Creating Healthy Soil

Yesterday I finally finished "Gaia's Garden", by Toby Hemenway. The book is so full of information and ideas that by the end  the reader feels both energized and overwhelmed. I can see clearly in my mind how my property will look once it has become a mature food forest, full of fruit trees and beautiful native shrubs and berry bushes, but then I look out the window I'm quickly reminded that my future yard couldn't be more dichotomous to what actually exists, a barren slope of hard packed hydrophobic dirt and decomposed granite, a place where only the most stubborn wild mustard plant can survive. Thankfully Hemenway provides, in the last chapter, some advice on where to start, he is sympathetic to those of us just starting the path to a permacultural paradise, as only someone who's been there can be. He confides to the reader that it won't happen overnight, and that there will be failures along the way, and shares that the best way to begin is to look for a place in your yard that is sheltered from nature's extremes, in our yard that would mean the blisteringly hot sun and high winds known as Santa Ana. He also advises to start small, and close to your back door. In the beginning there is a lot of work to put in, and if you have to traipse all the way across your yard then your first project is more likely to fail, start somewhere you're likely to pass most every day.

Now a note about me, I like to try things for myself. If I see a recipe that I think looks good, I make it, a craft that I think would be fun, I do it. I'm not usually satisfied by just knowing about something and assuming that it works the way someone else has said it will. Mostly because I want to prove that I can accomplish the task, and also a bit that I know some things are not quite as advertised. Either way, I set the book down and immediately set out to prove that I could turn a particularly terrible section of my yard into a garden. Behind our barn there is a flat section of hard packed dirt and decomposed granite. As a location it would be perfect for a kitchen garden, as a potential garden site, it literally couldn't be worse; the dirt is so hard that it could be confused for poorly poured concrete. Water pools on the surface of the dirt and rolls away without even thinking for a second of soaking in. It would be foolish for me to think I could take a shovel and dig more than an inch down without throwing down my broken shovel in a litany of curses. But this is where Hemenway suggest I start, in a sheltered area near the home, so I decide to deploy one of the tools he describes in the book, sheet mulching. Now I'll start by saying this, while I want to succeed and also to prove that I can create an oasis out of this horrible section of packed granite, I don't, however, want to go to the store on Sunday morning, so in true stubborn Michele fashion I used only those items I already had on hand. I realize that this means my experiment may not work as well, but I've bolstered myself with a quote directly from Gaia's Garden, "Overall, doing an imperfect something is better than doing a perfect nothing" and with this guiding me I set out with my shovel, gloves and wheelbarrow. As we only just recently moved I have an over abundance of empty cardboard boxes, this is one item that seems to make it's way into most blogs about sheet mulching and so I sat down peeled off the tape and labels and used that as the base of my garden. It was great to have a clear visual marker as to the size and shape that my garden would take,but also the cardboard will hold moisture and as it breaks down will help to add organic material to the dirt below it.

As you can see the area I'm working with is as dry and un-garden-like as possible. This addition of cardboard initially made it look more like an illegal dump site than a garden, but I wasn't deterred. As I've mentioned in a previous post Ramona, Permaulture, and Hugelculture, I have a surplus of horse manure lying around my property, another person would view this as a nuisance, but I see it as a valuable resource, one that I can shuttle from here to there, and one that I can use for free (I know not many people have this and I view my manure ownership as quite fortuitous). 

Two very full wheelbarrow loads of manure later and my little garden plot was well on it's way to looking, at least marginally more like a garden. The manure was about 2 inches deep across the surface of the cardboard, and as it had been lying around collecting weed seeds I decided to ad a layer on top of semi weed seed suppressing material. 

I'm the worst grocery shopper in the world, and I've always hated that stores send me ads in the mail that I don't even look at much less use, what a waste of paper. I hate wasting a resource, so imagine how happy I was to re -purpose those ridiculous store adds, and especially happy that they will forever be sandwiched between a layer of manure and dirt, I mean could there be more fitting an end for them? Now that I had this layer in place, and thoroughly wetted down; it was slightly breezy when I was working on this which was great for me, but horrible when needing to keep sheets of paper flat on my mound of horse poop. The next step was to put a layer of soil on top of this.

