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How To Sheet Mulch

By on May 17, 2013 in Gardening, Planting, Sustainability

You might recall that I use sheet mulching in my garden. For example, I used sheet mulching to build my keyhole garden.

Keyhole-garden-sheet-mulchweb

Sheet mulching is a really handy permaculture technique for building new gardens (and improving/rejuvenating old ones). You may have heard of “Lasagna Gardening.” That is a nifty name for sheet mulching.

There are several advantages to sheet mulching.

  1. Sheet mulching requires no digging. This is handy if you don’t know where your utility line locations.
  2. Sheet mulching beefs up the soil with organic matter and nutrients. What an easy way to feed your plants.
  3. Sheet mulching smothers weeds and grass, so you can build no-dig gardens right on top of the grass.
  4. Sheet mulching is easy and can be done at any time.

There are a few standard steps to sheet mulching. Let’s take a look at how it’s done.

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The first layer is some sort of compostable barrier, such as paper or cardboard. I have used newspaper, cardboard and paper grocery sacks. This layer should be something that will decompose over time, allow plant roots to grow through and allow worms to come up from the soil below.

It is important to soak the paper (or what ever) with water. In fact, you should water each layer as you build your garden. Since the wet layer of paper smothers what ever is under it, be sure not to cover plants you want to keep. It is best to use cardboard in the Fall (so it has time to decompose). I also like cardboard covered with straw or wood chips for paths.

I use a thick layer of straw or leaves for the second layer. When forming the second layer, it may be necessary to mix or turn over the straw/leaves while watering, so that they get thoroughly soaked. Straw (not hay) is really cheap and can be purchased at nurseries or feed stores. Leaves are free and can be collected in the Fall. If you can shred the leaves, it’s even better. They will decompose faster.

You can use other garden waste too, as long as it wasn’t sprayed with herbicides.

Warning: Don’t use poison ivy, poison oak or poison sumac in sheet mulching. The compound that causes itching (urushiol) does not degrade in the soil.

The third and fourth layers are compost, topsoil, amendments, and the like. If you have composted manure (cow, horse, bunny, chicken, etc.), you can throw some of that on too. Don’t use raw (non-composted) manure unless you are building your garden in the Fall (so it can compost over the winter).

If you want, you can stop there. Lately, this is the most sheet mulching I am doing, since I have a lot of ground to cover and not much to cover it with.

If you like, you can add one or more additional layers, as shown above.

It is OK to mix up the layers with a garden fork.

I always top off with a thick layer of straw. This suppresses weeds. To plant, I move some of the straw away from the location I intend to plant a seedling. I dig a hole, plant the seedling and firm up the “soil” around it. When I am finished, I move the straw back, forming a well around the seedling. If you cover your seedling with straw, it won’t grow well and may die. Finally, I give the seedling a good drink of water (even if the garden bed is already wet).

As the straw and/or leaves decompose, you might notice your garden “deflating.” This is OK.

You may also notice an increase in garden fauna, particularly wolf spiders, moths and worms.

Here is one of my gardens (the berm) made by sheet mulching.

Sheet-mulch-berm-n-swaleweb

If you are interested in learning more, just do a quick Google search of “sheet mulch.” You will find lots to useful articles and YouTube videos to get you started.

Happy gardening! :D

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Coco + Mud = FUN

By on May 17, 2013 in Coco & Lucy, Life, Photo

muddyCoco

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Graduation 2013

By on May 14, 2013 in Uncategorized

graduation

DD graduated from High School last night. Yay!

I keep remembering DD just hours old and asleep in my arms, doing that utterly enchanting spastic smiling thing so common of newborns. I can still barely believe that she started out such a tiny thing, and now she is grown up and starting her own life.

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Independence Days of 2013: Post #1

By on May 9, 2013 in Gardening, Independence Days, Planting, Resilience

943738_302619756535356_1915822467_nBoy, do I feel like that lady on the left. We had six inches of snow last week, and more rain than I could measure. The soil, which is loaded with clay, feels like it could be used to throw pots or to make cob. Since I laid down straw in the garden paths, to absorb some of the water and make them passable, we are certainly making cob with every squishy step!

