Erin Cross

William Roan wrote:Hey Chris
You made me curious, so I dug 8 holes around the garden and I can’t find any cardboard logs. I may be looking in the wrong places, but they seem to have completely disappeared after a year and a half.
When I started I didn’t have access to dirt and what dirt there was, was scrapped off with an end loader. When the grounds people tried to get rid of the English ivy that had been growing in the garden plot,  for the last 30-40 years. All I was given was a large rock, with a layer of gravel and clay.
So for my needs the cardboard and grass clippings have turned into black mulch. If I were to do it again, I would put grass clippings and kitchen waste between each layer of cardboard.
All organic material is going to break down over time. When it does, start all over, knowing that you are enriching the earth.

As a friend in Arkansas said, “When hard times come, people think all they have to do is stick a few seeds into the ground and they will be able to feed themselves. It doesn’t work that way, you have to improve the soil first.”
Biologybill

Was looking into ways to turn massive amounts of cardboard into rich soil in a hurry. This oldie thread has some great ideas! I really like the log method. Faster to make cardboard logs than to slice boxes into 6” strips that fit in my cross cut shredder. I shred cardboard for my vermicompost bins and the red wigglers do a good job breaking it down, but I’ve got more compost than they can keep up with.

I’m thinking of turning the logs vertical and burying them to use them. I’ll layer the cardboard with grass clippings and soaked them in manure tea. I bet Seminole Pumpkins would do great in these.

Just read an interesting SARE Article about a farmer in Guam using cardboard (both sheet and shredded paper forms) as mulch on his pepper farm. He also experimented with using mulched nitrogen fixing trees on top of the cardboard. His soil didn’t show a noticeable improvement of nitrogen levels, but his pepper harvest had definite increased yields. Here’s the article: https://www.sare.org/publications/case-studies-of-sare-grant-impacts/sheet-mulch-using-cardboard-and-nitrogen-fixing-trees/

We permies have been mulching with cardboard forever. My question is this: Does anyone have experience applying shredded cardboard directly to the soil as mulch and water wrong it to lock it in place? Also, has anyone used shredded cardboard as chicken bedding? I’m thinking the cardboard used as chicken bedding would be loaded with manure and beneficial bacteria and nutrients that would accelerate the decomposition process and could then be applied as mulch or used in compost.

On a small farm, cardboard is an easy waste stream and carbon material to come by.  

Thoughts?

Thekla McDaniels wrote:
I used to rely on cheap kitty litter as bentonite. That was, until I got a bag that was little tiny pieces of shell coated in a thin layer of bentonite clay, or something that looked like bentonite!  I don’t know which would be more expensive, real bentonite kitty litter or 50 pound bags of pure bentonite sold at the feed store and Farm Supply type stores. It is usually sold as pond liner. I have used it to increase the clay content in sand.

Oh, thanks for the tip! I’ll have to see if they sell big bags of bentonite here. In our suburban area, I have a hard time finding some ag products. I bet the big bag would be better and cheaper.

Stewart Lundy wrote:Biochar is probably quite good for sandy soils. Even a single 50# bag of good clay per acre every year would seriously help the low cation exchange capacity (CEC) that that sand has. Not only does organic matter burn off, but nutrients leach very fast from pure sand. Good biochar has a high CEC. Good clay has a high CEC, too. And clay can't burn off. Composting biochar or clay first should give a better final product for the garden too.... or just feed the clay or biochar to your animals and compost the manure.

I also have pure sand (we call it sugar sand in FL). The best things you can do are to get living roots in the soil and cover on the ground. When I’m building a garden in ground, I dump tons of mulch, grass clippings, whatever I can get, onto the soil, then dig a little pocket the size of a 1gallon pot into the mulch and fill that with compost then plant into the compost. This works great with tomatoes and veg of all kinds.


Alternatively, you can get a cover crop started that can handle sand (sorghum/sudan grass, cowpeas inoculated with beneficial bacteria, sun hemp, or lab lab beans for summer; rye/black oats/daikon radish for winter) spread fertilizer just to get it going (use organic or conventional), and water regularly with a sprinkler. Let your cover crop get huge, then graze it with animals or mow it and leave the organic material on the surface like mulch. You can run your chickens over it to eat some of the cover crop and add their manure. Do not till. Just plant again through the cover crop. Its roots will decompose in the soil and begin to hold organic matter and water which sand can’t do.

I have also used bentonite clay (cheap bags of all natural kitty litter) soaked in manure tea/fish emulsion then mixed that into my raised beds to add nutrition and water retention. I like using galvanized roof panels and wood corner posts to build my raised beds. As you noted, water just runs off the sides if there aren’t hard sides. I also use a fine pine bark mulch on top of the soil in my raised beds. It’s just too hot to leave soil uncovered down here in central Florida.

