We laid down cardboard in the fall, and by spring the grass was well mulched. It was now time to put in our sweat equity. We needed a deer fence, raised beds and bins for compost, soil, manure and chips.
Our other challenge … rabbits! Our neighbor had had a drunken epiphany a couple years prior to our arrival and had set her rabbits free. I once stood on the front porch and counted 72 rabbits in the corner of the yard viewable from the porch. They were everywhere. So, we had to build a fence. We had to build one anyway to keep the deer out, but I thought that rabbits being a digging kind of animal, we should dig the fence in a little.
I used a maddock to dig a foot deep ditch all around the perimeter and sunk the fencing into it. This was labor intensive and it was only after we were done that we actually watched the rabbits closely enough to discover that the rabbits were too fat and lazy to be bothered with trying to dig into our precious garden. Especially when they were surrounded by ample food supply. So, that’s a permaculture lesson we shouldn’t have missed.
Deer have always been an issue for gardeners. It’s because they’re grazers - they’ll take a bite out of one young plant and move on to take a bite out of another. When growing food, you don’t really want to eat something that’s been inside a deer’s mouth.
May 9th, 2006
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of raising one’s own food. When I was 6, we moved into a house in Encinitas that had a salsa garden. My parents were not so inclined so I adopted it and kept it going for nearly a year. Of course, when it was time to re-plant the garden I didn’t have a clue and it went to weeds pretty quickly. But it was fun while it lasted and I maintain a fondness for my tomatoes.
The few gardens I’d actually had prior to moving here had been inherited from previous tenants, so when we moved into our current home I wasn’t quite sure where to start in building a garden from scratch.
There are 2 primary books that I’m aware of on organic gardening in the maritime northwest: Steve Solomon’s Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades which takes a relatively scientific approach and the Seattle Tilth’s Maritime Northwest Garden Guide which is a really useful planning calendar. If you’re gardening here, you need these books.
I had been studying Bill Mollison’s classic Permaculture text book with my friend Simon
who was actually certificated as a permaculturist (by the Permaculture Institute). So, anyway we had a lot of fun siting the garden and learning from someone as knowledgeable and experienced as Simon.
Of course, in the end, our garden is not consistent with Permaculture principles, but it was fun learning about them.
The site we chose was at a little bit of a dip toward the pond which is west of the garden. In the late afternoon and evening, the sun reflects off the pond onto the garden, creating a heat sink, so it’s a little warmer throughout more of the year. A couple of cherry trees shade it on one side so we can plant a bed of more sensitive plants.
The first task was figuring out the area - how many beds of what size did we need to plant to produce the volume and variety that we wanted? This was so boring, that I determined to eventually write software for garden planning (part of the impetus for cataloging the process here).
Our goal was (and is) to grow our favorite foods in a low maintenance garden (yeah right, I know). We listed out our favorite things to eat, pored over the Territorial seed catalog and came up with a core list. Well, that’s the easy part.
We tried to calculate our needed production area, but in the end it was so tedious and not-fun, we just made a best guess and decided that we could always expand the garden if we needed to. So, I think the garden area ended up being 35×35 feet or something like that. In the Solomon book, he based his chapter on Planning on a 33 foot garden, so we might have been influenced by that. Solomon says that 1000 square feet is the average urban gardener’s area.
In the fall, we marked out the garden space with string and laid down cardboard to mulch the grass.
This is how I learned that worms really like cardboard. In the spring, as we began building our beds, the cardboard was nearly gone and it seemed as if there were a layer of worms in its place.
May 9th, 2006