So, in the end, there is nothing to do but get out there and garden anyway.

Since DD and I spent most of yesterday working in the yard, I thought it was about time for an Independence Days post. In case you don’t know, my Independence Days posts are based upon the book Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage and Preservation by   Sharon Astyk, as well as Sharon’s blogging. The main principle of Independence Days is to learn and practice skills that give you and your family food security. This insulates you and your family from today’s highly vulnerable just-in-time integrated supply chains, because hard times happen all of us.  In fact, more hard times are bearing down upon us, due to a variety of events/factors, such as but not limited to, The Sequester, peak oil, economic collapse, natural disasters and climate change. Independence Days revolves around eight activities, which are listed below.

  1. Independence DaysPlant something: A lot of us were trained to think of planting as done once a year, but if you start seeds, do season extension and succession plant, you’ll get much, much more out of your garden, so I try to plant something every day from February into September.
  2. Harvest something: Everything counts – from the milk and eggs you get from your animals to the first dandelions from your yard to 50 bushels of tomatoes – it all counts.
  3. Preserve something: Again, I find preserving is most productive if I try to do a little every day that there is anything, from the first dried raspberry leaves and jarred rhubarb to the last squashes at the end of the season.
  4. Waste Not: Reducing food waste, composting everything or feeding it to animals, reducing your use of disposables and creation of garbage, reusing things that would otherwise go to waste, making sure your preserved and stored foods are kept in good shape – all of these count.
  5. Want Not: Adding to your food storage or stash of goods for emergencies, building up resources that will be useful in the long-term.
  6. Eat the Food: Making full and good use of what you have, making sure that you are getting everything you can from your food, trying new recipes and new cooking ideas, eating out of your storage!
  7. Build community food systems: What have you done to help other people have better food access or to make your local food system more resilient?
  8. Skill up:  What did you learn this week that will help you in the future – could be as simple as fixing the faucet or as hard as building a shed, as simple as a new way of keeping records or as complicated as making shoes.  Whatever you are learning, you get a merit badge for it – this is important stuff.

artichoke_start_WEBSince the weather has been so terrible, I haven’t been able to do much in the way of Independence Days activities. However, yesterday I built part of a new permanent bed for my artichokes (Cynara cardunculus var. scolymus). I probably have both green and purple varieties, since I used a mixed packet of seeds. But, I won’t know for sure until they grow a bit more.

Because the soil is a sticky mire that is impossible to shovel, I can’t add any amendments to it. So, I decided to sheet mulch the bed on top of the soil. I used paper grocery sacks to cover the soil. After I soaked the bags with water, I added a thick layer of straw. The straw is already rotting, since it has been sitting out in the rain. On top of the straw, I added two bags of “top soil” and a bag of compost from Home Depot, some peat moss that happened to be in the shed, some home-made compost, some garden soil, a bit of composted cow manure, and a bit of organic slow-release fertilizer. All of this was watered well and then covered with a thin layer of more straw.

After the bed was built, I planted three of my artichoke seedlings by making a small hole in the bed, inserting the seedling and watering it in. The seedlings are spaced about 3-4 feet apart, because artichokes are huge plants. This weekend, I will add some smaller annual veggies and some flowers (e.g., zinnias).

Artichokes are perennials from the Mediterranean. Since they require warm winters, many people grow green globe artichokes as annuals. Since our area was upgraded to a warmer USDA Hardiness Zone (zone 6a), I hope that I will be able to keep these plants alive through the winters, by heavy mulching and winter row covers. This is sort of an experiment, since these plants may die and/or not produce any chokes. So, we will see how it goes.

How does your garden grow?

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Free Desktop Wallpaper: Spring Violets

By on May 7, 2013 in Photo

This is my first foray into making desktop wallpapers. Please feel free to download the size you need. I hope you enjoy them.

