jenny.shadegarden

  My friend, Virginia, is having to dig up her garden to make way for a laneway house. She has given me a collection of plants to re-home. Yesterday I constructed my first garden mounds using the hugelkulur method.  The first step was to dig and rake back the garden soil I put down last spring. The soil that was placed on cardboard last spring came up easily. The sections where I ran out of cardboard were threaded with fine white roots from the poplar tree. It's roots go everywhere. The second step was to pile leaves from the poplar tree to make a thick bed to lay a foundation for each garden mound. The third step was to pile the garden soil on top of the leaves.  The fourth step was to bring a large helping of compost from the kitchen bins. This compost is also full of worms. The fifth and last step was to plant some of the transplants from Virginia into the new mounds.  What I like about this method: The worms can go up and down between the ground and the mound - w...

  When I finished gardening yesterday I had the sidewalks blown clean and the leaves collected in the gardens. Last night another rain storm blew in and today the sidewalks are covered with more leaf gold. This year I am trying a new method to incorporate the leaves into the garden. Instead of putting cardboard down to create a semi-permeable barrier between tree roots and garden beds, I am laying down a thick carpet of leaves. Then I am piling a mound of dirt made up from last year's beds and new compost from the kitchen, as well as worm castings (and worms) from the worm bins. I'm adapting the Hugelkultur Method to take advantage of the windfall from the poplar tree, but also to protect my garden beds from the moisture and nutrient thieving tree roots that stunt growth above ground. I'll wait until things dry out a bit and then collect up this latest batch of leaves to form the foundation for more garden mounds.

  Every year our giant Lombardi Poplar tree drops leaves and branches by the truckload. In the past we would send this windfall to the City composting system.  This year I started to think about the leaves, how I could use them to create a base for my garden beds instead of using cardboard.  The leaves don't break down for the worm bins because they retain their shape unless they are mulched with the lawn mower. Mulching with the lawn mower doesn't work because there are so many leaves they clog the machine. My thinking this year is that I am going to use the leaves to create an organic barrier between the moisture and nutrient thirsty tree roots while providing a semi-permeable membrane so the worms can move in and out of the garden bed. At the same time, I don't want to make any permanent garden beds, I want to be able to move the beds around to continue building up the layer of leaves season after season.  This year, I started an experiment of creating a moveable ...