Yeardly Arthur

Peas!
I intentionally overplant snow peas and garden peas so we can harvest the leaves and stems, both for salads and greens. Oddly enough, they all taste like peas.
(Not sure about the root, but there's not much to them.)

Okay, I'm going to be the hate magnet in this thread. I LOVE ants in my plants. (Wasps, too, but that's for another discussion.) I actually go around the yard (and the neighbor's yard - and the other neighbors' yards) to find fire ant colonies. I scoop them up with a shovel and bring them home, depositing them all around my garden.

As Suzette noted above, fire ants are great at penetrating hard clay. Besides just loosening the soil (which is reason enough in my book to invite them in), they also provide aeration, fertilizer, and pest protection. I used to be a skeptic, right up to the day I got covered up to the elbow while picking tomatoes, with all bites and privileges thereunto appertaining. I resolved to eliminate them all the very next day - until I noticed the tomato plant that was growing in soil infested with ants was also twice as big, twice as green, and had twice as many tomatoes as its ant-free neighbors. So I decided to encourage them. After three or four weeks they usually move on, leaving behind a mound of fluffy, fertile soil that I didn't have to dig.

I do understand how fire ants can be a real hazard to gardeners, families and livestock in other ecosystems, but for my half acre out on the country edge of Deep South suburbia, they're a real benefit to the garden, and a delight to have around.

Thom Bri wrote:The garden has a hole, and everything from leaves to sticks to kitchen waste to ash and charcoal gets tossed in. Periodically I toss a layer of dirt on top. When it gets full I plant something on top, and dig a new hole. The holes when new are about 3 feet (one meter) deep and 4-5 feet across. A few rotting logs go in the bottom, so it's also a huegle. Usually 2 holes per year, one spring and one late fall. I suppose composing puritans will say I am doing it wrong.

Composting in situ is possibly the oldest method, so let the purists prattle. I'm intrigued at the size of your 'post holes. At first I thought you were describing keyhole gardens - then you gave the dimensions. That's some serious organic recycling you've got going on.

Only one option to vote for? Hmm.

I do use a gasoline push mower twice a year on my lawn, once in April after the wild onions have been harvested, and usually again in September or October. Both events give me welcome exercise and supply grass clippings for spring planting and post-season bed coverage.

The rest of the year I swing a sling blade as needed, then sweep up the leavings to mulch the tomatoes and fruit trees.

This is basically how we dealt with large oak stumps in our yard, by surrounding the entire stump with deadwood, compost, soil and leaf litter. Initially we poured water and compost tea in the center crevices to encourage decomposition. Eventually I chopped a 10" hole out of the center for an apple tree, but the space completely filled with oak bracket fungus and choked out the apple sapling. The hole was cleared, and replanted with sage.

A year later I transplanted the healthy sage elsewhere and enlarged the hole, which by then had rotted all the way down to ground level. A new apple tree took center stage, with room at the top of the hole to hold water. It doesn't stay there long; watering the apple tree waters the entire mound.

As you can tell from the pictures, it is a constant challenge to keep organic material mounded up against the stump. Deterioration has been relentless, with soil washing down after every rain. Fortunately, it also makes the planting area around the stump especially fertile. We've grown beans, onions, peppers, strawberries, potatoes, sweet potatoes, herbs and now sunflowers.

The only other problem is one we've found with every hugelkultur project we've tried, and that's dealing with the empty voids that occur beneath the surface. Underground wood rots away, leaving roots dangling in a dry, empty space. The first clue is usually a dying plant, while everything around it flourishes. I've now made a regular practice of poking our hugelkultur mounds with a broomstick to locate empty spaces. These get refilled with soil and compost.

From this experiment, I imagine the biggest challenge to a Grow-Cano would be keeping the sides of the mountain from washing down. Otherwise, it should work very well to increase the amount of cultivated space in a small surface area.

