Suburban Permaculture Project

Environmental consideration is a learning curve...even after all these years of practice. :I

I just asked Monkey to help me move the futon pad to the curb for bulk trash. He said why...I answered that it was ruined by the cat pee I've been unable to remove, and it needed to go to the dump because it stinks to much to keep using. What happens there, he asks...Well, in theory it should rot, but really they just bury it....uh...wait a minute, mommy needs to think.

Wonder what the stuffing is made of? Oh, look...cotton.

Well, heck. I'm slow. Let's just go empty it into the chicken pen...to...ya know...rot. ~facepalm~

Habits, they will sucker punch you.

ETA: Turns out there were two layers of foam, three of cotton stuffing, plus some cotton string. We saved the cover to wash (should work as a cover if we get another futon pad), dragged the pee pee stink foam to the curb, and threw all the cotton padding into the chicken pen. They say this is NOT good bedding thank you, where are their leaves, dammit.

But the boy child thinks the fact that the chickens will turn all of it (eventually) into garden dirt is WAY cool.

Ok, update: we ate our first strawberry out of the garden last week, and this week we had our first harvested broccoli. Apparently there are little grub worm things that like broccoli, but gryphynshadow  managed to pick them out when cooking, so I don't think we got too much extra protein from that. She has planted the heirloom tomato seedlings she started, 7 of them (I'll let her update you on the varieties and which are doing better or worse) and has shared a bunch of them with laughingturtle  as well. LT reports that something is attacking said tomatoes and is planning on spraying them with a soap nut mix to see if that solves the problem.

We have the chicken pen almost finished enough to bring the chickens over (taking long enough, isn't it?), we just need to add the roof. Then it will be time to find some food-grade DE to paint the wooden parts of the will-be-a-coop and treat the litter with. We are planning to try the deep litter method, so I'm on the lookout for side-of-the-road plywood to add an edge to the coop area to contain the litter. We still haven't figure out how the best way to add a rain barrier roof over the coop area, but we have some ideas we are bouncing around, so hopefully we will solve that one soon.

Progress in the yard has been slightly delayed by the Evil-Cold-of-Neverending-Lethargy that is making it's way through the family, and by us taking a weekend to work on our yurts for Flipside with errantember , but we hope to have at least the chickens moved over before we head out to that in May.

The spinach apparently either went in too late to take advantage of the cool weather, or needs to be planted on a side of the house that isn't quite so sunny and warm, as it has all gone to seed.gryphynshadow  dutifully saved the seeds when it bolted, so while we didn't get edible spinach, we did get the beginning of future spinach out of them.

The peppers lost their blossoms to the last cold snap, but those that had already set are doing their darndest to become peppers we can eat. And the accidental-pumpkins are blossoming as well.

The compost is doing better, and our daughters were absolutely enthralled to learn what our son already knew; that when you play outside, the mommies LIKE it when you pee in the compost.

goudananda  has offered to be on the lookout and try to get a hold of some barrels for us to use for rainwater catchment, so hopefully by the end of the season we can get a hold of a few of those and go about converting them to harvest rain off the roof.

Chicken pen progress, this pic is slightly outdated, as I have actually taken the pile of salvaged brick from the garden-bed-against-the-house removal and placed them inside the pen around the edge to discourage chicken digging of holes beneath the fence.

future peppers! Our first strawberry! wheee!! It was delicious...we shared it between gryphynshadow , myself, and our friend tazfromtx  who was over at the moment of harvest (clever timing) and all agreed it tasted far superior to store purchased strawberries.

Pumpking blossoms! Broccoli! They got slightly larger than this, but not by much, and then we harvested....I don't remember if GS said that was because she couldn't wait, or because they were starting to open up and preparing to bolt, but either way, it was tasty.

We have had a busy week, (there are two toddlers jumping on my bed as we speak, and gryphynshadow  is off to pick up the 5 year olds from school) but we haven't been entirely idle, just not out in the yard.

