Paradise Organic Plants

  We came to start laying out cardboard to kill the grass and make our life wonderful; we'd bought a 250 foot roll of corrugated paper, and who should be interested in it but the NonGrata Trio. (Can they read the Private Property sign?) Of course we will be planting food for them, but the cardboard is ours! At the left in the picture is the area we covered a few months ago. We put in some of our forest soil then and planted garlic and clover, and that has provided miniscule bits of green. That's ok; it is only March. The sticks on top are because we don't have a wood chipper yet, and we can't currently get a truckload down to the area. This trip we put in fava beans (broadbeans) and daikon radish--our goal at this time is to fix the soil. We'll be planting lots of beans to help turn the whitish silt into loam, and worms will feed on the daikon radish, leaving us castings. We ran out of time or we'd have covered the soil with cut weeds. Hopefully the clover will ...

It is easy to create a grass-free space, to begin with, by covering your gardening areas with a few overlapping layers of cardboard, paper bags, or thick layers of newspaper, whichever is most available. Hold them down with sticks and maybe topsoil, and mulch with woodchips. Never use plywood. Time and the lack of sunlight will kill the grass and its roots. Around the edge of your garden, dig a small trench which you could fill with a log, or you can buy various types of garden borders that will fit down into the earth far enough to block grass roots. Another option is to plant a border of comfrey or another plant with thick rhizomes to block the grass. The shade created by comfrey or other heavily leafed plants will also help prevent grasses. Permaculture gardening is one of the easiest ways to keep grass from taking back over your veggie spaces. With permaculture, you are not concerned about crowding (though you do want to consider the room needed by the full grown plant.) Inde...

The most fertile areas of the Earth are the lands of old growth forests. Soil in the Amazon has been built by nature for how many years? (Until the increase in fires) the air of the "Earth's lungs" was clean. The water at one time, coming from the Andes glaciers, was pristine. Who was tending all of that? Permaculture farming and gardening, using nature's principles, helps to restore these conditions. While nature works slower than a rototiller, it is so much easier and even more time effective in the long run than the typical modern methods. 1) To start, plan ahead. Make a map of your land and record where the sun hits for lengthier times of the day. Also watch for where water tends to run and pool. Under the outer rim of treetops make good garden spots if they are sunny, because water will drip into your plants from the trees. 2) If the sunny areas are covered with grass, simply design the shapes you want for your gardens or plantings, leaving room around or t...