of pond digging, celebrating and desert cities

This week we've had 4(!) helpers around to give us a hand around the land, notably with the pond digging.  Unfortunately it's also been VERY hot so working hours were restricted to early morning and late afternoon, but still, a lot got done and I'm really happy with the progress we've made.

Here we see Theresa and Peter digging on the pond:

 The basic outline is there, but as we get deeper we are hitting some seriously hard clay and the pick axe is required.  This is the overall progress so far:

Ben and I in the meantime busied ourselves building another raised bed / reverse hugelkultur on the very top terrace right next to the road.

The idea is to slow erosion along that particular stretch, so we are filling it with all manner of organic material, such as wooden branches, leaves and leaf litter from the side of the road.  This will eventually build up the soil and I am intending to plant some perennials there.  More of that at a later stage.  I also have a blog post on soil science in permaculture in my head, so look out for that.  This raised bed was Ben's idea, as he has also just returned from a permaculture design course and was keen to practice his new found skills.

Hannah in the meantime went to pick fruit such as pears, apples and plums to make jam:

It wasn't all hard work though as we spent the evenings celebrating together with pizza and music as you can see in the following photos.

All in all I think they've been having a good time.  Ben and Theresa left us yesterday (for the time being) and Hannah and Peter are still with us for the moment.

On a different note, I had to go to Milan yesterday for some boring bureucratic business.  I was a little apprehensive about it all, as I always have a bad conscience when dealing with any authorities...  Anyway, after I finished my business I had 5 hours to kill in the city with no money in my pocket.

Man was that depressing!  I know why I moved away from the city...  I just aimlessly wandered around the streets, trying to find a shady spot to eat my sandwiches and relax and maybe take in one or two of the sights if I happen to pass them.  At one stage I walked for about 10 or 15 minutes and the only plant life I spotted was this:

...a lonely solitary sow thistle.  It's in theory edible of course, but even if I wasn't worried about the pollution, it would be cruel to pick the one plant managing to survive in this desert.  Cities are just human moncultures, which is why they don't work.  Finally I spotted a creative citizen making use of the limited space to create some green:

 

Then I found something almost resembling a park... but fenced in and 'proudly sponsored' by an insurance company:

Finally my feet carried me into one of the leafier suburbs where they've created this:

I don't know what the solution is to the growing world population, but stuffing them all as tightly as possible into cities and then putting an odd plant in as an afterthought surely isn't it.  I was glad to get back on my train out of this depressing place.

The promised post on edges is soon coming up, so keep tuned in folks... ;)

Ooga Dooga Hugelkultur!

Sometimes in gardening like in any other walk of life you suddenly have that religious AHA! experience.  You know what I mean the Road to Damascus "I can see the Light!" kind of moment.  As I've been telling you I've been doing this online Introduction to Permaculture course and as part of that I'm reading Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway (I keep wanting to call him Ernest). 

I'm already coming around to permaculture being the best way to produce food AND preserve the land, especially in our rather... challenging gardening conditions.  Now Hemenway has introduced me to a completely new concept within permaculture, (well new to me anyway, I'm sure some of you have been doing this for years): the Hugelkultur!  Well actually it should be spelled: Hügelkultur.  Now for those of you not familiar with German, this should be pronounced hoogle-cool-toor, except for the first double o you should pout your lips forward like the Librarian of Unseen University who accidentally got turned into an orang utang, leaving a small round opening between your lips and pushing your tongue forward a tad towards said opening, as if to whistle and then you activate your vocal chords rather than whistle to emit an ü sound like in Bügeleisen.  What you don't know that one either?


Anyway, enough of this sillyness, I was talking about me seeing the light!  Serious stuff!  So you know the way you keep doing a particular thing for no better reason than not knowing any better and all of a sudden someone tells how to do this better and solve a number of other problems at the same time?  Well that's a Hugelkultur for you.  (You still practicing that pronunciation?).  Every year we prune our various trees, most of them in winter.  The larger bits of wood coming off that we cut into logs and use the following winter in our fire to heat our kitchen, given them some months to dry out some too.  Some of the smaller bits are handy to get your fire going, but the majority of the twigs and little branches just end up clattering up the place.  So we wait until we have a pleasant, not too dry, not too windy, not too wet, not too hot day and build a bonfire.  It takes a fair bit of effeort dragging it all to one place on a given terrace not too close to other vegetation, and stand over it all day keeping it under control.  And the result: tidier terraces and a small pile of woodash, which can be incorporated into the soil (and coughing neighbours, but mind you they are chain smokers anyway).


Since today what we do is, gather it all up and pile it up neatly.  A few rotten bits of bigger wood, which wouldn't be much good in the fireplace are also helpful.  You cover that wood with the turf you previously removed from your chosen site and having turned them upside down.  Find a few more turf squares and dump them on top.  If you have some other organic material, old leaves, grass cuttings, on with it.  Then shovel a load of soil on top, some compost if you have some spare and hey presto! You have a Hügelkultur (no hüüügel.  Got it now?). It should look somewhat like this (once mature of course):

or this:

Now that sound like more work then simply burning I hear you say, so what's the point of this.  So let me tell you:

• As the wood rots it slowly releases nutrients to the soil
• At the same time it releases heat, increasing the ambient temperature and enabling you to grow things earlier in the season then normal
• The wood has an incredibble capacity to absorb water, which is then slowly released again, eliminating or at least reducing the need to water.
• It increases surface.  Compared to a standard flat bed you have at least 3 times as much surface area to plant on
• It won't need digging over

Now, whilst I had some work building this thing, it will actually from now on reduce my workload.  Various sources seem to have varying opinions on what size this (incidentally Hügel simply means hill) hill should be.  Anything from 2 to 10 feet gets bandied about.  I made my decision based on the amount of wood I happened to have handy, which resulted in dimensions of approximately 8x4x4 feet.  One of the few disadvantages quoted is that the rotting wood, at least in the first year or two, will deplete the soil of nitrogen.  To get around that I started with sowing a couple of nitrogen fixers, i.e. peas and lupins.

Sepp Holzer, Austrian permaculture supremo and hillside farmer recommends that if you build one of those things on a slope angle it with the direction of the waterflow.  As my terraces are not so wide, I've given it a bit of a diagonal angle, roughly south-east facing.  And I placed it on one of the lower terraces, where a) the micro-climate is more humid and b) it's a bit far away from the main action, so you want to have a low maintenance bed there.  Unfortunately I'm still camera-less, so you are just going to have to use your imagination.


In other news, spring has arrived yesterday and we have 3 new additions to the woodland garden: Ribena, the blackcrrant, Ellie, the Elaeagns X Ebingei 

 ...and Paddy, the strawberry tree (also known as Killarney strawberry, hence Paddy)

 
Obviously it's not carrying that much fruit just yet...  Ellie should also be producing some tasty and delicious berries for us in the future as well as fixing the soil and adding nitrogen for the nearby apple and cherry trees as well as for Ribena.