Posted by tegan on 2015-03-16 21:53:07 UTC

Permalink

I moved in to my new house in July and we've been planning on growing food but wanted to get the inside of the house in order first.

Where we are now: The front and back yards are almost completely grass. The front yard has one area with nice dirt, landscape fabric underneath, that's growing pretty tulips and more chickweed than we could possibly eat. We also have a sad, tiny apple tree that's about two feet tall, but at least it's got tiny buds growing so it's not dead yet. We've got a tea plant in a pot that's doing well, and several potted herbs that my housemate brought that are starting to reappear with the warmer weather.

Where we're going: Focusing on the front yard right now since it's where we walk through every day. I want to try hugelkultur, which involves burying logs in tall, mounded, non-edged raised beds. We're going to eventually eliminate all the grass and have four ~4x10 raised beds, a fig tree and a couple of blueberry bushes, and an herb spiral near the kitchen door. This is going to involve me removing a ridiculous amount of grass by hand, so it may take us all season to get there. We looked into getting topsoil delivered and it's very expensive to our urban location, but hugelkultur will allow us to use the soil we've already got and just amend it with the things it needs. We've got an arborist friend who's going to bring some logs, and then maybe we'll be ready to sign up for a huge load of wood chips from the arborist network in the area. Logs, then wood chips/compost, then the grass sod removed from the ground, then the dirt dug up from below the grass, mixed with compost. Our soil around here is heavy clay left behind by glaciers. Hopefully getting plants up off the ground will help with drainage.