I did run into a slight snag at this point. In our back yard there are 2 raised bed planters. They are full of dirt but no plants. I figured that I would steal the dirt from one of these beds in order to compete my garden experiment. Unfortunately this "dirt" was less soil and more like an old wood ash pile. Half way though my first wheelbarrow full of the stuff and it turned powdery and white with little bits of charcoal. Not that it was entirely ash, there was a bit of dirt mixed in with it, but this dirt was also powdery and clearly unable to hold moisture. At this point I considered going to the store and bringing home some nice new garden mix, but then I reminded myself that imperfect is ok, and that I had this resource on my property all it needed was for me to make it into something useful. I added 2 full wheelbarrow loads of this onto the top of my mound and smoothed it out. No matter what the materials, it was definitely looking more like a garden than it did when I started, all that was left now was to plant it. Now this garden bed isn't ready to produce great fruits and vegetables, and that wasn't the purpose of this experiment, if you remember my goal is to turn this patch of hard unusable dirt into a gloriously loamy patch of garden soil. My final step was to sow seed onto the bed. I carefully chose what seed to add, and I decided to go with Sunn Hemp, a legume that adds nitrogen to the soil, has a root system that will tolerate dry conditions and also creates a bulk of green stalks - perfect for adding organic material to a garden bed in the making. 

Due to the horrible nature of the soil I was working with I did decide to use half a bag of organic garden compost purchased from the store, but only because I was concerned nothing would germinate in the ashes that I had used (and the bag was sitting right there). I mixed in a few handfulls of seed directly into the compost mix in my wheelbarrow, this way there was a good chance the seed would be evenly distributed and I spread it out across the top of my lovely sheet mulched square. 

Obviously I won't know if my morning's work was successful for a week or two, but I will say that the pile I created holds water much better that the surrounding area and that I'm very hopeful that when it's time to plant next year's tomatoes they will have a nice , healthy plot of soil that I can sink them into. If not, well, we'll just have to do a second round of sheet mulching, maybe with an addition of some red wigglers; only time will tell. 

Ramona, Permaulture, and the Hugelculture

It's been a bit since my last post, so let me catch you up. In 2009 when Todd left the Air Force and we decided to move home to San Diego we were starting from scratch. We rented a few different places, and once both of us had stable jobs we decided to buy a home. We bought what we considered a starter home, it was small had lots of work to be done and was definitely not in the best neighborhood, or  school district (mind you it could have been much worse), but it wasn't a place we wanted to stay forever. Fast forward 4 years and about a ton of elbow grease later, Todd and I decided that it was time to move, our house's value had risen enough that we would be able to get something nicer, but not too much, meaning it still looked like a great deal. So now we are caught up to present. We've bought a home on the outskirts of San Diego, in Ramona. Ramona is a beautiful city, not quite rural but definitely not like it is in the city. The air is fresh, the views are stunning, and the properties are big. Our place is about an acre and a half, which is a lot, and as you can imagine I'm itching to make it my own. We're lucky in that it is a blank slate, with no real water hungry landscaping, but unlucky in that there are no mature fruit trees (just dozens of eucalyptus). After moving up here my brother in law lent me his copy of "Gaia's Garden-A Guide to Home Scale Permacultre" by Toby Hemenway. I must say that this book has changed my view of gardening and has really inspired me, which wouldn't matter except I've got that big piece of land staring at me daring me to go on and do something (much to Todd's dismay). Which brings me to today, Todd is away in Portland. I'm sure he's having a grand ol' time as he's with my soon to be brother in law for his bachelor party, but it also leaves me here, at home, with no one telling me not to start a new project. I've been telling him for a few weeks now that I want to build a Hugelculture, which is just a strange Germanic word for raised bed garden that is filled with logs and sticks. Todd's been going crazy with me talking about it non-stop, so today, with him away, I pulled out my tools and decided to go ahead and make one. The supposed benefit of using a Hugelculture has to do with the ability of dead wood to absorb water, a well watered hugel retains moisture and so doesn't need to be watered as often, not to mention that the organic matter inside the hugel breaks down over years and feeds the plants planted in it and also replenishes the dirt around it. Another great feature is that on our gently sloped yard it creates a swale, which when, or if, it rains it will create a barrier slowing runoff and increasing the ability of the rain water to be absorbed into the ground. It is obvious that our yard allows water to drain a bit too freely during a rain storm, something I intend to remedy.

