What I Did for Mother's Day - Hugel Happiness

My son could not believe his ears. He had to ask me again just to be sure. "You really don't want me to buy you anything for Mother's Day? You're sure?" I assured him that agreeing to help me build a hugelkultur bed was going to be more than enough for a Mother's Day gift. I'm not sure he really believed me until he spent 4 hours in the 70 Degree sun this passed Sunday building my beautiful hugelkultur bed. 

First the base of the bed. In the fall we had laid down cardboard and topped that with our corn and sunflower stalks. Then we added our yard clippings and dried leaves. Over the winter we added our kitchen scraps. On top of all this we laid a lot of wood from standing dead trees that we had to take down for safety. Then we began to cover it with a load of loam that we had brought in. 

We haven't been  working our land long enough yet to have developed a large pile of well composted material for making top soil. My guys were handy carting all that soil. And this is when my son realized just what he'd got himself into. We were about 3 hours into the project at this point. I was in there wielding the shovel and hauling logs too, but I did have to pause occasionally to take the photos.

My Guys! They worked so hard!

In this last photo we are about half done with burying the woody debris. It's not quite finished yet, but we made a lot of progress. It still needs some top dressing with additional soil, compost and a good layer of straw mulch. We are going to plant medium bush blueberries on top of this mound. On the south facing side we will have sun loving strawberries, and on the north facing side we will grow shade loving greens. I can't wait to see what kind of yields we get. This and the fledgling orchard that you may notice to the right of the hugelkultur bed in some of these photos are some of our first steps toward our permaculture perennial food forest and garden. 

I will continue to post photos as the food forest progresses. Until next time - Live Light!

Today I'm Thankful For...

I am very thankful that I have a partner who is as excited and interested in permaculture as I am. Not everyone is lucky enough to have someone as supportive as him in their lives. He is always supportive of my efforts to save the planet, stray animals or a dollar. He recently spent a great many hours building bird houses and a bee house to attract the birds and the bees to our garden so that we could grown our own food without having it devoured by insects. He also bought me several geraniums and other herbs and plant seeds 

which I can inter-plant in our garden and under our fruit trees to discourage harmful insects and invite beneficial insects to the garden. 

I am also thankful for the members of my permaculture class who are organizing a plant swap for our final PDC weekend. I now that I will be able to get some lovely perennial plants which will be of great use in the garden.

I am particularly greatful for all the valuable knowledge I am gaining from my permaculture class, which is helping me to turn my once run down, bedraggled lawn into something worth bragging about. I now have a budding orchard of semi-dwarf fruit trees, a ten foot diameter herb garden right outside the door that produces nearly all the herbs we can eat, eight industrious little hens that provide us with more organic eggs than we can consume and a pair of charming ducks that we hope will help to control the slug population in our yard while providing hours of amusement to the other two and four legged inhabitants of the homestead. All in all I think I'm a pretty fortunate human being today. I just wanted to take this opportunity to express my gratitude for all the blessings that I have. I am also grateful for each of you who take the time to read my ramblings. I hope that I am able to provide you with something that is of value to you. Today, I am hopeful that you are able to take a few moments to reflect on what you are grateful for. As spring turns to summer and we begin to spend more time out in nature, I hope you will take some time to reflect on how fortunate ware are to have so many beautiful places that we can enjoy and experience the beauty of. Let's all work to keep them beautiful by remembering to live lightly.