Holes and greens

Down in the pasture I've been noticing a a carpet of green and a lot of holes in the ground which have both taken over the uncultivated space at the bottom of our hill.

The greens, of course, are natural grasses and shrubs, a.k.a. weeds, which grow enthusiastically on our property with a tenacity and success that I have yet to match with the trees and vines I plant down there. They're not much of a worry to me, except where they are growing around my berry and grape vines and trees. 

Not willing to apply chemical sprays, I've spent the better part of two days hand weeding around the bases of the trees and shrubs, and have the bleeding arms to prove it. Berries are thorny and very well-defended plants, even when you are trying to help them by removing competitive plants around their bases.

The holes are a bit of a mystery to me, except for the largest ones which are from ground squirrels. There are small ones and medium ones, which could host anything from tarantulas to snakes to field mice.

While the greenery is a simple fix -- pull what's competing with the plants for nutrients and leave the rest -- the holes are a dilemma, because if we are going to have livestock, the holes will have to go.  They are just too much of a hazard to sheep, who could injure or even break a leg by stepping into one.

But one of the basic cornerstones of permaculture is leaving a certain amount of your property to nature and her critters, to do with what they please (within reason). And so I'd prefer to leave the bottom of the pasture to the hole-dwellers, if possible.

This will take some creative fence design, but I think having a balance of cultivated property and wild property is worth it.  As for how to do it, I'm not sure yet...but in the hours I will be spending down in the pasture weeding, perhaps that will give me more than enough time to think about it.

Of course with enough holes and enough greens, I guess I could always open a permacultural golf course, and with the general pathetic-ness of my golf game, the hole-dwellers are probably safe.

Weeds

It's that time of year.  Even though we haven't had much rain, the spring weeds and grasses have still gone wild.  And so, the age old question gets asked:  How do we deal with it?

One property's forage is another's weed issue 

Big Ag's solution to weed issues is to spray with something commercially strong, like Professional Strength Round-Up.  This usually results in a feisty disagreement (aka an argument) between us, as I don't believe in using commercial herbicides.  True, their manufacturers claim they carry a low mammalian risk ("low" is not the same thing as non-existent, however), but they are also known endocrine disruptors for mammals.  And the chickens, the frogs and toads which live on our property are all non-mammals, and are therefore even more vulnerable to its effects.  It's simply not worth the risk.

This afternoon, after the rain was over, I went out with a Hula Hoe and tried to knock some of the ones in our back yard down, but could not do it.  The hoe started to pull up the landscape fabric the former owner has put throughout the back yard, which is rapidly shredding and is therefore less effective against blocking weed growth.  I didn't want to shred it anymore and worsen the problem, so away went the Hula Hoe. 

Two options I'm considering are using a small propane garden torch, which appeals to the latent arsonist in me (Fire!  Fun!) plus offers me the feeling of payback when the star thistle that scratched my calves so badly disappears in a pull of smoke.  The other option is a 20% solution of vinegar, called horticultural vinegar, which is safe for organic gardens as well as for domestic and wild animals to come in contact with.  

Another option is to just weed whack it all down until summer comes, when anyplace we've not irrigated will become so dry nothing can survive.  We killed a whole lawn that way last summer.

Either way, it's on.  Me against the weeds.  If you don't hear from me for three days, please send out a search party ... and have them load up the garden propane torches when they come looking for me.  Things are ugly out there, I'm tellin' ya.  I have the scratched calves to prove it.

To Weed Block Or Not To Weed Block...Hmmm

A Weedy Dilemma

So this morning I installed weed block in our front yard, before laying down some bark and finishing the lawn removal project we started last fall.  And just to be sure I was doing it right, I checked a few internet sites, only to find out there is a massive backlash against the use of landscape weed block, from gardeners everywhere...which leads to the dilemma:  Do I weed block or not?  Basically the arguments against it go as follows:

Weed block is ultimately unnecessary, because the mulch or bark you spread over your yard will 1) deter weeds all by themselves, and 2) break down and enrich the soil as it decomposes. But if you put weed block in place before laying your mulch or bark down, when the bark breaks down it will not become part of the soil -- it will just sit on top of it, uselessly. There's also the little issue of landscape fabric being non-recyclable, with some being made of plastic compounds.

Those are convincing arguments.

Nonetheless, I still weed blocked the front yard anyway, using non-plastic weed block.  Why?  First of all, because enriching the soil around the yard is not something I am interested in.  If I had spreading groundcovers, or planned on a more busy garden, adding plants as the years went on, I would leave the weed block out of the mix and just bark over the yard, since good soil would be something I needed in the future.  

The mostly-native plants that are growing out there will be receiving natural compost and of course water, but most of the yard is being left fallow, intentionally, because we want to use very little irrigation on anything not producing anything edible.  All these plants we put in do well on very little water and poor soil, so they are well-adapted to what's there now.  

The other thing is that while weeds ARE deterred by a thick layer of mulch, many of the native weeds we have here put down deep tap roots and, once in, are almost impossible to yank out.  A layer of weed block assures that, if those weeds do start to grow, they will not be able to get under the fabric layer and will therefore be easier to remove.

I also wonder how many people don't use the weed block and then end up using copious amounts of Round-Up instead of old-fashioned weeding.  I am a realist, and know I will be concentrating more on our food crops than our front yard, so I want to make sure I have to do as little weeding as possible, because I absolutely hate using Round-Up and avoid it at all times....even though it has low mammalian toxicity, it is still extremely hazardous to creatures like toads and frogs, both of which reside on our property in abundance. So thanks, but no thanks.  

So often things seem to come down to using what we consider to be the lesser of two evils.  I'm not in love with weed-block, but if it prevents Star Thistle from settling in as permanent yard-scape plants, as well as allows me to pull weeds easily instead of resorting to chemical warfare, then I'm willing to bite the bullet and use it.  

That being said, I am getting extremely excited as we approach the end of this lawn-killing endeavor.  The front yard has looked so bad for so long, to see bark and green, growing shrubs will be much easier on the eyes than how it's looked recently.  I'm sure our neighbors will agree.