm book giveaway to ONE lucky PermacultureMediaBlog Reader! The Quarter-Acre Farm: How I K...

Learning

I just applied for the 2011 CSU extension's Building Urban Farmers program, ya, not only do I hope I get in but I also hope I can get a scholarship. It would be even better if we had the proper funding for the NPO in order to pay for it, especially since these are the foundations that would make our project incredibly strong. We want to do whatever it takes to ensure the sustainability of our community, including everything we can in order to give more inspiration for others to do so as well. I would be so honored to take both this course and the permaculture design course. Yay for positive change!

Planting seeds..

I planted so many seeds this morning it was quite incredible. Four packets of radishes, three packets of carrots, two packets of beets and one packet of some lovely bunching onions. I had to get his done while watching two toddlers, who were much more interested in making holes than planting anything in them and luckily my love rescued me by taking our son away to entertain somewhere else. One toddler in the garden is much easier to manage and so we were quickly able to plant the last few packets in the random bare spots in the yard and get on with the rest of our day.

I originally had only planned to plant a few seeds from each pack but when the kids were helping me water this morning, somehow they all got wet... wet seeds need to be planted, so that's what we did. In the madness of planting I completely forgot about writing down what I planted where I planted it. Plus I also over seeded many of the crops which will either take care of itself with the help of a few insects or is going to take me a bunch of time in thinning, especially since they are all root crops and need plenty of growing space in the soil. I'm actually more bummed about this than I am about not knowing where all the food is growing. As soon as those seeds come up I'll have a nice little game to play called "name that seedling," not only does it cause me to pay more attention to minute details, it also helps me to learn the exact names of plants and gives me more insight into plant geneology.

To be honest I have only very loose drawings of the garden areas with plant names written down in barely legible scrawl. My partner told me he couldn't figure them out at all, so it's probably for the best that I didn't go back through them and change a few of the pages, adding even more jibberish to what already lay there. I'm also not very upset at the fact that most of the seeds got sprinkled and thrown about a bit so all my plantings are interspersed. Yay for polyculture in the garden, especially multiple varietals from a few different plant families! Since we are rebuilding the soil we want to have different plants, and plant families contributing wonderful organic matter to the soil. They all have different nutritional needs, soil bacterium and insect populations that will contribute to the vitality of the fledgling eco-system. Most of the root crops are going to be left in the soil, remember that we are planning on sheet mulching everything at the end of the season anyway, and all that wonderful plant matter is going to compost in place, leaving all the colonies of micro-organisms intact. Just thinking about all that soil life makes me so excited! Add to that the excitement of mystery seedlings and I am dancing in the clouds. I'm sure a few of you out there are cringing at the idea of letting seeds fall where they may, overplanting, not labeling and not really caring about the soil conditions, to you I ask, when was the last time you felt free in the garden? When was the last time your garden was about the earth?

We got blogged!

Well sort of... one of my favorite blogs, Permaculture media, posted info about our permaculture project in some really cool spots! Check it out here, on the permaculture design courses list, http://permaculture-design-courses.blogspot.com/2011/08/permaculture-project-creating-living.html. When you're done there head over to this link, to reddit and make sure to vote and keep it up top while you're there!  http://www.reddit.com/r/Permaculture/ The more people who see this the better, we must start the dialogue of positive change!

Dreaming away..

Planning, planning, planning. This has been my life lately. It's quite funny though because I don't quite have a set space to plan for, just all the things that we need to do when we get our Permaculture Project space. I had a vision of the house, maybe it's silly, but I saw a vision of it so clearly that I had to draw it all out right then and there this morning. It felt so amazing to get all the ideas drawn out on paper, up until now we had just been writing, reading, talking and visualizing, but nothing on paper. I think the idea of putting ideas down on paper always make them more tangible than typing out words on the computer. Actually using your hands to form your thoughts takes it an entire step farther, and for me it was just what I needed.

To see all of our ideas laid out, mapped out, in ways that are very likely to work, was a huge jolt of positive energy. We started formulating different types of mini eco-systems for the yard, choosing plants that work together in guilds, letting experimental ideas in (like our attached open floor greenhouse), and wrote out our dream list of plant and animal species. I can't wait until we build that first swale, or our water filtration pond and basin, putting into practice ideas that could change our way of gardening for years to come. This house, this community, this living classroom, is somewhere waiting for us. This old house is just waiting to be transformed, turned over to the next generation. When we are ready to move on, another family will take our place and the community will live on, growing and changing, the house along with it. Do you know where this house is? Can you help us find it? If you see it, please let it know that I'm searching and we are coming, carrying the hopes of our children, we are coming.

Plants will grow if you let them...

Yay for the garden! Every day it's such a wonderful surprise to go out and see what changes have occurred overnight. Even though it been baking hot and dry, the plants are all taking off and even our late planted beans are producing. I'm excited to show you just a few pictures of the progress, especially these where the flowers, herbs and veggies are all growing right over the grass...