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1920px X 1200px   1600px X1200px   1024px X768px   1024px X576px

Creative Commons License
Violets With Leaf by Eleanor McCarthy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Jim Hightower | Gagging on ag-gag laws

By on May 2, 2013 in Agriculture & Farming, Food Security, Food Systems, Local Food

KKFI-90.1From time to time, I listen to Jim Hightower on one of my local public radio stations, KKFI. I find that Mr. Hightower seems to be a down to Earth, practical guy who holds views that are similar to my own.

So, I subscribe to Mr. Hightower’s newsletter. This is a brief commentary that came to my in-box this morning. Thought you might find it interesting.

Gagging on ag-gag laws
Thursday, April 25, 2013   |   Posted by Jim Hightower

LISTEN TO THIS COMMENTARY
Factory farms are not farms at all. They are corporate-run, concentration camps for pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, and other food animals.

Held in corporate confinement, these creatures of nature are denied any contact with their natural world, instead being crammed by the thousands into concrete-and-metal buildings where they are locked in torturously-tiny cages for the duration of their so-called “life,” – which is nasty, brutish, and short. All so food giants like Tyson, Smithfield, and Borden can grab fatter and quicker profits. It’s so disgusting that America’s consumers would gag at the sight of it.

That’s why the profiteers are desperate to keep you from knowing what goes on inside their factories. Nonetheless, word has been getting out as animal rights advocates, consumer groups, unions, and others have exposed some of the disgusting realities of animal confinement to the public, including showing wretch-inducing photos and videos. Rather than cleaning up their act, however, the industrial food powers have simply doubled down on disgusting. Their lobbyists have been swarming state legislatures to demand passage of laws that single out anyone who reveals the industry’s ugly secrets, summarily stripping such whistleblowers of their Constitutional right of free speech.

This is Jim Hightower saying… The only thing that will gag you worse than viewing the gross animal abuse taking place in these factories is to look at the grossly-repressive and aptly-named “ag-gag” bills moving through the legislative sausage mills of various states. The bills are ridiculous – but so are some legislatures, where corporate money trumps both common sense and the Constitution. Six states have passed ag-gag laws, and six more are moving toward passage. To see what’s happening in your state, go to www.humanesociety.org.

“Silencing Witnesses to Animal Abuse,” www.nytimes.com, April 15, 2013.

“Eating With Our Eyes Closed,” www.nytimes.com, April 10, 2013.

“Gag the Whistleblower: 6 States That Might Criminalize Taping Animal Cruelty,” www.alternet.org, April 8, 2013.

“Five More States Consider ‘Ag Gag’ Laws Making It Illegal to Report Factory Farm Abuses,”
www.alternet.org, February 27, 2013.

“Outlawing exposes of factory farm horrors,”
www.jimhightower.com, February 7, 2013.

via Jim Hightower | Gagging on ag-gag laws.

As it happens, NPR reported on Crop Insurance this morning. I heard it on my commute to work.

Since I hadn’t known anything about crop insurance, other than it exists to help farmers whose crop failed, I learned a few things. Most importantly, I learned that crop insurance is subsidized by the federal government in such a way that it pays for most of the costs of crop insurance. For example:

  1. The federal government pays most of the purchase price of a crop insurance policy;
  2. the federal government pays almost all of the operating costs/overhead of the insurance companies; and
  3. the federal government pays almost all of the payout of a claim on the crop insurance policy.

This amounts to billions of dollars in subsidies.

I’m not saying that farmers shouldn’t have crop insurance. I think crop insurance is smart and would buy it myself.

I just wonder if we are going about this the right way. For example, shouldn’t the farmers (at least industrial farms) pay the bulk of the premium? While this might be very difficult or impossible for small farmers, do we really want our taxes to go toward the profits of factory farms?

Reduced farm insurance subsidization for industrial farms might be good for small farms. For example, if we don’t subsidize industrial farming so much, the cost of industrially produced food would probably increase (at least because industrial farms would have to pay out more themselves, and in response they would increase their prices to the consumer, so as to ensure that their profit level would be maintained). If industrially produced food becomes more expensive, small farms may become more competitive (e.g., with agro-businesses). From my point of view, more profitable, competitive small farms is desirable.

Here are three ways to improve the situation.

