Yeardly Arthur

Jay Angler wrote:"Unsightly Stump" is in the eye of the beholder.

If you know someone with a chainsaw, have them chainsaw out the middle of the stump from the top and you have a natural planter! If you don't want to plant into the hole, fill it with sawdust and give it regular doses of Fertilizer P, and it should rot faster.  And yes, I expect the right kinds of mushrooms would happily live on it!

We did just that, filling natural cracks with P, old coffee and compost tea. After a year I chopped a bowl out of the middle of one of them, which promptly filled back up with oak bracket fungus. A year later I cleared that out, then kept digging all the way to soil.  That stump is now a collar for a new apple tree. Another one is growing a ginkgo.

We moved to our happy hillside  3 years ago, a half-acre wooded lot on a suburban street just up the hill from a goat farm. Unfortunately we had a number of hundred-year-old oak trees near the house that were sharing too many of their branches with us at random times. They had to be cut down, which we found out is not cheap, but is a little bit cheaper if you dispose of the wood yourself. That left us wondering what to do with literally tons of wood and unsightly stumps.

We still think keeping the cut wood was a good choice. It saved us thousands of dollars in clean-up fees, and gave me an unexpected but not unwelcome workout schedule for nearly a month. We used the timber to fashion terraces on our heavy clay slope, backfilling the spaces with branches, leaves, and organic debris. We now have a series of five new garden beds that are still moist and green even after three weeks of drought.  

We're encouraging the stumps to decay in their own time as hugelkultur beds. One has become a productive dewberry patch, and another a small multipurpose garden.

We purchased a healthy specimen of our native elderberry (S. Canadensis) a few years ago, propagated it in pots and planted it in various spots around our property to see where it would do best. It decided to thrive in our hugelkultur beds, and spread through the woodpiles like lightning.

I plan to keep up with it as a major source of fruit *and* biomass for compost and mulch. It has adapted so well, I won't have any problem chopping it back wherever it becomes a nuisance, and letting it flourish where it harmonizes with the rest of our developing food forest.

Eric Hanson wrote:Jen,  Throw all of it on the ground.  Who cares if the ratio is not perfect--the ground will take care of the imperfections.  Sure, it may not get perfectly hot, but just sitting and decaying on the ground will do wonders for the ground.  And if you get the browns later on--even better, your greens will now be heavily inoculated with goodies from the ground!
Eric

What Eric said ^^. Compost is like a bad haircut. The cure is to wait two weeks and comb it out.

While I do realize that composture is a calling for many, and a religion for some, the overarching, abiding Truth is that Nature doesn't have five-gallon buckets, and would likely scoff at the idea of using them. I've been making compost for over forty years, and have learned that there is a (very) wide margin for error, and that margin is usually identical to the dimensions of your composting bin.

My philosophy, based on decades of doing just about everything wrong at least twice (and still not learning my lesson), is to put compostable materials in the bin as they make themselves available. Sometimes that's a season's worth of green pumpkin vines, and sometimes it's a truckload of autumn leaves or a pile of sawdust. Whatever shows up goes in, gets stirred up with whatever came before, and waits for the next rain (or a five-gallon bucket of grey water). Worms optional, but preferred.

I'm happy to offer a concise definition: I measure wealth/prosperity by personal happiness.
Everything else, in my opinion, is tangential to the discussion.

Jeff Peter wrote:Couple things:

Garlic, when naturalized as you want to do, are going to crowd in on each other so much that they'll resemble clumps of chives. They scape, which are edible, but the bulbs will be useless.
Garlic needs spacing to make the big bulbs and cloves.

Have you thought about perennial onions, also known as egyptian walking onions? Dig and eat as young green onions, or later as bulbing green onions. Reliable self sower/ spreader, but not annoyingly so.

Quite attractive plants, and you will never need to buy onions again. Well, except during winter.

There are wild spots where the garlic gets bunchy. I use those as seed reserves for the next time I want to plant a new row in the kitchen garden. And yes - we have enjoyed our walking onions immensely. A neighbor gave us a big bunch over twenty years ago, and they just keep getting better with time.

I have developed a foolproof method for mastery of the garden space year after year - at least as far as my neighbors are concerned.

Every year I introduce around a dozen different plants in my garden. As they all die off, I replace them with something else, so the beds are always full and green.
Of the hundred or so varieties planted over the course of the growing season, usually around four species survive, and even thrive.

The neighbors think I'm THE expert gardener of those four things. The Best They've Ever Seen, by insistent acclamation.

I have decided to do nothing to discourage that opinion.

Thom Bri wrote:I am kind of going in the opposite direction. I let everything go to seed and grow the survivors, so I suppose they may be re-wilding a bit. Tomatoes, lettuce, various greens like arugula, broccoli, beans.

We're definitely doing that, too. We can rely on peanuts, sweet potatoes and sunflowers coming up whether we plant them or not, and we usually see a mid-season crop of volunteer tomatoes, too.  But we're also adding tastier domestic versions of native plants as well, taking up the spaces where invasives used to be.

Wondering how many folks have taken the cheap and easy route of transplanting edible "weeds" from roadsides and yards into their garden plots?
We've been amazed at what native and naturalized plants can do when given a little space and decent soil.

So far, we've has success with wild onion/garlic, lambsquarters, chickweed, curly dock, dandelion, dewberries, elderberries, plantains, clingers, ground cherries, sorrel, pecans and muscadines, all of which have come up on their own, and thrived in our garden beds.

What local species have others adopted successfully into their gardens and food forests?

Carla Terry wrote:I am interested in drinking chicory, but not sure where to get it and even how to grow or make my coffee. I believe it is the root, but not completely sure. Since I can't have caffeine, this has been a great alternative for me, but would love to grow instead of buying.

Common chicory (Cichorium intybus), or 'blue dandelion'  grows just about everywhere, often found on roadsides and in fields and meadows. It is related to dandelions (Taraxacum officinale), and the taller, lemon yellow false dandelions of desert chicory (Pyrrhopappus spp),  and catsear (Hypochaeris radicata). All of these are edible, and all of their roots can be roasted and brewed as a coffee substitute.    

Apparently chicory is easy to grow, since it has been introduced all over the world and seems to do well in any temperate environment. Seeds are readily available online, or you could ask your local garden center for help. We have saved and replanted the native desert chicory that volunteers in our yard, both for the flowers and as a coffee substitute.