Hmm, so I haven't posted for more than six months. Too much to do, so little time.
Part of what I've been up to in the last few months has been planning for our permablitz - see www.permablitz.net. And it actually happened! A huge crew of wonderful people came and transformed our grassy wilderness into landscaped paths and irrigated no dig gardens. Miraculous. I'm not given to using the word awesome (don't get me started!), but I think I used it about six times on Sunday.
Anyway, I wanted to upload a pile of photos, and it suddenly occurred to me that I could do it here. I'll try to follow up with a post on the garden design and the thinking behind it, but am still too tired from the weekend to write much tonight.
These pics are of our back yard. I need to take another of the outcome with the morning sun, but this will do for now. The front was also transformed, but with such speed (or so it seemed to me) that I missed getting any action photos. I will get out there in the morning some time this week and take some photos of that too. It looks equally amazing.
Hope you like the pics.
e.
5 comments:
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Thank you so much for all of this - All the best of luck and I can't wait to see how it all turns out!
Wow, that garden looks fabulous - would love to know how you find it for weeds? Does the cardboard do a good job of keeping them down?
Hi Sasha,
Most weeds will grow in your top layers, so the cardboard doesn't suppress them. In the initial stages of a lasagna/layered garden, it is certainly easier to pull them out.
But as I try to garden following permaculture principles, I generally keep weeds in the garden. I let fat hen (lambs quarters) get quite large (it's quite ornamental) and then chop and drop it as mulch. Milk thistles stay at the moment, as we have a large outbreak of aphids and they're happy to eat the thistles and leave my vegies and ornamentals alone. I only pull out nasty prickly weeds and anything that has pest status (eg moth vine, mirror bush).
Where the cardboard really shines is in suppressing grass so you can create new beds. It worked really well in suppressing the kikuyu grass that we were planting over in these pics, but in another spot where couch was dominant, I'm still having to do quite a lot of spot weeding. I think I'd do at least a double layer of cardboard in the future if I were dealing with couch grass in the future.
Happy gardening!
Elizabeth
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