Tag Archives: gardening

Learning About Garden Weeds

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herb-garden-1

This is my herb garden looking southwest. When I first planted the herb garden, I used a pick axe to make "pots" in the clay and cobble. Look at how much soil has been built up over three years of ranging chickens and turkeys.

A weed is just a weed until its use has been found.
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In the past, Shaen cared for our household garden. We always had some garden fresh foods and eggs from our backyard flock. In the last few years, Shaen’s focus has been on learning about pasture development and the care of larger animals.

The garden has never been so neglected before. This year I decided that I would take on the work. I would learn about gardening so Shean could focus on more challenging tasks. I’ve learned a number of things about myself this year. I’m not a very enthusiastic gardener. I would rather plant a permanent forest garden or work with pasturing animals. I guess I am more of a herder than a gardener.

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This is my herb garden looking northeast.

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This is my herb garden looking southeast. The total width of the garden is 15 feet and it is right outside my kitchen. Note the clothes line that is illegal in many municipalities. I don't think bylaws like that are very enlightened.

It’s not the work of gardening that I do not like. When I break the surface of the soil for cultivating annuals, I can’t help but wonder what damage I’m doing to the ecology of the soil flora. I notice that the cultivated soil loses its moisture and appears “dead” very quickly.

In Kamloops, mulching cultivated soil is a must. All of these observations have got me wondering how much of our traditional cultivated garden can I convert to permaculture or to a forest garden. If you would like to learn more about forest gardens please read Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops by Martin Crawford. My goal now is to have very small plots of cultivated soil surrounded by large areas of perennial herbs, shrubs and trees. In these small cultivated areas I grow peas, lettuce, beets, carrots, garlic, and onions.

Another area I use traditional cultivation is our hoop-houses. In the winter, the hoop-houses are used for housing the laying hens. In summer, the hens go onto pasture and the hoop-houses are converted to greenhouses. These greenhouses are filled with heavy feeding, heat loving plants like tomatoes, peppers and squash. Every year we move the hoop-houses to new locations to break the pathogen cycle.

I am also trying to make peace with our weeds. Part of this truce is learning about the medicinal and culinary uses of weeds. Some of my new green friends are chickweed, shepherd’s purse, cleaver, plantain, dandelion, and yarrow. The list continues to grow.

I research each new plant that comes into bloom, and more often than not, I find myself adding the weed to my list of friendly plants. I cannot help but marvel at these weeds. They grow where nothing else seems to grow and have an unsurpassed vitality. To the knowledgeable observer, the type of weeds growing in an area can tell us about the state of the soil.

Having animals also makes me value weeds. Animals can take plants I cannot eat and transform them into rich milk, tasty eggs, and flavorful meat. It gets me wondering how many of these “weeds” I can eat or use for my animals.

Part of making peace with weeds is accepting my garden doesn’t look like Butchart Gardens. I have given up my human desire for order and replace it with the chaos of natural system design. It means giving up on one type of esthetic and replacing it with another. This means, along with tolerating the weeds, I am also allowing the “volunteers” to grow up in my garden. Volunteers, are cultivated plants that come up spontaneously and are “naturalized” to the local environment. Sometimes they come up in awkward places. This means I have to use my creativity to work around these plants. I still haven’t given up rows, but I am working on it!

greens-garden

This is my greens garden. I planted beets, carrots and salad greens. I had a fabulous growth of chickweed, dandelion, and nasturiums which are wonderful bitter greens for salads. Way in the back is a chicken hoop house. The chickens live in the hoop house in the winter and go on pasture in the summer.

hoop-house

As you can see, hoop houses are not beautiful but they become fabulous greenhouses after a winter of chicken manure. We grow heavy feeding plants like squash and tomatoes in the hoop houses. Note the straw mulch on the potato patch behind the hoop house. We now always mulch any bare soil.

This year, we have added four standard fruit trees to our forest garden. We have transplanted over eighty feet of raspberry canes throughout the garden. I have started a program of growing trees from seed for our forest garden. I am growing walnut and black locust trees. The black locust trees have seed pods that chickens love to eat. I am looking at making cuttings of our currents and spreading these tough plants all over the property. My only rule for planting is the plants must be food for my family or food for our animals, including our wild visitors.