In the foreground are Zinnias, the taller stalks in the middle are sunflowers, the thin waspy plants are love-in-a-mist and back against the wall are squash and bean plants. All of the seeds in front were thrown down into the grass and a very thin layer of dirt was sprinkled over them. In the back I had placed a bunch of leaf mulch on the ground which was still there and quite deep, so I just planted the seeds directly into the mulch, just tucked under some of the leaves.

This is a round summer squash, it's starting to get some flowers and is really quite happy. You can see a bit of the leaf mulch in the top right section of the picture. In the bottom left corner are a few bush bean leaves. The grass has been great as a ground cover, keeping the water around for the squash to use. The combination of lawn and leaf mulch has proved to be quite beneficial.

Lovely Cilantro, growing up around the rocks of a keyhole. You can see one of the vining winter squash moving towards the center with the large mama Rose in the background, growing against the garage. This ia a thicketing rose and you can see some of it's shoots right next to the cilantro in front. All of these wonderful food plants growing in and around the grass, so easy! Plus the cilantro and rose are great companion plants and encourage better health in each other.

So this will be the last picture for now, and though it seems rather bland, I find it exciting. This tiny alpine strawberry was a transplant. I saved this little guy from a certain death of lawn mower blades and placed it in a very sad, down hill, barren space in the yard. It only had two triple leaf sets when I planted it and look now! It's really quite happy, growing tons of new leaves and even some runners as well. I'm really looking forward to having a nice mat of alpine strawberry instead of a bunch of dirt that just slides away.

As you can see the garden has been very busy lately. There are tons of bees buzzing around and this morning there was a whole troupe of sparrows outside the back door enjoying the fruits of the yard. I am so thankful to be able to go outside and enjoy the soil between my fingers. My son loves being outside now, he's just started helping mommy water, but I can't wait until we don't have to water anymore, when we can rely on the natural cycles. That won't happen in this house, but I know there is one just waiting to be turned into a living classroom, and we are more than happy to do all the work.

Permaculture Media Blog: How to Make a Zeer: Pot-in-Pot Refrigerator

Another awesome post that I have to share!

Permaculture Media Blog: How to Make a Zeer: Pot-in-Pot Refrigerator: "Cooling food without electricity! In a community without electricity, storage of food long-term can be tricky. One simple solution is to ..."

Permaculture Media Blog: Book Giveaway - The Quarter-Acre Farm

This is from one of my favorite permaculture blogs! They are giving away a fantastic book, all about creating a more sustainable life for our planet and it's inhabitants. Plus they are always posting great ideas and other news related to permaculture! Check it out!

Permaculture Media Blog: Book Giveaway - The Quarter-Acre Farm: "This month we’re giving away The Quarter-Acre Farm book giveaway to ONE lucky PermacultureMediaBlog Reader! The Quarter-Acre Farm: How I K..."

Into the land of non-profit....

It's been a few days since I've written a blog and I hope you all can forgive me; I've been at work on something quite large and exciting which has consumed most of my writing time. What is this fabulous something, you may be asking yourself. Well I'll gladly tell you, we have decided to start a non-profit! Yes, it's going to be a non-profit permaculture urban homestead model home. Whew, that's quite a mouthful isn't it? But the idea, really, is quite simple. We want to create a living breathing model, that follows average size limits, and building codes, for city dwellers to create their own sustainable eco-systems. By showing them that we did it, basically laymen, just with a vehement passion, they can too. Permaculture does not have to be difficult or complicated, in fact I find it to be quite intuitive, but it can be quite overwhelming for people. We want to create change in ourselves and our community, so what better way than to become active participants for change?

This idea came about a few weeks ago when my partner came home from his job and told me that everyone had been laid off. We had been kicking around the idea of doing something big permaculture wise for a little while now but we hadn't settled on anything. The Denver County Fair was not too long after that, and as I walked around the fair one afternoon it occurred to me that, although there were a few urban homestead and community garden groups and projects, no one was focusing on permaculture. Now if you are a regular reader of this blog you know how I feel about permaculture. Why waste your time and energy creating an eco-system only to destroy it a few months later? Every action we take should be purposely propelling us toward a more sustainable tomorrow, permaculture being the foundation of those actions. It seemed only natural for us to create a model of a permaculture in this tough Denver climate, short growing seasons, cold winters, and dry dry dry.

Now, we are not professionals, though one day I would like to call myself a permaculture professional of some sort, so we still have a lot to learn. Our ideas begin with books (my favorite is Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway, but there are many others, Attack on the front lawn and One Straw Revolution are also fantastic), and then evolve into something more organic. When we are out in the garden we think about how we affecting the soil, the plants, the insects, and the little micro-climates that are being created. By being open to the possibilites, we are engaging in what we feel to be, practices that will become second nature to future generations. We want to take our potential for learning, and share it with others to create more sustainable communities for us all.

