Jeanine's permaculture projects

Inspired by Tyler here is my personal permie journey.

I joined permies.com exactly one year ago and that is when a converted from organic to permaculture.
There are so many photos on Facebook already that I will just have to start from today with new photos.
Here is a link to my Facebook photos which is also at the bottom of all posts.
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.292522040820090.67008.100001868904943&type=3&l=2363985e56

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.292522547486706.67009.100001868904943&type=3&l=3c4cbc096e
Elephant garlic and regular garlic are my pets. This year I only harvested 40lbs of elephant garlic due to a little setback last year (we ate most of it).
I didn’t weigh the regular garlic. I stopped trying to increase my production of regular garlic but then I found an easy way to make garlic powder so now I’ll get back into increasing the production of regular garlic.

Other than that there are LOTS of assorted plants. Basically if you take Nicks list – subtract the purely tropical stuff (like avocadoes and citrus) then I’m growing all of that. Thank you Nick for putting together such a great list – I started but lost patience with the whole idea.

In todays photo I am looking at the circle garden and have decided I have TOO much stuff in there. I need to just stick with the apples, muscadines and perennials (herbs, berries) and then fill in with elephant garlic over the winter. It is too confusing at the moment, I can’t find anything, stepping on everything etc.

Very pretty garden! I like the decorative element of the trimmed shrubs (what are they?)

lovely and inviting

Thanks Brenda, Tyler the shrubs at the entry and exit are boxwoods. The interior is such a jumble that the boxwoods help me define the area. It also defines it for visitors who can't figure out where to put thier feet. It is my way of giving an illusion of order and also telling people to stay on the path and not stomp all over my plants.

As an illusion of order they work great and something I might emulate if I can figure out a shrub to use. Maybe Rosemary....

I am currently making some changes to this particular garden. The permanent plants do well with out any supplemental watering and don't like heavy nitrogen (as in manure). Currently the corn, tomatoes, potatoes and carrots seem to do better with a little dressing from the poultry pens and some extra water - this is not making my rosemary and other herbs happy, it turns the muscadine grapes sour, and I think it leads to diseases on the apples.

So my change is going to be that I will only plant elephant garlic (it really liked the clover) as an annual crop. The rest, apples, blueberry, grapes, rosemary, oregano, marjoram, valerian, chives, mint and daylilies seem to do better without supplemental watering and just moving around the 'compost-in-place' barrel.

My point is...... I can now use rosemary in this area to give it form and structure. The one that is in there now is struggling because it is getting much more attention than it would like. Mine do not like to be watered at all. I will probably remove the hollies (that you can't see in the pic) and replace them with rosemary. Then no more watering for this area.

Today's project: The new chicken coop, the geese, and the hotwire will (I hope) offer protection for the new birds from the local dogs. This used to be my potting shed. The it occured to me that the area around it was a GREAT food supply and nice shady place in the summer for the birds.

I do love plastic netting. I can change it and move it on a whim so when the birds get this area cleaned out I will simply move it.

The elephant garlic harvest this year - 40lbs after cutting greens. As I said earlier I didn't even bother to weigh the regular garlic. I'll save all of it for replanting. Tomorrow is sorting and storing day for the garlic. It has been laying out to cure a bit before deciding what we'll eat and what we'll plant.

One of the major factors in increasing production is NOT TO EAT ALL OF IT.

We have lots of corms. Since they take two years I need to decide on a elephant garlic corm bed and mark it so I'll remember where I put it next year.

elephant garlic harvest May2012

Finished a new small hugel bed today. It used to be a path to another section of the yard but it has been fenced off for the birds. Threw in some mustard seed and onion seed for good luck. It won't be ready to do much until spring but I'm sure it will be good moisture retention for the nearby horseradish and apple tree over the summer.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.292522040820090.67008.100001868904943&type=3&l=2363985e56#!/photo.php?fbid=339967829408844&set=a.292522040820090.67008.100001868904943&type=3&l=2363985e56&theater

Great pics! I need to get some more stuff posted, I even have some sitting on my dumbphone that I just haven't uploaded. Thanks for sharing!

Looks good, Jeanine! Your yard is so beautifully green.

ms. Gurley, this is a avery Girlie garden..tee hee..and I love it..reminds me of things I'd do. Wish I could come and visit.

Jeanine, you're already harvesting garlic? Wow. I live in Nova Scotia and we have a great climate for garlic, but it doesn't become ready until the end of July or thereabouts.

I was just reading that elephant garlic is not really garlic at all. It's a variant of leek. I didn't know that.