I found and purchased a cold water bath, tongs, and a ton of mason jars along with some rings and lids off of Craigslist. This involved listing what the lady had for Miss J, having her look them up on the internet, proclaim us interested and then contacting the woman to arrange to goink her canning stuff. Our dining room has a big pile of boxes in it now, and eventually we are going to have to figure out where to store them. We don't need them now of course, but I'm told that at the prices one can pay for canning supplies, keeping an eye out now is a good thing. :)

Miss J has been working her laptop into a lather, visiting a permaculture forum, finding sources of heirloom seeds, and I don't even know what else. She's been happy as a pig in manure, so one assumes she is learning nifty things and lusting seeds and will remain content until next weekend when we go to put in the chicken pen.

The plants she put in are doing well (I'll try to add a picture when I'm not supervising bouncy children). The red onions are happy, though the yellow seem to be less enthusiastic. The broccoli is getting taller, we have a....something...growing from a seed that J thinks may be a pumpkin and is therefore letting get large enough to be identified before removing or relocating. The brussels sprouts seem less excited, but haven't died either, so that's ok. And we've quite a bit of rain, so the compost is no longer pathetically dry.

I don't have an update on the strawberries, believe it or not I haven't been over there and I don't remember if J gave me an update on those.

It was suggested (via internet searches) that to jump start our compost pile (one just needed water and is heating up now, but the other is being stubborn) one should save human urine. This led to an interesting realization that I actually don't know if I can do that. I'm on blood-to-brain barrier crossing drugs. I know they pass into breast milk, but I don't know if they would pass into other bodily fluids, and until we do some research, we can't risk contaminating the areas ground water with my partially processed pharmaceuticals. Hey, it's possible I'm a bio-hazard! wee!

This conversation came on the heels of an online discussions with laughingturtle  about humanure and composting toilets. Now, I personally think it's despicable and gross that we use drinking water to remove waste from our homes. I fully intend to install a humanure toilet in my home at some point. I also am realistic enough to say that sometimes one has to compromise one's ideals to compensate for living in the suburbs and not the country. When I do convert one of our bathrooms, I intend to leave the original plumbing (minus the toilet) in place, use a composting bin that allows me to capture the compost 'tea' for disposal down the remaining black-water toilet, and NOT use the resulting compost on our edibles, only on the ornamental sections of our garden. After all, what is the point of organic gardening if I then put drugs on it? Plus, of course, there is the issue of "if we don't do everything safely, how do we expect the movement to get outdated laws about grey-water and humanure and other things overturned"? I firmly believe everything we do has to be to a level that I would be willing to have it put in the paper for local lawmakers to use in making their decisions. If my lot is an example of why permaculture and all it's attendant projects should be legal, I'm doing it right. :)

The modern day permaculturist has some interesting conundrums to deal with.

Progress is slow so far, but we have accomplished a few things. Since they happened before we started the blog, let me catch you up. :)

We have put in a compost pile. When I say "we" in this instance, what I mean is that I helped weed to provide things for the compost pile and gryphynshadow  did all the rest of the work. There was some confusion for a while as to why it wasn't heating up (the germinating pumpkin seeds in the middle were sort of a clue we were doing something wrong). But G got on the internet and discovered that one of our problems is that (duh!) bone dry stuff does not rot. She has begun watering it, and we are getting some heat in one, though nothing in the other. Still not sure what the problem is there.



We also (and again, I mostly mean her, I bought the plants though! lol) planted three strawberry plants,  a row of broccoli, and a row of brussels sprouts on the south side of the house. Then, with some help from the visiting errantember , we (and I actually do mean "we" this time) put in three Earth Boxes worth of onions. The Earth boxes are left over from my container gardening era before I had a capable human to live with and could contemplate other methods of growing food. I've had good luck with them in the past, but this will be the first time I've tried them without their plastic cover (which I don't have any more of now) so I'm curious to see if they perform as well as they did with all their intended pieces.




Oh, the red thing in the photo? That's the painted stump from one of the four trees we had removed before we installed the privacy fence.

So that's where we stand right now; couple of rows of plants put in at the tail end of the recommended planting season, a stubbornly cool compost pile, and big ideas!

The next step will be putting in the chicken pen.....