A Man Is Like A Tree: Sheet Mulch 2.0 and Dueling Gardens

OK. As promised, I wanted to update you on some gardening work. I'm really excited about what we have going on in the back yard. First a little reflection on this years experimenting.

In previous posts, I've given some detailed accounts of our gardening experiments. Now that the last of the veggies have been harvested, I'd like to offer a little in the way of final reflections. It's easy to focus on the mistakes we made, but first I want to say what worked well. First, weeding was very easy. There were literally no weeds until just a few showed up in August. Even then it wasn't much at all. Second, I was very happy with the salad greens polyculture - a scattering of mixed seeds. The greens were densely planted and therefor shaded by other plants, keeping them from bolting and getting bitter. At one point in the summer I decided to clean out old radish stalks and others that had bolted and gotten stringy. This might have been a mistake because afterward the lettuces bolted in the more-direct exposure. I had success with a few squash plants. After a slow start, the tomatoes worked well. A few peppers. Cucumbers were pretty good, but not as plentiful as they should have been. Turnips did well. Red radishes were fun to hunt for and plenty of them were good.

What didn't work were root vegetables and brassicas. I only had a couple carrots germinate; I think they got lost in the polyculture planting. Cauliflower and broccoli were stringy messes, not nice heads, aside from a few broccoli servings. Melons, cantaloupe and watermelon got some fruits, but were too small. Fall Daikon were pretty sad, and practically no fall greens germinated.

If I were judging by our produce yield alone, I'd have to say it was a pretty lousy year. I put a lot of energy and resources into the garden, and got relatively little out of it. I think I could have gotten more if I had known more about how to read the conditions of the plants and react to them. I often felt, "Well these look terrible. They shouldn't, but they do, but I don't know why," and I didn't take any action to correct the problems. I don't have the experience. I pick things up from books and from friends, but there's so much to learn. In the end I think my plants were a little starved this year. My biggest mistakes were not shredding the leaves - my main mulching material, being a little careless in my polyculture planting, and not reacting well to plants that were showing signs of stress.

However, I'm really thinking long term here, so I don't think of this year as a failure. I added A LOT of organic matter to the soil. And I think that organic matter will convert into a better growing medium over time. The whole leaves seemed to linger until about August, when they suddenly seemed to be converted to worm castings overnight. The chickens have been on the property for not even 6 months yet. They're such hard workers, but the manure they're adding hasn't been utilized yet. When I think about yield in a broader sense, there is a lot to account for. We have a lot more water absorption - storage in the ground- happening. We're attracting beneficial wildlife - earth worms, pollinators, and I assume good soil microbes. Eggs, manure, entertainment from the chickens. The soil is getting better. The inputs we've put in will be paying off for years, a solid investment if you ask me.

So from last weekend up to today we did a lot of work on the property. First we harvested the last of the daikon, some mustard greens, and a few collards. Then we dumped a whole bunch of whole leaves from our yard on the garden in preparation for the chickens. This is the dueling gardens concept. This year's chicken run will be next summer's veggie garden, and this year's veggie garden is next summer's chicken run. And they alternate every year. The chickens scratch, eat old veggies and weed seeds, and add manure, and there aren't any nutrients being harvested by us via veggies for a year. The idea with the whole leaves is to create deep litter to protect the soil and keep it thawed and full of insect and worm life for the chickens to enjoy. It also provides a "carbon diaper" for absorption of the chicken manure, and endless entertainment for the chickens themselves. Since we moved them there Saturday they are really loving it. And we love watching them from the kitchen window - little triangle tales pointing to the sky as they scratch and peck. My hope is that over the next year they shred the leaves and turn them into the soil and that everything shapes up so that next fall we can basically shape up the beds, throw some straw over them and they'll be really rich, fertile, and lovely to plant in the Spring of 2018. They work all day. Perhaps the leaves will be shredded sooner, and I can collect them and then add new leaves. Yet another function of the hens: solar powered leaf shredders that happen to weed, till, control insects, fertilize, and produce eggs and entertainment at the same time!

In the old chicken run / new veggie garden, I lightly raked up the straw, leaves, and scraps that the chickens were working with. I wasn't sure if I should've left this stuff down at the soil level, but I decided it might be better in the mulch, so I pulled it off and set it aside. Then I marked were the beds were going to be (designed for a low amount of walking path space) and forked the soil a bit. It wasn't full tilling, but just stabbing and pulling on the fork a bit. This area was grass before the chickens arrived. Adding a lot of kitchen scraps, compost piles, straw, along with the scratching by the chickens eventually killed the grass. In retrospect I wish I had had more organic matter down on the ground to better protect the soil. In old photos of the property, I see tractors and machinery were parked in the yard, so the soil was pretty compacted and I thought the loosening would help. Curiously I find a lot of broken dishes whenever I dig in the yard. I wonder if there was an idea behind burying them.

