Kijiji Queen Wood Mulch

I do not take my nickname of "Kijiji Queen" lightly. I take a lot of pride on being able to get items inexpensively or free if they are reasonable driving distance from our house. Additionally, I LOVE to get rid of things on the site as well (remember all of the wood from our deck removals??). To add carbon matter and ground cover to our future food forest and beef up our outdoor compost bins, I began the search for wood mulch. Within a week or so, I found an arborist that would deliver 4-6 yards of mulch only for the cost of delivery (about $65).

Other than about 1.5 yards that friends took to use, we made use of all of the mulch. Here is a close-up of the mulch. It was steaming and already full of fungal growth--perfect for our pending food forest!

The future food forest looks a lot more polished and ready for some cherry trees.

Next up: Growth on our urban farm

Bring in the soil

Since we did not want to wait for a year or more to build and make soil, we decided it would be best to bring in 4 yards of compost/loam mix from Western Canada Compost. They have a great mix of organic matter, no bio solids (municipal sewage), and maintains good water retention.

Finally by June 10th we were able to plant our seedlings in the garden, now with our swale system in place and slowly filling in with gravel as more was dug out of the beds. In the background you can see the black buckets and tires where we were trying to grow potatoes for the first time.

While the swales were filling in with gravel, I sprinkled this product (which is really just clover seeds) around the edges of the swale to aid in holding the soil in place and fixing nitrogen at the same time. Some of it grew, but much of it was washed away in the heavy rains in June. Additionally, we broadcasted daikon radish seeds as a cover crop to help us deal with the compaction of our mainly clay soil.

Up next: How we built the wicking beds!

Fall is approaching

As the fall of 2010 was starting to come in nice and slowly, we still had lots of tomatoes that needed to ripen before the frost came. Here is the story of how we helped them ripen:

Tim holding a tomato plant he ripped up.

We hung them upside down in our basement to stress the plants into ripening their tomatoes.

Some of the tomatoes that fell off during their uprooting were put in a box, layered with newspaper and a small apple to help their ripening. It worked! We were eating ripened tomatoes from our garden well into December. In fact, we froze many of them whole and still make sauce from them when the mood strikes.

Here is the garden aftermath:

All of the foliage was laid back down on the garden and later covered with leaves rescued from the leaf drop off area in our community. This act assures that nutrients are not all being removed from the garden and are composted into the soil during the winter.