Thursday, April 28, 2011

Convert your lawn into a veggie garden.

When you think about your front/back lawn, is it something you use daily? Do you go out and sit  or lay on it? Do you take long strolls in it? Do you get a return on your investment of money put into watering, and time spent cutting the grass edging, or maybe you hire a landscaper to do it?

If your answer is not really, to any of those above questions, and you enjoy eating fresh organic food, then maybe you might consider converting your lawn into a vegetable garden. There are tons of great advantages such as, creating a poly culture in your yard attracting beneficials insects, birds and other wild life. It can help reduce your grocery bill, and improve the quality of food you eat.  Now I know some of the arguments are "but lawns look so beautiful" etc. Well let me tell you veggie gardens can look beautiful too! Check these out.


Via -http://gardenbeautiful.wordpress.com/

Via-http://theraisedvegetablegardenbeds.com/



Here is a good book on the subject "Food not Lawns"

Also John from growingyourgreens.com has lots of great videos, and has an awesome front yard veggie garden.

Tell me your thoughts, do you know of anyone whose done this? How did it turn out?

Thanks --Dave

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

IKEA Gets Worms : TreeHugger

Here is a little post over at treehugger.com that i stumbled upon. Apparently they are going to do vermicomposting with all of the food scraps from there amazingly yummy kitchen scraps. Well the food is, the scraps are probably yucky..
IKEA Gets Worms : TreeHugger

Monday, April 25, 2011

Two new videos up


Hey everybody, I've uploaded two new videos. The first one is a "How to" video on making a DIY worm tower for your garden.
And the second video is the second installment of this years, garden update :) Enjoy

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

We had our first strawberry from our garden this year

It was pretty good , it wasn't this one, but it was one just like it :)
Yum! The good news is there are TONS more to come.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Got a worm tower made for a friend as a present, and harvested some worms to go along with them. Also harvested some worm juice from my new bins. Its only been sitting about a week or so and i already had a full cup of black liquid gold. I'll be posting  a short video of it soon.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Trees planted

Well I got the 12 trees in the ground today in our little hugelkultur bed. Time will tell if these little guys take hold. They were free from the Arbor day people, unfortunately they were kind of moldy looking and, I'm not sure if they are going to end up pulling through.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

How legumes fix nitrogen in the soil

My wife and I were talking about legumes (pod producing plants such as peanuts, peas, beans as well as plants such as clover and buckwheat) and wondering about how they fix nitrogen in the soil. Do they store it up within themselves and then is it released into the soil upon there decay? Do they suck it out of the air, and put straight into the soil? If so how?

Well I did a little research and it appears as though the correct answer is, mostly the former.  Let me try and explain. As I understand it The legumes's roots form a symbiotic relationship with specialized bacteria called Rhizobia, that help convert the nitrogen from the air into something the plant can use. During the lifetime of this plant these bacteria continue to convert the nitrogen to the plant, but do not release it to the surrounding soil/plant life in the garden. Upon the death of the legume, the nitrogen is released from the plant, and becomes available for use by other plants in the garden.

These types of plants are great for crop rotations when you have previously planted high nitrogen demand plants.

A few things to keep in mind:

  1. Nitrogen is only released to the soil upon the death of legume plants.
  2. Calcium can intensify the ability to produce nitrogen by the bacteria.
  3. If the soil already contains a fair amount of nitrogen, nitrogen fixing plants/bacteria will not be able to add much.
So if you ever wondered how that works now you know! Hope that helps and if you have any thing to add or corrections please feel free to comment below.


P.S My wife was right, as usual. ;)

Yucky wind

Wind 25 to 35 mph, with gusts up to 50mph over night. I think the baby trees will have to wait one more day..

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Hugelkultur !

We recieved shipment of 10 free trees from the arbor day foundation the other day, and didnt really have any place ready for them yet. After reading the planting instructions they say to plant them  somewhere nice for a year, and then you can transplant them to their final location.

I thought this would be a great chance to try my hand at a little hugelkultur experiment. For those who don't know Paul Wheaton over at Permies.com has a great write up on hugelkultur. From what I've read people in desert settings might see the greatest benefit through water savings with this method of creating garden beds. Being the desert rat that I am, I said lets give it a go.

I've had a lot of spare firewood laying around and some of it was quite marginal when I first got it, so I took a few of them and soaked them in some buckets that I collected rain water from awhile back.  Fast forward like a week, and its time to go in the ground.  After digging a trench and adding the soaked logs as well as some dry stuff, i interspersed it with 50% composted material from my compost bin ( oh and about 100 red wigglers came along for the ride! )  then covered that with a thick layer of native soil and a little bit of finished compost/cow manure. watering between layers.

Tomorrow we will plant some trees and see how it goes, I plan on posting up a little video on this later in the week.

Monday, April 11, 2011

How to build a great worm bin.

Heres my latest video on making a better worm bin. Please leave me some feed back. let me know what you think. Or if you have any suggestion on ways to improve  the system let me know id love to hear about it!

Friday, April 8, 2011

Design work this weekend

We'll, I think this weekend we are finally going to sit down and draw up the layout for our yard based on the things we've learned in permaculture and zones. We've been planing it for awhile now, and i've borrowed ye'old push along measurement wheel, to help keep things scale. The kids should have fun with it too. Hopefully something akin to the image on the right.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Southern Oregon Permaculture Institute

Some cool permaculture tips for this spring.

Spider mites >: [

Well it looks like we have a little bit of a spider mites problem in the garden. Researching some organic ways to take care of the issues. Ill be making a video about it in the next few days.

--If you have any recommendations lets hear them!

Fertilizing the no-dig garden

We noticed some problems with some of our veggies this year, and are trying some fertilizing methods to help green, some of our yellowing plants.

How to build a greenhouse.

Here is a short video on how we built our green house out here in the high desert of California.