Spring is an excellent time of year to add wood chip mulch to your garden, before summer kicks your homesteading into high gear. We just got finished spreading a fresh batch of wood chips around our homestead to cover all of our planting beds. It was a big job, but the payoff of using wood chips in your garden is worth the effort. Mulch is
Building Soil Quality with Leaves
Most of us are constantly working on increasing the soil quality of our gardens – both the soil nutrients and the soil structure. Either we’re starting a new garden on less-than-ideal soil or we’re trying to build the soil quality back up after previous crops sapped nutrients from the ground or winter rains compacted the soil. In this post, I will discuss how to enhance the soil
Garden Installation: Part IV
The backyard has taken shape! The concept for the backyard is to create an edible food forest. It’s similar in design to our former homestead – working in layers to add edible ground covers, shrubs, trees and vines – but I added a few new components like a nature-based play area to accommodate our growing family, larger raised beds for dedicated vegetable gardening space and perennial
My Current Garden
I remember talking with a silver-haired lady a few years back about gardening. She said she has created eleven gardens in her life, and I remember thinking that sounded like a lot. Yet here I am, living in a rental house this year, again building another garden. How many is this for me now? There was my childhood garden and about six or seven rentals
Making Good Garden Soil
A garden is only going to be as good as its soil quality, which is why we gardeners are obsessed with building better soil. Many of us are not blessed with perfect soil where we have planted our gardens. We also do not have the luxury of an endless gardening budget, allowing us to bring in fine garden loam by the dump truck load. And
Use Those Leaves
Piles of leaves under bare trees are becoming a very common sight in our cities at this time of year. Large black plastic bags filled with with leaves tend to follow this trend. As Spring approaches in a few short months, some of these same people will be running out to garden stores to buy mulch and new garden soil. If we all take a
The Great Sheet Mulching 2007 (Part III of III)
Okay, I am tired of sheet mulching. I am going to pretend this is the final chapter of the project, but in reality I still have another load of wood chips coming this week so I can finish spreading a more presentable mulch material over our brown, soggy leaf layer. I think the neighbors would probably appreciate that. The City of Portland delivered collected leaves
The Great Sheet Mulching 2007 (Part II of III)
I knew I would be doing all of the sheet mulching alone this weekend. I also knew the weather forecast was rain all weekend. To say I haven’t really been looking forward to this weekend would be an understatement. However, I had two gigantic heaps of wood chips on our front yard and someone had to move it. Saturday morning got rolling and I made
The Great Sheet Mulching 2007 (Part I of III)
Our plan is to sheet mulch our entire front and backyard. We want to eliminate all of the grass in our yard and replace it with fruit bearing trees/shrubs and beneficial insect attracting plants. Here is a quick recap of why we don’t want grass: Labor intensive – I want to spend my weekend leisure time putzing around the in garden, not mowing my lawn