Community is the key to this project, The Permaculture Project. The community is the reason for the project, as the only way to true sustainability and viability as communities is to work together for the betterment of us all. We want to share what we know and learn from others, documenting and sharing with the greater community the same time we share with our own. We plan on having donation-based classes, sliding scale priced workshops, community building days and bi-monthly tours. This is a living, evolving urban farm, with new challenges everyday. Taking on those challenges as a family is something we are greatly looking forward to. The series of events that have led us to this point have been incredible but I feel they were very purposeful. I want to make sure I am doing everything in my power to share what I know and teach it to others.

If you would like to help out with this project, please check out the indie go-go site we created to get it off the ground. Here's the page, http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Permaculture-Project. Please share, share, share, and donate if you can, anything helps. There is one big thing I didn't put on that site that we really need for the project, I just figured it wasn't the best place for it. We need a house! We need a house in Denver County in order to properly fulfill this dream. Denver is a city, with city codes and smaller lots than outlying areas. We want to show people a realistic view of all they can achieve with their smaller sized lots and restrictions on animals and water containment systems. These are not the only codes for urban homesteading they were just the first ones I thought of. I have a much more detailed proposal for the non-profit but we need to specify the land so I can be super specific about our plans. If you know someone who wants to donate land to the project, please leave me a comment so we can get in contact. In order to benefit all we must work together, and in order to do that we must take the steps necessary to make sure mother nature is there along with us.

You see a lawn that needs help, I see a happy vibrant niche polyculture...

This is our lawn. Well, it's not all of our lawn, there are places where the lawn is really lush, deep green and thriving. This is what our lawn looks like if it's only grass. Our front lawn, which is sloped, gets all day sun, and I mean ALL DAY SUN. Before we lived here the lawn was not taken care of, for years and years, it was entirely dead when we moved in, besides being lumpy and patchy. We watered, made some lovely compost tea for fertilizer, let the grass grow long to hopefully reseed itself, yet it was all to no avail. That grass is trashed. The only areas of grass that are doing well are living in relative harmony with what most people would call weeds. Here's an example,

Notice how lush everything is in this picture? The grass, looking very healthy, growing right along with prostrate spurge. Spotted Spurge, though labeled a common weed, is very useful in learning not only about the state of the lawn, but also the state of the soil. Spurge is considered an indicator plant when lawns are concerned. It tells you that the soil is too compact, arid, and that the grass was obviously very patchy and unhealthy before the spurge germinated.

So what does someone like me, who honestly couldn't care less about the grass itself, learn from the growth of the spurge? Well for one, the fact that it thrives in soil that is too compacted tell me that it has a lovely tap root that is great for breaking up soil, natures way of aerating the soil. It also tell me that it must bring valuable nutrients to the top of the soil, mainly because of the health of the grass around it, but also because that's what taproots are for, bringing nutrients up from deep underground. Last it tells me that there is more water getting down into the soil, this is from the taproots themselves, since they go deeper than the shallow roots of the grass, the water has a place to flow down into and essentially back up from those deep soil spots. Though having the spurge may not be desirable to most people when it's in the lawn, my landlady, for one, does not like it, it is desirable to know it's capabilities in other areas of the yard. I think that the grass is much healthier in the areas that it's sharing space with other plants, here's another example,

Look at that, healthy grass, spurge and cilantro all growing together quite happily. This is where, what I would call a niche polyculture is growing. I call it this because there are a few varieties of plants, all of whom essentially occupy the same niche, lowing growing, slender annuals. I know cilantro to be edible, most grass seeds are, but the milky white sap the spurge exudes may eliminate it's ability to be consumed; I don't know this for a fact, it just seems to make sense. These three plants, growing together, are doing better than a monoculture of any one of them. The grass is still growing, and it's essentially healing itself, with a little extra help.

Sadly my landlady was here yesterday and she was not such a big fan of the spurge as myself. Here's the essence of our conversation,

LL: Are those weeds in the lawn?

Me: No way, they are a native species that specialize in nutrient replacement and water retention in the     soil.

LL: Are you sure they aren't weeds? Have you tried using an herbicide on them?

Me: *shudder* umm no, I was just pulling them out by hand for a bit but I think the lawn is doing much better everywhere it's growing. Don't you think it's looks greener in those spots?

LL: Well yes, but my lawn is just lawn and it looks the best. I'm really not sure about all that plant, I think it's a weed, I'm going to look into it.

Me: ok, just let me know.

And then she left. I know she is going to come back and tell me to get rid of it, which is very sad, more so since the lawn is just going to go back to being thrashed without it. I went out today to go and pull some of the spurge up, from the front yard at least, and it started raining. A sign from mother nature to leave her perfect yard alone? Perhaps, but when it does come up, I know there's lots of nutrient mulch to be had.