So the first step was finding a good location for my hugel, it needed to be on a slope, within reach of a hose, and also not too centrally located (as this was a semi covert operation and I don't need to cause unnecessary trouble with the hubby). I settled on a spot next to the driveway with a good amount of slope where lots of runoff can be collected, and where a hose will reach until California sees some rain.

Even though the slope was already there, I had to clear it more to create a flat spot to pile up all my logs and branches, I wanted to make the hugel start at the bottom of the slope but be about as tall as the existing hill, needless to say it was a lot of digging in very hard dirt, but hey it doubles as a workout, and I love multitasking.

One small problem was the amount of weed debris I created when clearing the spot, out place had been empty for a good while before we moved in and the amount of uncut brush, and invasive thistle is pretty daunting. I decided to use the little knowledge of composting and the even larger amount of ignorance I have to "hide" all that awful weed seed infested organic matter in my hugel bed, a compost heap can kill the weed seeds due to the heat created by decomposing matter, so I took the easy way out and just filled the bottom of my ditch with the pile of weeds (Yes, this will most likely come back and haunt me, but it can't be worse that it was).

I did however, create a barrier between the weeds themselves and my hugel insides, just to be on the safe side, cardboard is a great tool for smothering unwanted plants, so I used it as the base of my hugel and began piling.

The next step involved scavenging my yard for stumps, logs, and branches that were hiding under bushes and in thecreek bed. It didn't take long, I have enough dead wood lying around for another 3-5 hugels, easy. One problem is making sure that I don't use too much eucalyptus, as a hugel made of all eucalyptus could be bad for the garden, it has allelopathic properties, which just means it's toxic and can stunt other plants from growing around it, did I mention how many eucalyptus trees are on our property? It's obscene, no wonder it's just a wide open dirt patch. Fortunately we have a variety of trees in varying stages of breaking down all over the yard.

Now is where the dirty work begins. Did I mention that there used to be horses on our property? Probably not, it's really neither here nor there, except that we have a surplus of manure all along our fence line, just waiting to be put to better use.

Between all the horse manure, and the mess that our chicken flock creates, I was able to cover the entire hugel in a nitrogen rich layer of, well, dung. This will help keep the mound more balanced and able to support plants more readily, it was however not the most pleasant portion of the entire hugel experience. At least it was all free, I'm sure slopping paid for poop is more upsetting that slopping free poop, but only just.

At this point I got the pile nice and wet to make sure the inside of the hugel wasn't starting out dry, the wetter it is in the beginning the less I'll have to water it over time. I also wanted to make sure that the pile would stay put, even if it got wet, I don't want all my hard work washing away at the first rain. After a good soaking I simply pushed the original dirt back over the hugel. This is where, if Todd were home he'd intervene. Luckily he isn't here so we didn't have to go off to the nursery and buy garden soil. I like to use the free dirt that came with the house (are you starting to see my cheap streak)? Sure garden soil might look better, so dark and loamy, but we're creating healthy soil from the bottom up. If this comes back to haunt me, so be it; at least I didn't waste any money in the mean time.

So what did I get out of this project? I mean so far it looks like all I did was dig a big trench in a hillside, just to put all the dirt back to once again have a hillside, oh yeah did I mention how much poop I had to shovel? Well, for one, I got the satisfaction of knowing that I'm starting the process of making my property more water wise, once we do get rain I'll be storing a little bit of it right there in that mound and the plants I plant there will be lush and green without me having to turn on the hose. I'm also building better soil, which will benefit us for years. But best of all I was able to make my property produce, there is nothing better than sweating over a piece of land and being able to reap, literally a harvest from your hard work.  Very soon my hugel will be providing us with kale, chard, arugula, rosemary, chives, carrots, beets, garlic, green beans, and strawberries (sounds like a lot right, but that mound is huge 4ftx8ft and 3 dimensional).

All this before noon, I think it's time to relax.