VOIDS:

It has probably been addressed in the 31 pages that precede my note, but worth repeating. Every one of  my hugelkultur beds, whether they be naturally aging stumps, filled trenches or backfilled berms/terraces eventually suffers from void issues.

Whatever you put on top of your woodpile (soil, compost, wood chips, mulch), the wood beneath will rot away faster than the surface material can replace it. This will leave your plant roots dangling in mid-air in a soil-less bubble, and leads to sudden die-offs that look just like drought, pests and infections have attacked your crops. Adding water only helps for a day, but that is a clue to the (literal) underlying problem.

I've made it a habit to randomly plumb my hugelkultur beds with a stick (I keep old broomsticks and shovel handles stained around the property for just this purpose), looking for places where the probe drops deep into the soil without resistance. When that happens, I widen the hole, then come back with soil or compost to fill it back up again.

Ben Knofe wrote:Same here, I am very careful to put something non edible or even poisonous in our garden since the kids are used to eat from the garden. Alliums are definitely perfect for a fruit tree guild. I'd recommend strawberries, chives and mint too. I have a peach tree guild with this and can do a great summer fruit salad with peach, strawberries and mint.

I agree - if the point is to grow a food forest, I'm happy to pack edibles into every ecological niche inhabited by a noxious plant. I personally think poison ivy vines are lovely, but that doesn't keep me from removing them wherever they show up on the property - which is everywhere. (Dewberries do a great job of crowding them out.) It usually doesn't  take long to identify a native edible or medicinal that thrives in the same location.

We're attempting to kill two birds with one stone fruit (then bury the feathery remains for fertilizer) by combining two guilds in one, peaches and strawberries.

We have been frustrated to watch our strawberries thrive for a single season then die away by the third year. Even rooting the stolons failed to keep the line going. I have since learned that the allelopathic strawberry plants may be poisoning themselves - a condition which I'm told  may be countered by planting other allelopathic species nearby whose toxins cancel each other out.

This year we're planting our strawberries in  peach tree guilds with alliums, mint, and clover, in the hope they will all support each other. Since the strawberries are shade tolerant, we planted the berry guilds beneath our peach trees, along with dandelions and curly dock for deep penetration and mulch.

We'll report back in 4-5 years to let you know if it works.

We live on a half acre at the edge of a small rural town in central Alabama, where the soil is primarily red clay with occasional chunks of chirt and limestone bedrock.

Our back yard is a gentle hillside composed entirely of clay. The residential site has been lived on and trod over for a hundred years that we can document; the ground is packed so tight that fertile topsoil only extends for an inch or two. Any space where you dig a hole or scrape the turf takes a year to re-cover itself.

We get plenty of rainfall (50-60" per year), but it all sheets right off and heads downhill. Summers are brutal. The clay dries and cracks, and any planting has to involve a deep dig with lots of organic amendments. For the past two years the total rainfall hasn't changed, but we've had extensive periods of drought lasting 4-6 weeks without rain. The gardens have a tough time staying green after week two, so I decided to try and do something to hang onto the rain when it visits us.

I started by digging a 18x18" trench just downhill of our 16 ft shed, perpendicular to the slope and positioned to catch the runoff from the roof. I filled the 16' trench with downed limbs and leaf mold layered with gypsum to break up the clay at the microscopic level. As the wood rots away, the top of the trench is dressed with compost, leaves, and sawdust, and occasionally plumbed with an old shovel handle to locate and fill any voids.

So far we have five trenches spaced 8 ft apart. The last couple were easier to dig, and showed signs of mycelial development along old tree roots that communicate between the troughs. I have planted them over the tops with daffodils, garlic, strawberries and potatoes, mainly just to get some sort of root structure growing down into the developing spaces. Everything we've planted is thriving, with very little watering - even during droughts.  We just went through five weeks with only an inch of rain, and every trench remained moist below the surface.

I made a cup of clover and dewberry leaf tea.