  1. Substantially reduce (or even eliminate) subsidies to industrial farms (but not necessarily to small farms).
  2. Encourage consumers to buy local (supports the local economy and small farmer).
  3. Encourage people to grow some of their own food (improved personal and community resilience). This includes educating them, as it seems that many people no longer know how to do this.

What are your thoughts on these issues?

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Garden Space Requirements

By on May 1, 2013 in Agriculture & Farming, Food Security, Gardening, Infographic, Preparedness, Resilience

Ever wondered how much you need to plant to live off of your garden? For example, how many tomatoes do I need to plant to can enough tomato sauce for a year? I have.

Anyway, here’s a cool infographic that I recently found, when might give us a clue.

How Big A Backyard Do You Need To Live Off The Land?

How Big A Backyard Do You Need To Live Off The Land? infographic by Column Five Media.
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More Veggie and Flow Starts

By on May 1, 2013 in Gardening, Planting, Resilience, Sustainability

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Here’s a look at my latest group of starts.

In the top photo, I have 36-different varieties. Some are vegetables  while others are flowers. For example, can you pick out the borage, clover, tomatoes or oregano?

In the bottom photo, half of the flat is devoted to various varieties of zinnias. The other half of the flat contains poppies, cone flowers, cosmos and okra.

You might be wondering what I am going to do with these clumps of seedlings. It is pretty simple, actually. This weekend, or over the next few weeks, I will transplant the individual seedlings to either larger flats or into individual pots. I like to follow the John Jeavons Grow Biointensive Method, where you start the seedlings in flats, the prick them out and plant into larger flats or into pots. As the seedlings grow in size, they get scaled up into larger posts. Then, eventually, they get transplanted into the garden. I first learned about this method of gardening from an earlier edition of Jeavons’ How to Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine

Here is a video from John Jeavons on how to handle seedlings.

I like this method for a few reasons.

  1. I really enjoy planting seeds in the flats and transplanting the seedlings.
  2. I can start a wider variety of plants.
  3. It saves space.
  4. I don’t need as many grow-lights.
  5. It saves water.
  6. I can use a self-watering seedling flat, so the correct moisture level is maintained.
  7. Growing your own starts saves a lot of money.

Of course, I’m not averse to trying other methods, or purchasing starts. Have you tried this method of gardening? What methods do you prefer?

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Culinary Disasters

By on May 1, 2013 in Cooking

Bread dough exploding out of container.

Surprise!

Exploding bread dough!

I prepared a double batch of no-kneed bread dough, from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking. While it was resting over night, it exploded all over the refrigerator. I hadn’t expected it to rise that much, since it seemed like there was enough room from a single batch.

Oh well.

Guess I need a larger container.

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Composting Has a High Carbon Footprint?

By on April 30, 2013 in Environment, Gardening

I was recently reading an article by Steve Savage, on his blog Applied Mythology. This is what I learned, apparently making a lot of compost might not be good for global warming…

This what Steve said.

The greatest original contribution of the early organic movement was its focus on building soil health.  One of the main ways that organic farmers do this is by physically incorporating tons of organic matter into the soil in the form of composts.  Unfortunately, during the process of composting a substantial amount of methane is emitted which means that broad use of this soil-building approach would be problematic from a climate change point of view.

via Applied Mythology.

What the Hell?!

I love my composter!

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So, I checked out Steve’s article. Apparently, composting cattle manure produces a lot of methane. This is not too surprising, since one of the arguments about meat-eating, which one frequently hears, is that cattle produce a lot of methane. When you think about it, whether the manure is in the pasture or in a composter probably isn’t going to make much difference in the total amount of methane produced.

I was happy to see that there is a great alternative to the traditional method of composting cow manure…an anaerobic digester, where most of the carbon is converted to methane on purpose. :D This is a really cool process because it used methanogenic organisms to convert the carbon to methane.

As it happens, I happen to work on some patent applications for a deep well digester that sequesters carbon (such as from flu gases at coal-fired power plants) and converts the sequestered carbon to methane.

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So, I wonder what is the impact of composting my kitchen scraps and yard waste. For now, I am going to assume that it is better than if I was to send these things to the dump.

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