Erin Alladin

I'm so grateful that you did this research! I have been researching to write a blog post on the subject of dynamic accumulators, and for a long time the only discussions I could find were five years old. I had almost given up when I found your report. I'm very happily going through it now!

I shouldn't attempt a formal review because I read the book several years ago from the library and can't refresh my memory now, but I want to add my two cents. It was exactly the kind of book I was looking for after reading The Soil Will Save Us by Kristin Ohlson and Cows Save the Planet by Judith D. Schwartz. It took the ideas I formed from those books about how farming and ranching can sequester soil carbon, and expanded my understanding to include other food systems...other ecosystems. I found it deeply exciting to learn about both traditional whole-systems approaches that have existed for centuries and new ones that are being developed today. I'd love to read it again.

I suspect you'll see better results in coming years no matter what. I live on very hard clay and raspberries are one of the wild plants that thrive like nobody's business here.

Few things make me happier than having so many nasturtiums that I can eat all I want and not leave them visibly depleted. Here's to all self-seeding (desirable) flowers!

Good question. I'm personally very tolerant of wayward living mulches, but I did find others in my communal permaculture garden were a bit more bothered by plants going out of the bounds we planned for them. Borage was one for the same reason you described. Strawberries were another. I guess the important thing is to know before you start what you and other stakeholders are comfortable with in terms of plants that seed or spread freely.

Did you end up growing your pumpkins on the piles, Phil? My landlord (and, I think, the previous owner) left a big mess of piled-up logs that I've been mining for a hugelkultur mound, and it occurred to me the other day that it would be so much easier just to transplant some squash right into the log pile. I'm still finishing my non-lazy mound because I want it as a windbreak, but I am increasingly eyeing my too-abundant squash seedlings and the pockets of soil in the log pile...

I used to manage a communal garden where we used a lot of leaf mulch. The best method we ever found was to wait until the leaves were dry, put a big armful into an old metal garbage can, then climb in and stomp them as if we were stomping grapes. It was effort, but not as much as using a hand tool to cut them because each step could crush a lot more leaves.

Aphids were my first real test of holistic pest management, and it took me several years of squishing them to be brave enough to try it. We finally decided one spring to stop fighting the aphids and plant flowers to attract ladybugs instead (calendula, geranium, alyssum—we already had parsley, cilantro, dill, mint, and some others). Between the flowers and the banquet of aphids we were finally leaving available to them, the ladybugs showed up and stayed. Which meant we suddenly had a lot less work to do. A very satisfying proof of permaculture ideas all around.

It's nice to see this—I'm in the middle of building a hugelkultur mound on hard clay right now.

It sounds like the sod is likely going to be useful to you as a resource, but if that plan doesn't work out and you go back to considering sheet mulching, you could leverage community labour in gathering materials and laying them down. People are so hungry for gardening knowledge and hands-on experience. The community garden I used to manage did this a couple of times and promoted it as a hands-on workshop. It works especially well if you can also have a cardboard/newspaper-collecting drive for a week or so beforehand, but that depends on whether people are able to drop materials off any time.