Finally, my herb garden has gone wild. I remember only a few years ago using a pick-axe to dig small “pots” into the rock-hard clay. Four years of compost and animal manure has enlivened a moonscape. My herb garden is the new home for some tadpoles. My daughter Erika saved the tadpoles from a drying-up mud puddle. When the tadpoles mature, we are going to use the toads for insect control in the greenhouses and forest garden.

Terracing a Slope and Planning a Pasture

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lower-hill-looking-west

This is the lower part of the hill looking west. It is very dry and the soil is poor. You can see the narrow path the goes to the top of the hill. We are dumping waste organic materials in the area below the path to help hold water.? Cobbles fall onto the path making walking dangerous.

Last winter we put away meat, vegetables, fruit and dairy in freezers. For more information please read Winter Storage Part I and Part II. We lived off our cold stores and dried goods until the middle of March this year before having to go to the grocery store for fresh vegetables and fruits. Living off winter stores was a very educational experience for my family. We had some problems with our root cellar freezing at one point during the winter. We lost some carrots, potatoes and parsnips due to freezing. We lost a few squash to rot, but for the most part, everything made it through the winter in very good condition.

The one thing I would change for next year would be to grow greens under indoor lights. I would like to grow Chinese greens, parsley, cilantro and try to over winter some tomatoes and peppers. For the hens, growing flats of spelt grass is a wonderful winter supplement. I would like to have a lemon, lime and avocado tree. I don’t think this is very practical, but I’m thinking about it.

This spring we are ready to increase the challenge. We have decided to try producing as much food as we can on our property. On the back of our property we have about an acre of unused land. Unfortunately, the area has a steep slope and faces north. There is a gully on the west side filled with small fir and alder trees. The rest of the hill has tiny fir trees trying to get a start on the steep, rocky slope. The parent material is clay and cobble. There is a small skidder trail at the top of the property which could become a garden after we build some soil with chickens.

Shaen has started to terrace the slope. There are a few weeks every year after the snow melts when the soil is not hard as rock. In a few weeks this window will close and the soil will refuse the pick. He has started a main path to the upper area at about a 25 degree angle. He needs the path to be large enough to get a wheel barrel up the hill to where we will have chickens in a hoop house on deep litter. This deep litter will take up the nitrogen from the chicken droppings. After the chickens are finished, we will grow heavy-feeding, heat-loving plants such as squash, peppers and tomatoes in the hoop house.

After Shaen finishes the main path to the upper area, he plans to run smaller horizontal paths off the main path. We will be planting the slope using permaculture principles. We will be using a drip system for watering to get the plants going. We are trying to decide what type of plants we want on the slope. Blueberries, currents, hazelnuts, black walnut, fruit trees, and other edible perennials will make up the base planting. We will plant Russian olives, honey locust, and other plants for wild animal, bird and insect consumption. We want a place for the wild in our garden.

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This is about half way up the hill looking west. As we move closer to the gully and the trees there is more ground cover.

We have also leased four acres from a local farmer, which we are hoping to develop into pasture for cows, pigs and chickens. The four acres are covered with mature pine and alder trees. There is native sage, sedges and forbs. The area is covered with bunch grass. The land has well water at the top of the property that we can gravity feed to the area we want to convert to pasture. We have done a lot of reading about pasture development and management. We would like to put some of that theory into practice, if we can.

We will have access to the leased property later in the summer. We will move Patty, our Jersey cow, to the new property after we have built a hay shed and shelter for her. We have plans to try out Joel Salatin’s intensive pasturing system using electric fencing and controlled grazing. We can run the hens or broilers after the cow to eat the maggots out of the cow’s patties and spread the patties, fertilizing and improving the pasture. This sanitizes the pasture for the cow’s later return. We have dreams of hogs digging up the gully and doing the heavy work of turning compost for us.

I will continue to update through the summer about the progress of these two research projects.

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This is the top of the hill looking east. There is a flat area and small road to my right. The treed area is right behind me.

Updated May 13, 2012: Please read Brittle Grassland Pasture Undated: Photo Essay. We decided to shelf terracing the slope while we focus on the pasture project.