Brenda, I am NOT a 'girlie-girl' so it is kind of ironic that my garden does have that look to it. Maybe I need to rough it up a bit more

Been away from it for three days and then on the puter for a few hours this morning. Time to get crackin. Todays list:

Start seeds of gourds, sqaush, comfrey and calendula. We have a long season so if I start them today I should still get something out of them before winter.

Plant three comfrey plants and one mulberry seedling that I dug up from the retreat in Georgia.

Move some baby turkeys into a mobile pens so they can be on grass.

Tie up cukes and tomatoes and prune the tomatoes.

Get an estimate for new windows in the home office. It is an old house and we are doing the pay-as-you-go one and two windows at a time. AND inspired by the clothes dryer thread I think I will plan an outdoor covered area to hang clothes - I do have a clothes line but as the yard has evolved it ended up in the poultry yard.

Like you I'm as far from a girly girl as you can get too, but I do love a romantic garden with gingerbread, ironwork, benches, old fashioned flowers etc..but then I also concentrate a lot on food crops..and do all the MEN type work around the place..still..I love your gardens

sweet space

May I ask for the "easy way to make garlic powder"?

Sure. Take the whole bulb - don't bother to peel.

Slice thin and put in the dehydrator.

Once it is dry stick it in the coffee grinder - I like the espresso blend.

Caution - put the dehydrator outside. The first time I dehydrated onions and garlic we woke up to an entire house that smelled like REALLY bad feet. But this is the easiest and longest lasting way I have found to preserve my garlic and onions for the winter.

Thank You. Appreciate your reply.

Max,
thanks for asking. You beat me to it.

And Jeanine,
thanks for replying.
That is a beautiful, elegant garden. It reminds me somewhat of english gardens. (Many of which are designed and tended by men, so no worries there. lol)
Keep up the good work.

Billboard Pond
Why did I build the pond? I wanted a well for the purpose of having access to unchlorinated water not controlled by the city/county. It is not tied into our house because the house is too far away. It was cheapest and easiest to say this is for irrigation only when we had the well dug last year. We do not run a sprinkler system so I had to find some reason to run the well at least every other day – if you don’t use it you lose it.

The pond has no electronics; no pump, no filter, etc. It is filled with two different types of plants, cheapest goldfish (30 cents apiece) and tadpoles that showed up. I have also done the same thing with 40 gallon water features and have had fish, dragon flies, toads, plants – if you clean it out you lose the benefits – just overflow occasionally and thin out the plants.
There is a small swale at one end that feeds into a new garden bed. I run a hose into the pond 3 or 4 times a week but only overflow it once a month or so.
In theory the overflow is providing water and fish fertilizer to the garden area and the nearby apple trees. Currently there are tomatoes, sunflowers, zucchini, watermelon, a mandarin and a lime. Soon to move some bananas to that spot.

This pond is made with some sort of beer bill board - I think it is Milwaukee Light.

Right below the surface of this entire area are buried decades of old metal fence, metal roof and shed materials and tons of other crap. I noticed right off that there was a slow leak to the pond. However, I had hardly had it filled – I had not even finished the edges – as shown in one picture – before there were an estimated 1000 tadpoles. I didn’t want to disturb them so the pond has sat, with its slow leak for several months and what now appears to be two hatches of tadpoles. They have all morphed into toads now (they are EVERYWHERE) and so I am ready to empty the pond and find out where the leak is. It could be some metal or it could be leaking through the billboard or both.

I purchased a regular pond liner from Lowes only to find that it is not big enough and they don’t have any larger. Hubby says we have an even larger piece of billboard left over so tomorrow I will locate it and I’ll attempt to use that layered over what is already in there.
Packing down the earth for a pond would be preferable but in this area it may be a hundred years or more before all of that metal and trash is ‘packable’. In the meantime I’ll just work with what I have.

pretty little pond, hope you are able to fix your leak

I'm getting my pond more and more like I want it..see my blog

I worked on my second pond this weekend, this one will be used for irrigation sometimes.

One problem I see with your pond being used for irrigation is that even a slight drop in water level will expose the liner. The way I am getting around exposing the liner in mine is that I made the sides sloped instead of the usual steep drop off, and the top foot or so of the liner is buried under soil all the way around (instead of bare plastic clamped under a ring of rocks.)

This way water/bog plants can grow all the way around and keep the sides stable , keep the plastic out of view and out of harmful sun light.

How do you grow plants in a lined pond? We have a ground water catch that uses a big billboard, but I just scoop water out with a bucket to water the plants near by. Last year it had a bunch of tad poles and the local wild life used it as a watering hole until it went dry. I never knew I could turn it into a pond with water plants and such.

Kathy, you can plant in pots or add some soil to the bottom and plant in that.

