Hello and welcome to a post about building our future garden! I’m going to take a little bit of a break from my recent run of posts regarding acorns (hey they only come every couple of years, so one has to work with the bounty when it’s given :D), but don’t worry I will return to those topics with updates soon. It is a good reminder that there are always lots of things to do on the homestead, and more importantly you don’t always get to choose when things need your attention 🙂
I’ve always felt that I am a lazy person at heart. Not in the traditional sense where you don’t get things done. A better description would be that I am very selective about what I spend my energy doing. Which leads to me saying ‘meh’ to a lot of activities (especially when video games are so accessible), and therefore appearing lazy. One of the most valuable lessons I learned as a kid was that everything comes at a cost. This then lead to various jobs, where I learned how much time and effort it took to afford the things I wanted. From that point on, that thought was pretty much always in the back of my mind when I wanted to purchase something. As I have gotten older, I’ve learned that what I really dislike is inefficient work. Obviously searching for perfect efficiency in everything that I do is ridiculous, but I have found that the more I rush around, the more little things fall through the cracks. Rather than getting more done by rushing around I actually become far less efficient, and really just frustrate myself from said inefficiency. Know thy self or something like that 😀
And how does this all relate to building a garden you ask? Well, it relates to how I will build the garden, but it also gives you an idea of why I wanted to retire from the corporate world in my thirties.
I’m a fairly patient person which ties very well into my ‘lazy’ personality. I’m usually more than willing to wait a decent amount of time if it will save me energy or money. I believe this is a big reason why I started looking into the homesteading life. One of the biggest draws of the homestead for me is learning to live with nature. Nature has a lot of the tools needed to survive, but sometimes it takes a long time for it to work its magic. Building this garden is an excellent example of this, and why we purchased the land so many years prior to living there. When we first purchased the property we weren’t quite sure what the soil would be like. I had higher hopes that it would be a little more workable. As I mentioned in one of the flashback posts about the soil, it is overwhelming clay. This is great for the long term as there are a lot of nutrients in clay, but extremely annoying to dig in initially.
In this little experiment we will be working to build up the garden (and work through the clay) with a fairly hands off method. The idea is to use fallen leaves from the trees on the property, and basically build a compost pile where we expect the garden to eventually be located. Here is the future garden before anything has been added. Don’t worry about the small size of the garden. That will grow with time, but for now we will start small. Remember I don’t like wasted energy, so I need to prove to myself that this works before we spend a lot of time moving leaves.
I also decided to layer some cardboard in between the leaves for some more future soil. It was cardboard that I already had from previous purchases, and in a sense I paid for the cardboard. Retiring from the corporate world in your thirties means you have to be very diligent about not letting things go to waste.
I could have torn the cardboard into smaller pieces to break down faster, but I was feeling lazy knowing that nature would help me out 😀 I also could do this with the leaves, but that would have required me to bring up a large battery and our leaf shredder. We will see how quickly nature breaks these things down. The leaves will break down to create a much softer soil to mix into the clay, but we will also be relying on the wonderful little earth worms to do a lot of work for us. The earth worms live in the first couple of feet below the surface, and will come up to help break down the leaves. I’m not sure at all how much they will help break down the soil below the surface, but I am about to find out!
The plan is to build up the pile of leaves for a few years before we are living up on the homestead. This will give us a good amount of useful topsoil while we work to slowly mix in the clay. Once we are living up there permanently I will focus on the double dig method for at least the first couple of years. The double dig method is rather intensive since one is supposed to dig down a couple of feet, but loosening the soil that much will help our plants grow deep roots. I’ll write about that when the time comes to actually dig so that you can see just how much work the double dig method involves. It is a good example that I am willing to put in a lot of work when I feel the payoff is there. For now I get to do the easy part though, and just move some leaves for a few years. The heavy lifting is future Will problems 😀
Very cool! Did not know you could create a compost pile with just leaves and cardboard. Might consider something similar for my
Back yard now that we have cleared some trees and get more light.
I highly recommend doing something like this in your backyard! Throw in some grass clippings, and you will have some of the best compost around 😀 About one bag of grass to three or four bags of leaves is a good starting ratio.