Garden Residency

Hey folks ::

My name's Aidan, and I'm gonna be posting here at watchthegardengrow very frequently during the coming months.

I just started the pilot for a garden residency here at Denniston Hill. A while back I approached Kara and other members of the Garden Committee with a proposal :: that I'd help take care of, plan, and develop or expand Denniston Hill's garden in exchange for the ability to do some projects of my own making here at the site. Concomitantly, I'll be apprenticing with a couple of permaculturists who live down the road a ways, Andrew Faust and Adriana Magaña of the Center for Bioregional Living. 

The three proposed projects were 

1) research and documentation of the ecology of the site, the lay and history of the land, to be used as a reference by the Garden Committee and as a tool for any potential future permaculture designs for the site. 

2) an ongoing foraging project. I'm interested in wild medicinal and edible plants and the practice of foraging in general. My plan is to harvest as many things as I can, to process and store wild foods for the winter, and to craft tinctures, oils, and salves from the wild medicinals I gather. Thanks to the work of L. Mazzarella, we already have a substantial list of identified wild medicinals growing in the area to start with.

3) an expanded compost/soil-building project. I'm still getting a feel for the scope of what's possible for me to do here, but the initial idea I had would be to build relationships with local restaurants and other local producers of organic waste and see if I can't truck some of that refuse home to grow compost for us as well as a free resource for people who are gardening in the area. 

I'm interested in the idea of soil stewardship as a fundamental and base practice of gardening. I've only recently begun to learn about the ecology of soil life, and the importance of nurturing a diverse and robust base of soil communities as part of a larger practice of growing things. I'm looking forward to taking that on.

The proposal was recently approved by the Board and I moved here this past Friday. Needless to say, I'm very excited to be here, and have already found quite a bit of joy in the work that I'm doing. 

And Kara and I got to work right away.

We went out to the garden a few times this past weekend, harvesting some tomatoes, kale, cucumbers, squash and zucchini, and just assessing the overall situation there. We discussed what had been doing well, and what hadn't, and we referenced a previous map plan for the garden and talked about how things had played out in terms of companion planting and the timing of seeding. We figured out what we still had left to harvest up until the first frost, and what would persist on post-frost and continue to be productive in the late fall/early winter. 

We discussed what could happen with the garden from hereon. Use of the greenhouse structure as a cold frame is going to be a priority. We'd both like to see more greens, especially in the early spring and in July. We'd like to see more companion planting occur, and to figure out some strategies to protect the kale and collards from the critters that seem to be having a good time eating them. 

We also discussed some aspirations I'm particularly excited about. I'd like to sheet mulch (basically, compost in place) as much of the garden as possible, to build up the soil and the communities of life that are in it. It'd be great to cover crop this winter, of course, and we talked a little bit about what that could look like. I'd like to experiment with the use of a perennial green carpet for the pathways that can mulch in place and develop the soil and, ideally, provide some sustenance. 

I'd also like to experiment with the intentional use of weeds next season. I've been reading "Weeds: Guardians of the Soil" by Joseph A. Cocannouer, and I highly recommend this book. It certainly is an unorthodox position to take by many people's standards, but the author discusses how the intentional, managed use of weeds or volunteer plants can do tremendous things for the soil and the other plants in it :: by providing mulch material above and below ground, and by digging deep into the subsoil with their roots to loosen it up, conducting nutrients and water up to the topsoil, and leaving behind them paths for our more traditionally cultivated plants to do similarly. All that generous work aside, there are many so-called "weeds" that are edible and/or medicinal, and have historically provided sustenance for many communities the world over, including Native communities here.

Lastly, we discussed the idea of having more insectary plants throughout the growing season next year, as a strategy to waylay the various pests that are out there. 

Aside from all this scheming and dreaming, Kara and I went to work on the compost pile we got going alongside the garden. There had been at some point the idea of having three piles, side by side :: one ready to use, one cooking, and one fresh pile to give new materials to. Over time there's been less distinction made between what's cooking and what's cooked, so Sunday we decided to get a little dirty. We used shovels to push the cooking layers of material to the side, and shoveled as much of the fully cooked stuff into a pile in one of the less human-used beds of the garden (the weeds have been making plenty use of it, and from what Kara told me it sounds like the weeds and the shizo planted there have done some beautiful work for the soil). The idea is to use this cooked compost for sheet-mulching the inside of the cold frame this upcoming weekend, when Kara's Arts and Agriculture class over at Hampshire shows up for a few days of dirty romping.

Sunday was also a beautiful day for foraging. I've been meaning to harvest the bountiful droves of goldenrod growing everywhere for some time now. However, it's often occurred to me to do so when I've spotted goldenrod butting up against a frequented roadside, and I'm not too keen on the idea of turning to such places for my medicine. Fortunately, here I don't have to. The meadows alongside the river back behind John's place are still popping with delicate, aptly-named goldenrod. I gathered as much as I could, taking cues from all the pollinators to determine which plants were the freshest, most recently bloomed. Though the goldenrod community didn't seem to be facing any risk of subsiding or falling behind in the meadow scheme, I made a point of only harvesting a little here and there, taking from robust clusters and leaving behind the more isolated, exploratory plants making their way alone. Now they're hanging in my room to dry. Once they have, I'll be making some tinctures for the treatment of urinary tract infections. Basically it has the ability to sooth the entire genito-urinary tract, and is a diuretic and antiseptic for treating kidney or bladder infection. It'll make a good gift for some of my friends who are plagued with the like.

 Yesterday, Monday, was mostly about research. I read up on a plan for an Appalachian Solar Dehydrator I'd like to build this week, to take advantage of the last of the season's tomatoes etc. and dry some food for the winter. The folks with the best design I could find predict a total cost of materials at $150, more than a little beyond my current means. But I suspect there are plenty of scrap materials to be found in the area that I could use, and today I'm going to begin looking for them. 

I also researched potential cover crops for the winter, some dynamic nutrient accumulators that could be useful to plant throughout the garden next season, and some edible insectary plants that could be planted next season to encourage the presence of beneficial, predatory insect communities. 

Lastly, I took to organizing and cleaning up the mudroom/summer kitchen/harvest processing space, and decided to process as many of the tomatoes as I could. I oven candied, with olive oil, salt, and dill, a bunch of tomatoes from the DH garden to enjoy this week, and then took tomatoes from the garden here as well as from Hampshire Farm and made them into a very rich sauce, which I then canned for the winter. 

Among other things I'll be up to this week :: planning and scavenging materials for the building of a solar dehydrator and for the laying down of sheet mulch this coming weekend.