Turning Straw Into Gold

Strawbale gardening: it's not something I'd heard of until this year. My friend loaned me the book Food Not Lawns, an excellent resource for yard transformation which I'm reading, and we've been thinking on how we can restructure our massively sloped north-facing back yard to be more of a food producing zone in the "paradise garden" style that the author discusses in that book. But that's a multi-year project to say the least. In the meanwhile, we had some pressing problems like how to effectively fence off our raised beds from the pups that joined our family this year, what to do with the big dirt patch in the middle of the lawn where the trampoline was until recently, where to put the blueberries and raspberry starts (hopefully in a dedicated berry patch) and how to keep some lawn for the dogs while beginning to transform the rest.

Enter the strawbale! Did you know you can grow things right in a strawbale? You basically put the bale where you want it, get it wet to start the decomposition process, wait a few days, make a hole in the top and put in your plants. So our new fence around the raised beds is now going to be a double-high strawbale garden, thus giving us even more growing room with no extra digging or planning for the year. We've mulched in between the raised beds with straw, in the eventual plan to turn the beds into a more free-flowing design with water channels to reduce water needs. For the next couple of years, the strawbale mulch will begin this process by turning the paths to more usable ground.

And that big dirt hole where the trampoline was located? Now covered with straw bales which will house even more plants. The new berry patch is fenced off with twine in the upper right corner of the yard. Stay tuned for how the big strawbale experiment turns out!

Taking a Page From Johnny Appleseed

As the news stories careen towards ever-scarier pronouncements (now even mainstream presses are admitting we might've passed peak oil, and objections to global warming have become the feeblest murmurs), one might wonder "What the heck can I do?"

When I was a kid, my grandparents and parents owned a theatre. During the summer months, they also did children's theatre productions. So I was a toy in Babes in Toyland, a dancing skunk in Johnny Appleseed, and a singing Gretel in Hansel and Gretel. Remembering the story of Johnny Appleseed (even though the version in the play is much dramatized from his real life), it occurs to me that we could all take a page from his book. Johnny Appleseed is known for planting orchards of apple trees, as well as fostering community, and helping out those less fortunate than himself (to the point where if people gave him clothing, he only kept the worst pieces for himself to wear and passed on the nicer items to others in need).

Right now, community and local food are two things that will be increasingly important as we head into an energy-poor future. For most of us, whether we live on suburban lots or in the country, we've got places we might be able to plant sustainable food sources for future harvesting. Of course, what is available to you to plant as part of your permanent landscaping will vary depending on your local climate, which direction your lot faces, how many shade trees you already have, and other variables. In our area, there are lots of options open for planting, including nuts like walnuts and filbert trees, a huge variety of fruit trees, and fruiting shrubs.

In a last fit of fall gardening, I picked up five more huckleberry bushes and three of a new variety of evergreen blueberry that fruits for 10 weeks a summer instead of fruiting in one short intense burst. I'm determined to both squeeze in more edible landscaping into areas that we have, and also to replace some of my least favorite shrubs (legacy of the previous owner) with fruit-bearing raspberries, huckleberries, blueberries, etc. We also planted a cherry tree this year, and I'm thinking of squeezing in a filbert somewhere. We have a yellow plum, purple free-stone plum. asian pear, and two red apple trees already.