The great dissapearing lawn

It's always scary to move from the idea stage to the action stage.

This week, we took the first step in turning our sloping, grassy front lawn into a garden of fruits and nectar. But before we get to the beautiful vision in our heads, we have to put in the work to get there.

The hill in front of the house looks gracious and inviting, but in reality it has been anything but. The slope is too steep for comfortable mowing - there is always the lingering fear of falling down the side.

It's also too steep to play most games on. Rolling downhill or sledding seem fun except you would end up in a thicket of English Laurel, with a poorly lighted street on the other side. Less fun, that. Especially because we live across the street from a park with a nice flat grassy area plus a good sledding hill. We didn't need a less useful version of either.

So we are going to convert it into a garden.




We have wanted to do this for years, but dreaded the labor. Luckily, the neighboring community of White Center is home to one of the best equipment rental stores around. For $75, we rented a sod cutter for the day.

sod cutter and some rolled sod

This baby sliced through the grass much more easily than we imagined. It was harder than mowing the lawn, but much easier than rototilling. It didn't take over in quite the same way.



We did learn that if you cut sod, you should remove the cut strips immediately, either by lifting them or rolling them up. Otherwise you won't be able to see where you cut, and will either miss spots or slice up your nice strips into little tatters.


Four hours of cutting yielded 3500 square feet of bare soil. Or rather, soil with cut sod on it. We lifted the sod strips and piled them into long walls which followed the line of the hill.

This was hard work, and really dirty. But it was also fun - like making a fort. Using sod strips as building material was a new experience for us - but was once a common building method. The folks who did it to make homes, without the benefit of a sod cutter, were truly stout hearted.





It took David and me about 12 man hours to roll and stack the sod. It takes weight as well as strength to wrestle the sod rolls. Noah was not able to budge them, but he helped by working the broadfork to loosen the soil.

Here is the slope with two rows of sod walls, positioned about seven feet apart down the hill. The walls ended up about eight or nine inches tall. We expect they will settle with age and time but remain as boundaries to the edges of each garden bed.

In all, we made three long terraces. They should act as water catchments, slowing the percolation of rain into the soil and storing winter moisture for our dry summers. All Meggie knows is she doesn't usually get to this part of the yard so she's excited.



Next we covered the hill with burlap bags.


Seattle is a coffee town. Many of the warehouses for the bigger companies will give you huge numbers of their bags. You just have to ask around and see who has them.


The hill used two full bales of bags - about 1600 of them. Each bag is about 4' x 2', or eight square feet, so we had 12800 feet of surface area.

That means we covered the whole area between two and three bags deep. We hope the bags will block out light and prevent any residual grass from growing back out. More crucially, they should hold the soil in place between now and our next steps - adding mulch and planting the garden.








                                    









Laying out the bags was unbelievably fast. David arrived with the bags at 11:30. Then we built a campfire and roasted hot dogs and veggie dogs. Then we started laying out the bags.


Two or three hours later, the rain started and Noah went inside. By four, David and I were done. The rain weighted the burlap so it conformed with the  contours of the hill.

From our new staircase, you now see a rounded beige hill off to your right.

It looks like some one's paper mache project. Or like a pair of khaki pants cast off by a giant.

As the rain softens the fabric I am starting to see the higher ridges where the walls of grass and soil rise up.

Right now we are all tired. The school break is over so I go back to work and Noah goes to school.



The hill will wait. Soon our buddy Heath will call to ask where we want him to drop some wood chips.

We will be ready!

 To be continued...

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Blossom by Blossom, Spring Begins

Late January and the dark is getting to us. The days are getting longer, but we are locked in shadow. The ducks ponds freeze at night. Goats really appreciate warm water to drink. They drink more of it, which is important for their urinary health and of course for milk production.

In the Pacific Northwest, the dominant season of the year is this winter/spring hybrid- endless, rainy, hinting at hopeful. Sometimes I think it starts in January with the first openings of midwinter flowers and ends in June when it finally stops raining for three glorious months.

All around Several Gardens Farm, in tiny ways, Spring is waking up.

The very first blossoming is the catkins of the filbert hedge. Filberts are wind pollinated, so they don't need to flower when the bees are active. Instead, their bare winter branches are suddenly alive with fuzzy, dangly "boy things". The female flowers are extremely subtle, but they are the part that will ripen into nuts later.

I could not get a good picture of the tiny, hot fuchsia female blossom, but here are the catkins.








Next comes the cornelian cherry dogwood. This brilliant yellow seems to be a special color - a way to start the season. Here are the fat, swelling flower buds against a grey sky.















The imposing camellias are getting ready to flower (later this month).

A single branch, with its waxy dark leaves and tissue paper flowers, is a centerpiece.

If you cut a branch while it's still in bud, the flowers that open inside are much paler pink than the ones that open outdoors.


You can make a very pretty arrangement by mixing the two of them.









But what about the edibles?

The artichoke is alive but beaten down by rain and freezing. When we get to our last frost date, I'll pull back all the tattered leaves. Strawberries are also looking pretty bad but in reality, gearing up for a comeback.


