Hugelkultur 2

Where we are at part two of our Hugelkultur. We just finished putting all the logs inside it so the next thing we are going to do is put left over hay that the sheep left in the barn and on top of that put in sheep manure on top. After that we cover it up with the dirt and plant what we want to plant which in this case is going to be my blackberries.

We are putting together a video too explaining a lot more of Hugelkultur

Sam

Hugelkultur garden bed

We started a new project called Hugelkultur- Bed.

"Hugelkulture is the practice of composting large woody material to create a raised garden bed. It is a way of dealing with excess amounts of woody garden wastes, for example prunings, hedge clippings, brassica stems, or brashwood.

The name comes from German - hügelkultur translates as "hill culture".

As the years pass, the deep soil of the raised bed becomes incredibly rich and loaded with soil life. As the wood shrinks, it makes more tiny air pockets - so your hugelkultur becomes self tilling. The first few years, the composting process will slightly warm the soil giving a slightly longer growing season, in temperate and cold climates".

The main two reasons we love it is that 1. It takes our wasted fallen logs from our pecan trees and makes a use for it. 2. It will act like a sponge in a couple of yrs which will save us in watering we are hoping especially in this southTexas heat!

Some people don't even dig holes they just pile the wood and bury it with dirt, but we wanted to dig the holes. Because of the clay we have in our area we could only go down about 1 foot. We did a bit of it with the plow from our tractor then the rest we did by hand.

We plan to plant blackberrys in this bed and hopefully a covercrop on top.

I will post more photos as we fill the bed.

Sam

Garden has been pretty good this year. It rained a lot so we got our garden in later then we hoped. We did get lots of cucumbers which we canned into pickels a relishes & a lot of them that got too big we used for feed for the chickens which they just loved.

Our pear tree produced twice as much as it did last year. I think we made at least 9 large quart jars of pears. They didnt come out as sweet as we would have liked but I think they will be good to eat. Last year we only got one basket full of pears from two trees, this year two, hopefully next year 4!

It got so hot and I had to be at the hospital a lot with my father that the garden got away from me. Now we have the hard task of pulling up all the weeds and starting over again for our winter garden.

Hopefully it will cool off some so we can go out to the garden more often.

Sam

Date is wrong on the camera. It was shut off for awhile had to restart it didnt realize it was set for 2008? lol

Mother hen with her chicks hunting for those juicy bugs
Green beans climbing up the corn stalk
My daughters flowers
Cucumbers growing up the trelis

Well we spent a lot of time gardening today, we did mowing and weed eating the garden was getting lost in all the grass. Our lawn mower was down and had to wait awhile for the part to come in.

We have been getting a lot of ..continue later..late

Ok so we picked up these 450 plus bricks from someone on the craigslist the other day for $50 we priced it and it would have cost us $220 to buy it at store brand new so we made out like a bandit :)



Ok above picture is not mine I borrowed it from www.myedibleyard.blogspot hope they don't mind me borrowing it. This is sort of what we want to do with the bricks. Its called a "spiral herb garden" Hubby showed it to me and said he would build me two, one for my herbs the other for my strawberrys if I could find the bricks cheap. You should have seen me afterwards checking the craigslist morning, noon and night lol.

When you find a good deal on craigslist the thing is you have to be fast on contacting them and done your research on the actual cost of an item. I was lucky on this one, I was the second caller. The lady Melissa said a guy called said he would have to see if it matched his house and will get back to her..duh!...by that time I called told her if she had it still I would take it...please hold for me...I told her what I wanted to do with it to be friendly. Asked her when she wanted it picked up, she said today or 2morrow I told her I would be there 2morrow..done deal...Most people want to get rid of the stuff fast.

Once in order to get some bricks I gave the guy some fresh farm eggs lol sometimes a lil bartering does it.

Just to let y'all know if your in the San Antonio Texas area...you might want to check out the City wide garage sale this Saturday 8am-4pm..going to be a great sale.

Sam

Memorial Day Weekend gardening

Today we spread the mulch all around our garden. We still need more mulch if you believe it or not.

My raised beds surrounded by mulch now :)

Mulch spread amoung my berries

The kids below spreading mulch on our garden. Tommy is stomping on it for us.

Miranda showing off one of my tomatoes below

This picture below is off our 12yds of compost being delivered to our house. Cost us about $290 with delivery from SA. Double dark mulch.

Helotes

Good picture of one of their compost


Great Hydroponic system at the Helotes Center.

Today we traveled to the Helotes Nature Center

It was a good class lots of information and we made some good contacts, best of all it was free. We have been thinking of building a hydroponics are self. Hubby has tons of information on it already its just the doing and having the time to do this is the problem.

They will be having tons of classes on permaculture & other classes. I recommend if y'all have the time you should take one.

Later that day at the Tractor supply store on the way home we saw these lil tomato plants for 50cents. What a great deal but we knew it wouldnt grow well so late in the season in the dirt but we thought wow if we had a hydroponic system running it would have fit there so well.

We talked a lot about our rain system we wanted to put up today as we drove into SA mainly because hubbie had his ITUNEs playing with a segment of "Rain water systems" we even looked and priced some of the containers at the Tractor supply store. If we wanted to go a cheaper route there R tons of them for sale on the craigslisting all the time. $99 for 275 gal water totes is not so bad.

Lot of gardening dreaming today :) good day.