Full bellies from the Rooted Landscaping home garden

Here's a sample of what's cooking in the Rooted Landscaping home garden.  In the photo below you see blueberry hill extending along the length of the fence.  In the foreground, against the fence, we've planted two rhubarbs.  Apparently they like buddies.  We planted bare root bulbs where they'll get plenty of sun & have enough room to expand and grow.  We probably won't get much of a harvest for two years.

I'm not a big rhubarb eater, but I do have substantial rhubarb aesthetic appreciation.  These are big focal points in a garden.  They have beautiful color & become fairly low-maintenance once established.  I like to integrate rhubarb into landscape designs for the sheer color and shape.  Edible plants are often lovely.  

Outside of the photo but around where the photographer stood is the little baby persimmon tree.  Given the orientation of the yard, as the tree goes its shade should fall downhill, where we plan a little yoga space (!) & leave the adjacent plants in full sun.

The trench slightly down hill from the rhubarb is now housing asparagus roots.  As the spears begin to poke up we'll slowly add more soil until the bed is level with the grade of the hill.  This plant is also fairly low maintenance.  Most asparagus patches have a life-span of 10-12 years.  We'd like to extend the patch in 5 years to create a nice on-going cycle of asparagus.

Oh, glowing corn.  In the foreground is a raised bed reserved for our friend, Sonora.  We've lured her with land so we get the added benefit of her insight into our growing garden.  See that goofy business with old fence doors & posts behind?  A jerry-rigged cucumber trellis to shade some lettuces.  Give it time.  I have faith.

The rows of logs & soil beyond now house corn seeds & soaker hoses.  There are four rows so that we could interplant corn & sunflowers in diamond patterns.  This is reccommended for corn growth.  They like small hills for water drainage. Given our surplus of logs we decided to hold in the arable soil for the corn with these logs.  It helps direct the water down hill and away from the base of the stalks.  So far so good.

Once we have about three inches of corn stalks we plan to plant the three sisters: squash to crawl over the ground & create a weed barrier, and beans to climb the corn stalks & fix the soil nitrogen.

This little raised bed is showing some life.  We planted the sweet peas & chard early.  They're said to be nice companion plants & provide an early harvest.  There's a big ole chard leaf coming in against the warmth of the log border.  There are more peas planted in other parts of the yard with natural trellising.

Early yields of onions and red cabbage.  We're waiting for the onion leaves to fall over to begin harvesting, drying, & curing the crop.

More food & fun to come!  Yum!

To all you lushes out there...

We need your help.

And your empty wine bottles.

You get the idea.  The post is one of our clotheslines.  I've planted this raised bed with sweet peas that we're hoping to train up the post.

We're beginning to run out of felled logs to frame out raised beds.  For several beds, especially those with undulating edges, we're using buried wine bottles to hold in the soil.  In the area surrounding this bed we're hoping to plant something nice & soil-amending, maybe vetch, maybe clover because the neighboring grape vines are said to like it.

The first time we saw buried wine bottles was at Aaculaax, during a trip to Guatemala.  If you want to see the inspiration in person, check out the yoga retreat I'm leading there next year!

We had collected crates of empty wine bottles from family vacations.  We used them all.  Do you have wine bottles you would donate?  Contact me to coordinate pick-up.  Blue bottles are best!

Food Forest. It's happening.

Kevin & I are slowly transforming our suburban home into a small farm.  Or, we're working towards sustainability, both in terms of sound environmental stewardship & being rewarded with food from our land.  Our home & property are fixer upper's so there have been long periods of preparation.  We look forward to having the space more self-sufficient.  Maybe that's a pipe dream.  Maybe we look forward to just maintenance work.

We called in some friends & spent a cool, sunny day installing some delicious new fruit trees, bushes, & vines!  In the space between our clothes-lines & our neighbor's garage, we built raised beds for conchord grapes & a fig tree.  The garage will give some nice wind barrier for the fig.  We plan to construct a trellis out of bicycle rims about a foot from the neighbor's garage.  That will give the conchords something to climb.  For fun, I planted sweet peas at the base of the clothesline posts.  My hope is to train them up the posts.  We'll see if it works!

Our backyard is full of roots & rocks.  We've been sheet mulching the yard even while we plant food in raised beds.  The raised beds allow us to grow vegetables to keep us encouraged!  It would be years before the soil was sufficiently root free & healthy enough to give us much of a food yield.  This way we can slowly support the soil while getting the quicker rewards of raised bed gardening.

After clearing the weeds we added some weed barrier.  Cardboard works great!  It's water permeable & will break down within a season or two.  This first growing season, when weed prevention is crucial, it will function just fine!

We added composted soil on top, planted the conchords & fig, & ran soaker hoses to give the new guys a long drink.

We went through the same process across the yard along our neighbor's fence.  We're calling this area "blueberry hill."  After prepping and building beds we planted 10 new blueberry bushes & transplanted two existing bushes that were struggling in a shady area of the yard.

 Lots of sun & drainage on blueberry hill!  Perfect.

At the far end we planted a persimmmon tree.  When it reaches full size at 15-20 ft it's shade radius shouldn't interfere with the blueberries getting lots of sunshine.

 A close-up of one of our new arrivals.  We planted a variety of blueberries for nice cross pollination.

We also planted two hugelkultur beds of raspberries & blackberries.  There was much debate about where to create the berry bramble.  We worked with what we have & created two thickets in front of four new fruit trees.  We planted two varieties of apple tree that cross-pollinate well, a black cherry, and peach tree.

Lots of fun talk of what to plant next & where.  Kevin made home-made pizza for the workers.  We happily soaked in sun before getting back to work!

Stay posted as these new additions take root.