A stray habenero in the greenhouse. Pepper bushes love heat, and don't take off until the hottest part of summer. But once up, I find them remarkably tough, often surviving the mild freezes in our unheated greenhouse and limping into the next year still alive.

Any forgotten onions will provide tasty greens through our mild winters.







Cabbage gets sweeter with frost. So do Jerusalem artichokes. I dig up a few of them whenever I feel like it (which given how much work they are and how indifferent I am to them, is pretty rare).

 Arugula just keeps giving. This plant is the offspring of our summer crop. A few leaves at a time, it spices up salads all winter.

Miners' lettuce sprouts

The miners' lettuce and nasturtiums are not perennials, but they come back from seed every year.

Fava bean blossoms

These little miners' lettuce sprouts will self-thin to a couple of hardy plants. I think I'll do a story just for them when they're in season. They are pretty, tasty and easy to grow; winners in every way.





And ah, those pretty fava beans. I did not expect to find them in flower mid-January. Here's to pleasant surprises. They are usually grown as cover crops or as food, but they are semi-attractive ornamentals, and also have a lovely, waxy fragrance on warm evenings.

The oyster mushroom log has stopped putting out new growth but the old ones are still edible in soups and as flavoring, though too tough to enjoy on their own.

Of all the bee hives, the healthiest and most active is the Warre. If it stays this prosperous, expect to hear more about it in the coming year. But - it is the only hive with the full south facing exit and a wall behind it, so there may be extenuating circumstances.

 Winter is a good time to see the underlying structure of things.

The fat clusters of buds that stick out on fruit trees are the future blossoms. Thin buds that cling tightly to the stem hold leaves. You need both, so careful not to winter prune away all of your next year's fruit!









Winter or early Spring is when you check your espaliers for shape.I apologize for the clutter in this picture, but hopefully you can see that the tree is growing nicely - balanced branches starting to put out little side spurs where apples will form.

 And who isn't grateful for the Bergenia and the Beauty Berry for giving color at this time of year. I ask nothing else of them, but simply give thanks.

Excuses not to weed or deadhead

At Several Gardens Farm we care for the animals and the orchard, grow some veggies, try to keep the neighbors happy and the kid too busy to play computer games. Deadheading doesn't even make it onto the list. Weeding the perenial beds ison an as needed basis for safety or to clear space for my plants to survive. Only when I'm caught up on everything do the two get done to completion.

Most people understand this at once, but occasionally I see people giving our weeds some quizzical glances. They say things like "I wish I weren't wearing white pants - I'd help you weed" or "I love how you let your garden naturalize. I always pull those things out." Like I have time for that.

So - if you are like me, and let things go a bit, you may need a few excuses. Here's my list. I'd love you to add to it.

My chickens eat the seed heads. 

Great for old sunflowers, gone-to-seed pig weed, grain crops of all kinds.  Hint - goats and rabbits eat things too! And wildlife of all kinds.

I'm using the roots to prevent back pain. 

 I save my back by not pulling those babies out! This excuse works with anything big, stubborn, or numerous.

So many weeds - so little interest in pulling them.

There are some cool  mushrooms that grow in the mulch. I think they may be symbiotic with the plant life.

These Stropharia ambigua aren't edible, just too pretty to risk crushing while I weed.

I think they are gorgeous after they go to seed. 

Artichokes in particular are worth growing for the bloom if you forget to eat them!

Thank you Heidi for teaching me to see these in all their beauty!



You can get lost in that color



It's a honey plant. 

This is especially good with a spring "crop" of lawn dandelions, those overgrown borage plants or for pearly everlasting. If the guest asks for a sample of the honey, you reply that it's so valuable to the bees that you leave it in the hive and never collect the honey for human use.

Don't pull the weeds or we'll sting!

Nectar

More nectar

If you don't keep bees,  say "this is an important plant for native pollinators".

That works better than my old line "thatch ants metabolize the lipids in the seed capsules."







  

I was too busy preserving the harvest. 

That one's a little smug, but in fact, harvesting, canning, drying, pickling - it takes time!

 I leave them here to reduce evaporation from the soil 

works for nasturtiums, borage, claytonia, etc - the pretty weeds. Plant cover really does benefit the soil, and if I have volunteer plants, I often let them be my cover crops.

Seriously, this plant is holding down the soil. I can't pull it.

Oh - I didn't notice that! 

Use this for huge, unseemly, sprawling weeds or old, nearly dead garden plants. Use a sweet, self effacing tone, don't lay on the sarcasm.

Fireweed, hawkweed, volunteer hazel sprouts and gone-to-seed Shasta daisy

I keep planning to do it, but it just isn't happening this year. 

That's the good old honest truth. We had fun this year, and difficult times too. We nursed sickness, we dealt with problems, some serious, some silly. We danced and met new babies. We lived. We kept meaning to weed, but other things got in the way...

Note - certain invasive weeds have no place in a garden - Himalayan blackberry, perennial morning glory, butterfly weed, etc. I do my best to fight these, though they return again and again. The things I'm not afraid to slack on are the more run of the mill weeds.

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