After that I put about an inch or two of compost from the City of Beacon Transfer Station (the dump) over the beds. Boy this stuff was beautiful. It was really hard to cover it with cardboard - so tempting to leave it and plant right into it. I must say that I'm pretty excited about the free compost that they have at the transfer station. Some people in town think that it might contain weed seeds - people put all sorts of junk in the materials they bring to the dump. But the piles are the size of houses and they are smoking/steaming hot. Then they screen the stuff. It's super rich, dark black fluffy stuff. It looks better than what you buy in bags at the store. I'm going to give it a try this year and see what happens.

To correct last year's mistake of using whole leaves for sheet mulching, well, I went ahead and shredded them this time. Some leaves I picked up around the neighborhood had been gathered using a lawnmower and were already shredded. For the rest, I borrowed my friend Justin's lawnmower. The mower probably didn't do the finest job. A leaf shredder/chipper is on the shopping list for the future. We just can't afford one after doing the garage roof. But I look forward to making a lot of mulch with it in the future. Although, we'll have to see how the chickens do with the leaves this year, as I mentioned above. Perhaps they're our little shredders and a gas guzzling machine won't be necessary after all.

So we piled 5 to 6 inches of shredded leaves over the beds, on top of the cardboard layer. The cardboard layer was installed over the entire garden this year including the walking paths. On top of the leaves we threw the material that we raked up from the chicken run, a couple bags of grass clippings, and then all of the compost we made on site this year. After some rain delay, I gathered more compost from the transfer station, and added that on top of our home made compost. I think I hauled about 3 tons of the stuff in our little Honda Fit over the past week! Finally I topped it with straw to protect everything from the elements. Now it will sit for the winter. Hopefully the deep mulch will keep soil organisms warm and at work over the winter, helping to break down the material. Some freezing and thawing will help too.

I'm pretty excited about this sheet mulch/dueling gardens work. I think I've made some improvements to the sheet mulching. And I plan on being more careful with my planting this year. Probably a little more traditional planting in rows, some smaller polyculture arrangements, and hopefully a better ability to read the soil and plant health.

One thing permaculturists think about is an energy input versus output. Eventually we want to be creating more energy (in a broad sense) than we're bringing in. Resource use is part of that. Eventually we want to be producing more on site than what we need ourselves, at which point we'll have a surplus to work with. Since arriving here, there has been a lot of energy going into the property. But I think we did an even better job this Fall with the sheet mulching effort. Last year I bought a lot of organic matter. This year the only thing I purchased was the straw. Some gasoline was used to transport materials from the dump and from the neighbors. But it's far more cost and energy efficient to do it that way, rather than buy materials from a store. It's local and it's getting more for our tax dollars.

A lot of human muscle power and calorie energy and time were used. Had I a truck, the guys at the dump could have dumped a load into it with the front loader. Instead I had to shovel it all into bags and pails. Again though, human power is a resource that is regenerative - the more you use it (carefully and reasonably) the stronger it gets, and I feel good about doing it that way.

We have to count the cost and energy of the organic chicken feed. I believe we're saving a lot of feed by having them pasture on the old veggie garden - I rarely see them eating pellets. We also buy a lot of food on site for us to eat right now. We will never be able to produce 100% of our own food, and we wouldn't want to do that anyway - it would be pretty boring. But I hope someday to be eating all of our summer and fall veggies and fruits off the property and preserving a lot of it for winter and spring. Leftovers and kitchen scraps of the food we buy are used to feed the chickens, which they turn into fertilizer, so more is being added to the soil in that way also.

There's much more to consider with the energy audit, this stuff is just the beginning. But it's fun to think about and fun to aspire to a real sustainable life on the property. All of the time, energy, and money we're putting into the property here will easily pay for itself over time . And I really enjoy doing the work too.

I will soon be thinking a lot more about some of the perennial food plants that we want to add - fruit trees, more berries, and some perennial veggies, that will go outside of these annual gardens. Also I have what I think if might be a great greenhouse idea that is incorporated into the dueling gardens rotation. More on that later. Here are some photos:

The girls on the old veggie garden: