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School Days

firstdayofschool1

School. The nourishing routine began. They needed this. And Chas started kindergarten.

With this came new friendships, early mornings slicing carrots, spreading jam, checking homework. Chas is eager to please his teacher; he often reminds me of the one important thing to do when I am bogged down in these daily details.

“Mommy, are you staying with me at school today?”

I think will rock kindergarten

I volunteer now, like many other parents at our school. On Mondays I spend the entire day in the school garden, raking, mulching, planting, weeding, thinning, harvesting, my handiwork echoed sixfold by eager little kindergarten helpers. They take turns. When teacher Kathy isn’t looking, I let the most dexterous child handle the pruning shears to collect rosemary sprigs. He is ready, despite the rules.

Chas plays alongside us in the garden, with no interest in garden maintenance. There are bridges to build and battles to fight under the live oak canopy. He steps back into the sunlight occasionally and his flaxen halo glows in the bright morning light.

It is the little school up in the mountain. We love it here.

Ford is in a classroom with seventeen other children, mostly girls, and, according to his teacher, he is raising his hand at every question, jumping at each opportunity. In the whole-school music class, he volunteers to sing solo. At the same time he is navigating new social ground. He made two close friends on the first day of school, a magnetic, spinning connection over goofy faces, animated gestures and general silliness. And he has discovered the comic book.

In the car on the way to Santa Cruz, on a golden Friday afternoon, Ford sits in the backseat of the car with a stack of paper and a pencil. He draws. By the time the sun has set and I lay the board back atop the car, I look into the backseat to find a stack full of comics that he has drawn. They include page upon page of alien species on lush, fruity topography choosing flowers to eat, introducing themselves to other species. There is no war, no battles, no conflict other than which flowers to eat. There are so many, after all, from which to choose.

firstdayofschool2

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Sheet Mulching

You are looking at a gardener’s gold mine; a stockpile of fallen leaves and recycled cardboard boxes, all flattened down and ready for work. I’m building more garden beds right now without building the heavy-duty raised beds; this time I’m creating a lasagna garden or a sheet mulched garden. It’s great because this doesn’t require anything I have to go out and buy and certainly doesn’t require of me any more back-breaking carpentry work (since I’ll be making another chicken tractor this weekend). Somebody please stop me with the chicken nonsense.

The whole idea behind the raised beds that I built earlier was to keep the gophers at bay, who have menaced me from the beginning in this garden, but it seems that Seti and the cats have gained the upperhand on the gophers.  Nearly every morning I see a kitten batting a gopher around on the patio, so I’ve determined that quite possibly the gophers are either on retreat or in fewer numbers now.
to be fair,

You can build some fast garden beds using the permaculture technique of sheet mulching to build up a simple, low-maintenance, no-dig garden bed, an instant garden of sorts. It gets you going immediately. And I need that. Sheet mulching suppresses weeds and grasses and dandelions and EVEN OXALIS. You can build sheet mulched beds atop any kind of soil, except for that concrete-looking, leached-out, rock-hard soil that I’ve got going out back. (In my case, I’m building up off the ground and carting in more earth and compost to fill it. The rest of the process is identical for everyone.)

Here’s how you do it:

Start with an area of 4 square meters, and build out as time and materials allow.

You’ll need:

    1.  a concentrated compost layer (this is for the worms): enriched compost, poultry or stock manure, worm castings or the like. For my first bed I simply removed the chicken tractor from where it was sitting and left all the manure in its place.
    2.  a weed barrier: 4-6 sheet layers of newspaper, cardboard, burlap bags, old carpet, worn-out jeans, whatever you can find along these lines. Place this atop the concentrated compost layer.
    3.  a compost layer: Well conditioned compost, grass clippings, seaweed and leaves are ideal materials to spread over the weed barrier. It must be weed free, and it should add up to about 3 inches tall, fairly compacted, atop the weed barrier.
    4.  a top layer: leaves, twigs and small branches, fern fronds, straw, wood chips, wood shavings, sawdust, bark, etc. 3-5 inches deep. These will inhibit moisture loss and slowly decompose over time, much like leaf litter on the forest floor.
    5. your plants! Now you can make some holes in the top layer and insert into those spaces some plants–but the trick is to plant them close together rather than too far apart.

Here’s a visual aid for the visual learners like myself from The Humanity Development Library:

And here’s a quick video by the father of Permaculture himself, Bill Mollison, as explains the mechanism of sheet mulching while planting a lazy gardener’s potato patch:

It really couldn’t get any easier to start another garden bed. The hard part is maintaining what you’ve planted while allowing your chickens to range. I’d like to see someone’s clever assortment of chickenproofing strategies in the garden. Until then, be prepared to see some jerry-rigged aviary netting and the like in my garden, because that’s how I roll.

Who else besides me is still trying to make room for more summer/ fall vegetables?

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June’s Garden

June garden

Crossing out #2 on the list, this garden is now in full swing. Just about everything growing out there is pictured above, but  I can’t believe I haven’t included the zucchinis and squashes. Really. They’ve reached such an absurd level of abundance that, well, perhaps for me it’s enough just seeing them pile up in the kitchen.

I tend to appreciate what little I have as opposed to how much. For your consideration, the smattering of ripe ‘Stupice’ tomatoes and the variety of tomatoes yet to come:


raisedBeds-20

Alis has some tender shoots and blooms growing over at her dad’s house, just a few miles from where we live. Siri doesn’t mess around,  Denise has a beautiful greens assortment (of which I’m envious, ever since the chickens mowed all of ours (I’m learning what to keep covered)! Also, she may be on a plane to Melbourne right now, but I happen to know that Cyndi has been getting her hands dirty, too.

What’s growing in your garden right now?