Don't know about y'all, but I'm dreaming of summer. It helps to keep the summer garden in mind when doing the winter chores in the brown mud...

Last year we expanded our vegetable garden three-fold by converting grass into raised beds.  My plan for last autumn was to sheet mulch the last row of grass that receives any sun, making it ready for spring planting.  Sheet mulching is the  great, labor-saving method of converting any grassy-weedy area into a nutrient-rich garden bed by layering compostable material onto it, and letting it sit for several months.  It mimics natural systems, in which layers of leafy litter fall to the earth and compost over time, without tilling.  Many garden websites have instructions for sheet mulching–these from the New York Permaculture Exchange are pretty straightforward.  BUT of course I was too busy or lazy or something  last fall and didn’t get to the sheet mulching, which meant, yesterday, gathering my little Urban Land Army (Tom and Claire) and going at the sod with a shovel.

This is a controversial step–urban soil tends to be so distressed, removing the top layer of grass also removes any semblance of a soil ecosystem, and most permaculturists recommend mulching and planting over the grass.  But I am a little neurotic about grass removal.  In my experience, grass is SO tenacious–it starts growing back around the garden edges, and sprouting up between my carrots, no matter how much soil is piled on top of it.  It stresses me out.  As much as I agree with the permaculture philosophy, in my own yard (once the chance for sheet mulching has passed), I am a grass-remover-soil-amender, doing as much as I can to rebuild the soil after sod removal, with the help of chickens and compost and future good habits.  Besides, I like digging with my family…

The new bed isn’t that big–2 feet wide by maybe 20 feet long.  We removed as much of the wormy soil from the sod as we could, and put the rest in the chickens’ pen.  They were tickled, nibbling grass and finding worms all afternoon.  They’ll have it converted to fine, manure-rich soil in no time.

Meanwhile, my friend David, who works on making the waste products from the coffee industry available  to gardeners through his UpCycle Northwest project (and who I wrote about in the recent coffee chaff in the chicken coop post) was looking for gardeners to experiment with chaff and spent grounds as soil amendment, and burlap coffee bags as weed block/sheet mulch.  We said “Sure!” and he showed up yesterday like Santa Claus with a truck full of bags and chaff and coffee grounds. We wet down the new bed, layered it with the nitrogen-rich chaff and grounds, and–to speed composting for late spring planting– covered it with the burlap. I intend to amend the soil further with composted chicken manure from the coop.  We’ll soil test and see how it turns out.

David, spreading chaff.

The burlap coffee bags are beautiful, and I loved reading their stamped labels as we spread them–they came from Guatemala, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Mexico…David saves the ones with the cleanest, nicest labels for crafters, who repurpose them into handbags.  The rest are offered to gardeners, for whom they nicely replace that nasty plastic weekblock, and make the perfect first layer in a sheet mulch.  I am planning to plant this bed in a couple of months, so we will probably remove the burlap, rather than letting it fully compost, but I’ll try it as proper sheet mulch in the future, and will let you know how this experiment fares.

You’ll see there is some grass left, and if we lived somewhere that grass required upkeep, I would remove all of it.  But the rest of our grass is all in the shade, unsuitable for most food gardening.  We never water it, just let it die back in the summer, and it’s mostly moss (which is soft), and dandelions (which we and the hens can eat).  We use one corner to pitch our backyard camping tent in the summer, and a nice mossy spot for a quilt where we read and play games.  I am very pleased that, at least at this house, my grass removing days are complete!

For  information on obtaining burlap coffee bags, and more on upcycling, (the in-word for smarter/better recycling, making use of the energy in the initial production of something, rather than using more energy to break it down into raw materials–or, as David puts it, finding “the highest and best re-use for the material rather than the easiest or most obvious”), see David’s website.

And for more on turning lawns into food, explore the wonderful Cascadia Food Not Lawns website!

I leaned over to gently unwrap the beans, and return them to the bamboo teepee I’d constructed for them and all their bean friends.  As I did, I had to reach across the sugar pumpkin plant that was sprawling across the base of both the beans and the sunflower.  I suddenly realized that I’d unwittingly created my own version of the classic Three Sisters guild.  Permaculturists suggest planting in communities, or guilds that build a sense of interconnectedness in the garden, moving us beyond the traditional limits of “vegetable gardening.”  The quintessential example of guild planting is the Three Sisters, the Native American triad of corn, beans, and squash.  The corn provides a trellis for the beans, the beans fix nitrogen for the other plants, and the squash, with its rambling ways and spreading leaves, creates a parasol for the soil, keeping it cool, moist, and alive.  I smiled at the little sugar pumpkin hidden in the leaves,  now just hinting at its autumn change from green to orange.  And of course I left the bean where it was.