Timothy Norton wrote:This year, I'm trying to work more polycultures into my landscape in order to try and take advantage of the most space possible while not being limited to a few crops due to limited area.

I have roughly a hundred foot by four foot section of bare soil. This is from clearing out a line of hedges that had overgrown significantly and were 'tamed' back. I threw a bunch of old seed in it and had really good yields last year so I'm trying to be a bit more intentional this year.

Has anyone had success making the most of limited space through polyculture?

Check out David the Good’s “Grocery Row Gardens.” He has a little book and a blog and YouTube channel (pick your fave media) and has an entire garden built around permaculture poly culture. I always mix up my plantings in my raised beds. Other than beans and corn, I don’t do long rows of anything. Every tomato plant has a different veggie or herb between them. Far less disease and especially pest pressure with polyculture/intercropping

Thought I’d share some pics from two years ago when I claimed the whole backyard for growing. Looking back, I’m actually surprised how fast the fruit trees have grown in just two years. But here are the pretty pics. You can do a lot in a small space. The first three pics are from April 2023, the last is from May 2023.

Josh Hoffman wrote:

Timothy Norton wrote:Part of my solution is the utilization of dwarf and semi-dwarf rootstock. It is my understanding that I may be trading a few years of production for a smaller footprint. I don't mind this so much in my situation.

I would recommend that you pick this book up before it is too late to apply the methods contained in it. I believe it solves the orchard piece of having a small property. Little does not mean unproductive.

https://permies.com/wiki/260271/Grow-Fruit-Tree-Ann-Ralph

An excellent recommendation! I was was gonna say the same.

I have 0.15 acres in suburban Space Coast Florida that I own plus generous easements between sidewalk and road owing to it being a corner lot  that I have to mow. I learned long ago that people WILL steal fruit from my front yard, so I have focused primarily on my backyard behind my privacy fence.
I have over 40 assorted fruit trees, grapes, and passionfruit vine plus three large raised veggie gardens and several pollinator patches of flowers. In addition, beneath my fruit trees, I run a backyard plant nursery. There are not big open spaces in my yard, mostly just 3ft pathways. I also have 4 chickens (at times, I’ve kept more), had quail but the neighbors dog killed them, and a swarm of bees has just chosen one of my vermicomposting bins as their home, so they will soon be relocated into a hive. I guess I have honey bees now Meat Rabbits could easily be incorporated into my system and I’m confident I could feed them at least 80% from my suburban homestead, but one step at a time.

There wasn’t anything in my backyard when I moved in. It now looks like an established forest. The key to fitting more in is aggressive pruning and choosing, productive, hardy, dwarf varieties.

I’ll be adding more fruit trees in the front yard once I can establish a thorny blackberry hedge that will keep light-fingers out of my produce.

The best thing to do is start in one little area. Plant it out. Then keep moving. Sure, you may regret the placement of something down the road, we all do, but you can either learn to work with things where they are, grab a shovel if the tree is small, or an axe if it really doesn’t work where it is. Just start playing. And keep building. Have fun!

Welcome! What a fantastic idea turning waste wool into amendment pellets! I see wool used in gardens, but it doesn’t seem to get mixed in so much as used as mulch. I have very very sandy soil so I’m always looking for new amendments to add. I even amended my beds with pure bentonite clay kitty litter soaked in fish/seaweed emulsion before adding it to the beds. Had a bumper crop of veggies that year that I haven’t beaten to this day.

Any chance you could run it through a chipper and turn it into mulch then set chickens loose on it for 6 or so months? My weed seeds are drastically reduced in my chicken run cold compost when I do that.

After doing extensive historical research regarding the types of plants and foods the natives used to eat here in Central Florida in zone 10a, I discovered that the Ais Tribe and an older tribe of unknown name found at Windover Pond did not mess with agriculture. They ate the myriad small critters and fish and oysters and the occasional gator and manatee that are in abundant supply here. They also ate from the perennial plants that grow here.

This research supported what I’ve observed from growing in the same patch of land for 15yrs: this area doesn’t want to grow the fragile annuals which comprise the typical veggie garden. This area wants to be a scrubby forest.

And so, I’ve cut back on my veggie area to expand my organized food forest. I picked up a Jujube tree and a Kerry Starfruit tree at ECHO in Ft Myers last month, an Oro Negro Avocado tree, and just got 2 Bababerry Raspberries and 10 Black Butte Blackberries in the mail today. Want to get two persimmons this year to plant between my sidewalk and fence. This pic is the trellis I plan to build next to the sidewalk for my thorny blackberries to keep people away from my new muscadine grapes and the higher value fruit. I’ve had bad luck with people stealing fruit from my yard before. Let them try to cross a thorny blackberry hedge