Dog Head Farms Day 1: Cleared out, ready for beds

Man… things really worked out in our favor yesterday. All yall that missed it really messed up. Within the first hour of our work day start we had a yard mule on the way to help out with the big weeds and an offer of more land in the neighborhood on which to plant.

Dana working the grilled cheese/PB&J station

We got way more done yesterday than I would have ever thought: land completely cleared, large compost bin built, neighboring fig tree rescued, existing fence posts cleared for trellising, and preliminary contour marking of the land for raised beds (see below) — basically our overgrown, weedy lot has been completely transformed and we’re now ready to plan out some beds and start digging! Many many thanks go to Dana, Nate, Hope, Lorenz, Grady, Dixon, LaMatra, Venece, Christina, Maggie, Magaggie, Manny, Stacy, Lilli, Chris, Randy, Rick, John and Dodger!

When we first received this property, we had two big concerns: water access and the slope of the land. The more we’ve been researching it, the more convinced we’ve become of permaculture and hugelkultur practices in particular as being able to address both of these issues — basically the practice of building raised beds atop of piles of rotting logs. The logs absorb loads of water, release lots of organic matter in to the soil, and even “self-till” the soil through creation of air pockets as they decompose. Supposedly, if the beds are built big enough (6 feet+ in height) you can get away without irrigation whatsoever. We’re not quite equipped to even take on that kind of experiment, but we’re going to do plenty of smaller beds and see how far we can get.

In order to do these raised beds effectively, they need to be built to follow the contour of the hill on which they lay. This makes it so that water traveling downhill hits the bed uniformly and doesn’t funnel to a single point and break through the bed. To do that, one uses an ingenious but simple tool called an A frame to mark out the contour of the land. We have done some amount of this already, and will be doing more next week. From there, we begin digging and laying logs.

So consider this an open call for lumber: drop it off at our site! We need lots and lots of wood for these beds, and the more we have, the more we can do and the bigger we can do.

And while we’re at it, let’s go ahead and plan our next work day for this Sunday, February 12th at noon. While our first work day was much more of a clean up day, this will be more of a planning day — contour marking the land, laying out paths between the beds, planting some fruit trees, and hopefully moving some logs around and digging some dirt as well. See you there!

Tags: 2012, hugelkultur

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