March Challange:

Breakfast-Yogurt, canned mixed fruit, walnuts

Lunch-Baked Beans on Bread

Supper-Pasta with roasted Chicken leg in a pasta sauce mixed with yogurt and dried squash.

Dessert- Hot Spiced Roasted Peanuts.

Ok, so lets talk about Permaculture today, the idea as I understand it in a nut shell is work with nature, layer, and layer some more.. follow nature’s rules, instead of trying to bend her to our will..

We all have the image in our heads of a perfect garden, that English garden, that has head gardeners, and under gardeners and is so sweet and perfect that we all drool, we have even seen these places in our garden magazines and on the net.. stunning they are.. and if they rock your world.. go for it.

I garden to fill my belly first and formost, and for pleasure second.. I often wonder if I have it wrong, my grandmother always planted flowers in her garden, not just to help bring in the bee’s but because she loved to have flowers, I remember her giving me my first chick and hen, my first sweet pea’s to plant and grow, she talked about the sweet smell they would give to the garden area, and I still plant them and think of her.. Rasberries always make me remember my grandfather, the many hours of “grandpa” chats that took place in my teens over his rasberry patch, now as a adult, I wish that I had spent more time out there listening and learning and just being with him..

In someways my garden and its many styles almost seems like a revolt in some ways from the way I was raised to garden, but I do believe each has its own place in your yard, don’t tie yourself down, have a raised sqaure foot herb, have a vertial growing space in that spot in the garden, use rocks to raise the temp and create a mini zone for your strawberries, Grow your horseradish in pots on the deck if you want, make narrow beds, make 4 foot wide beds (never bigger if you want to be able to reach the middle) make and use hugelculture and their wood based huge hugelbeets. Use Green covers, use mulch in your pathways, use mulch in your garden, have some area’s that are no till, some that are in fact lightly tilled and have some area’s that are double dug (awesome for potato’s). Try wintersowning, build and use cold frame, consider making a cold hoop house, have at least a few rows worth of row covers, don’t put all your eggs in one basket by this I mean, have many garden spots in your yard, and your farm.

Be wild, got a spot by a building, put down a wood ledge, be it bought or cut, mulch it down, cover with dirt and compost mix and plant it out..  Got a area that the pig rooted out for you to make into a new pasture? Throw a fence around it and put it into sqaush for the season, it will go crazy and produce like mad, when you take it out, frost seed it late winter and you will have pasture the year after..

Know your plants, some will only go down a few inches, some a foot and some three or more, this knowledge will let you know if you can dump a couple shovels of dirt/compost into a tree stump and turn into a working garden spot!

Ok, so tell me some the wild things you do in your gardens, what do you mix and match! What new thing are you going to try this year?