Thank you. I kinda feel like a ditz now. I wrote a couple of brief articles several years ago on making a small water garden with pots and apparently forgot all about it. Jeanine's pictures are so pretty I'm tempted to experiment with our water catch. Not sure if I can keep water in it year round yet though.

Kathy Burns-Millyard wrote:How do you grow plants in a lined pond? We have a ground water catch that uses a big billboard, but I just scoop water out with a bucket to water the plants near by. Last year it had a bunch of tad poles and the local wild life used it as a watering hole until it went dry. I never knew I could turn it into a pond with water plants and such.

How "natural" do you want the pond? You can plant into pots to keep the water clearer and make it easier to clean, but putting soil directly into the pond will allow plants to naturalize and for water creatures to dig in the soil and make babies and stuff.
I have some frogs that live year round in my pond, in the winter they dig down into the mud in the shallow boggy areas and hibernate until late winter/early Spring, and then they make tons of tadpoles. I have tall plants just outside the pond for the frogs to hide in, and also to keep part of the pond cool in the heat of the day.

It really depends on the type of plant. Some plants like shallow water, and some like deep water. Some plants need soil, some plants float on the surface of the water.

I have a shallow area in one part of the pond that I simply dumped 3-4 inches of soil in and put in some rootballs of some purple loose strife there. These come back year after year.
There are many types of plants that will live in a shallow edge area.
I put in some water hyacinths this year and these float on the surface and need no soil.

If you have a good balance of plants, the pond will stay pretty clear naturally because the plants will eat up extra nitrogen and stuff in the water that might otherwise cause algae problems.

Purple loose strife is classed as a highly invasive plant that will take over nearby marshes crowding out natural species. I spend some of my summer every year wading in marshes and tearing this monster out. Please rid yourself of this for the sake of surrounding waterways.

Max Kennedy wrote:Purple loose strife is classed as a highly invasive plant that will take over nearby marshes crowding out natural species. I spend some of my summer every year wading in marshes and tearing this monster out. Please rid yourself of this for the sake of surrounding waterways.

The closest waterway is a river two miles away. I've had these planted in my pond for 5 years and they spread very slowly, if at all most years.

Water hyacinth is also classed as highly invasive, but again its in my relatively tiny pond, any extra plants can be put on the compost pile.

Loose strife seeds will be spread by birds and a few miles means nothing. Hyacinth I believe spreads by budding vegetatively so if no direct attachment to a waterway it isn't a hazard. The loose strife though is a menace, why chance it. Not being disrespectful but it's the "it won't happen here" thing that has probably caused the most trouble world wide. Please reconsider that plant choice.

So far it looks like the geese are taking possession of their chickens, and the chickens seem to follow around where ever the geese are. Today was their first day out in the yard. It looks like I will still need to keep them separated from the turkeys though. 'Mister' the largest baby goose does NOT like the big tom turkey around his chicks.

there are sterile hybrid purple loosestrifes that will only propagage by cuttings and will not cross with the wild ones..I have some I've had for 40 years..the only way to propagate them is by cuttings they never spread, so your's might be sterile ones..like mine.

Also there are scientists that say the looosestrife is cleaning up the pollution in the waterways so there may be some benefits of it after all?

The sterile version is OK so long as it doesn't get away from you vegetatively however for the normal variety the environmental disruption through displacement of native speciec to a near monoculture of PL far outweighs the benefit. It's like saying cane toads in Australia are OK because they got rid of the cane beetles. When PL takes over the diversity of habitat suffers drastically resulting in not only fewer plant species but a lot fewer insect and animal species. I have volunteered every summer over the last 10 years to try and control this stuff, the degree it can degrade wetland environment is tremendous. From personal experience if you don't ABSOLUTELY know it's a sterile version of the plant, BURN IT!

Having my morning coffee and evaluating my first year as a permie convert. Please visit me on my blog at Spirit of Place: http://localsustainablefoodgarden.blogspot.com/

Garlic planting article I wrote for Renegade Farmer: I love Garlic Edited to add: I'm practicing some image linking stuff that Paul told me about - it worked but my image is REALLY BIG.

baby mulberry

New leaves this morning - Hooray! There are two giant mulberries on our fence line but not convenient. This one is placed so that it will drop fruit right in the middle of the areas that I can graze the birds.

Oh my goodness that picture of the baby gese is sooooooo cute! He's like "Meh! Get out of my face!" Haha!

great thread, you got some good progress to show for all your work:)

Let the demolition begin! The dumpster arrived this morning.

We bought 1.75 acres next door and an sad old house that has to be demolished.

These hands are getting ready to see some new callouses .

By this time next year I hope to see some goats in the refurbished little barn, olive trees planted and new hugelculture beds growing butternut squash.

And beehives?

Congrats on the land buy! Is there anything you can salvage from the old house?