I have tried growing corn in Seattle, and it always seems promising.  The plants are “knee high by the fourth of July,” grow tassels, and eventually ears.  But it takes a lot of space in a backyard garden, and the corn itself is always mealy; I’ve decided to give up and let the nice people on the sunny side of the state grow my corn, as they do so well, and are now selling at the farmer’s market in beautiful, affordable heaps.

So in my version of the Three Sisters, the sunflower stands as a substitute for the corn, and a very good one, I think.  It is certainly sturdy enough to hold its own against a vine.  And when the center opens to reveal its thousands of seeds, I’ll leave them for the birds.  I love this twining of food/beauty/human/wild.

I’ve plugged it before, and will again:  for the backyard permaculturist there is no better guide than Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden.

For a nice, kid-friendly introduction to a Three Sisters garden, check this site.

There are many myths surrounding the Three Sisters–here are just a couple.

We’d love to hear your ideas for other place-specific versions of the Three Sisters.

I’ve been perusing a beautiful new book by Barbara Pleasant, The Complete Compost Gardening Guide. Pleasant invites us into the rich underworld of our backyard soil, asking us to see it as a living food web, rather than a simple input-output system.  In one of my favorite sections, she discusses the microscopic fungi that live on or near the roots of plants.  These mycorrhizae send a web of hyphae, or “rootlets” into the soil, which increase plants’ access to moisture and nutrients.  When the hyphae die, they decompose, feeding protozoa, bacteria, and all sorts of hidden “soil critters,” as Pleasant says, releasing even more nutrients for our crops.  It’s a symbiotic relationship–the roots provide shelter and structure for the microfungi, and the fungi bring increased health to the plants.

The upshot for us as gardeners is a welcome one–more mulching, less digging.  Digging interrupts this delicate system.  But Pleasant’s book goes even further than the recent move to no-till gardening:  when we pull up plants from our gardens, such as the spring peas that are now finishing up, we also pull up this hidden mycorrhizael ecosystem, and a rich source of soil health.  Her suggestion?  Just cut the tops off of spent plants, and leave the stubble.  New seeds can be planted around the previous plants’ root structure, and will benefit from the beautiful food web thriving beyond our vision.

Off to the compost bin.

It was a sad day when I realized those gorgeous snap peas we’d been feasting on were finally spent.  But I loved thinking of the world beneath the soil as I cut the plants off, leaving the roots.  I’m letting this bed lie for a couple of weeks before starting the winter garden there–pac choi, kale, cabbage, beets…

Permaculture offers a gardening philosophy and practice that combines both notions, inviting us to work with the natural state of our landscape, even on a small backyard scale, to grow gardens that require less grappling.  In the current “victory garden” movement, it seems the impulse is to construct a few rectangular wooden raised beds, then fill them with soil and rows of plants.  Permaculture asks us to approach gardening with more heart, to first take a step back, and ask two questions.  What is is that we, the human inhabitants, require of our bit of land (food, a place to play, herbs, peace for the soul…)? And then, what does the land, and the region, need from us (soil rejuvenation, removal of invasive plants/grass, space for native plants, varied dimensions to provide habitat for birds…)?

We are still a long way from a full permacultural landscape, but in an homage to the vision, we’ve deployed one of the classic permaculture projects–the Herb Spiral.  Instead of a long path, or an unimaginative straight-edged bed for herbs, the herb spiral wraps nearly 30 linear feed of planting space into a five foot labyrinth.  The earth is mounded to three feet in the center, and slopes downward on the sides, terraced by a winding circle of stones.  Plants requiring less water, such as rosemary and dill, are planted near the center; those at the bottom edge of the spiral, such as coriander and parsley, will get more water as it makes its way down the slope.  The mounded bed also provides directional variation–the herbs that thrive in hot, dry climates (oregano, rosemary, thyme) can be planted on the sunny south side, while those that prefer cooler climes (parsley, chives) go on the north.  Cilantro, with its tendency to bolt, can be settled on the east side, out of the way of the hottest afternoon sun.

The spiral saves space, while it works with the elements of wild nature to allow our plants to flourish.  And I believe on some level we benefit from the cross-cultural symbolism of the labyrinth that ties in so well with our gardening efforts–a simultaneous turning to center, and back out to the wider earth.

Yes, it’s a little hippie.  I love it.

You can find more information on this project and many others in Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway, my favorite book on home-scale permaculture, just out in a shiny new edition with color photos and an expanded section on urban gardening.  It’s super accessible–nicely written, filled with inspirational ideas, and the wild-ranging thoughts of a true permaculture activist.