Blue Boat Home learning to live together sustainably

Midsummer poses a number of challenges here at our urban farm.  It's when I've finally gotten around to preparing garden beds for sheet-mulching, but that means I need a large volume of green organic matter, as well as the leaves or straw I've saved from the previous fall.  Grass clippings are easy to come by, but they tend to turn slimy and smelly under sheet mulch conditio

Back in the summer of 2008 when I was first ordering plants for our winter garden, I came across an item called "tyfon" or "Holland greens." It was in the section of the Territorial Seed catalog devoted to cover crops, and indeed when the seed packet arrived it said "EDIBLE GREEN MANURE."  How appetizing!  But in farming lingo, a "green manure" is just a cover crop that improves the soil... multiple sources said that tyfon could be eaten by people as well as animals, so I ordered it, along with several other crops that Territorial promised were winter-hardy.

The shadow of the neighbors' fence is very visible in this shot. It casts a very crisp frost line in the spring. I located the spiral several feet away from the frost line. It's only in shadow in this picture because the sun is setting.

I did use the level (in the background) a little, but mostly I just eyeballed it.

I've wanted to build an herb spiral since we first moved into the house, but the back yard was such a wreck last year that I didn't get to it until this year. I followed the plan at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Herb_spiral.svg roughly, and will plant it according to that plan. It took about twice as many bricks as I expected, but fortunately we had plenty lying around!

In preparation for tomorrow evening's Green Living Emporia meeting, which may or may not actually happen, here's a list of plants we grew in the garden's first year:

So back in June, we went on the Kansas City Urban Farm tour, and Jessie posted the photos quite a whle ago, but I just got around to posting the videos.  Here they are:

The most common question that Jessie and I got about our house during the winter was, "What exactly are you doing in the front yard?"  They'd never seen anyone intentionally bury the yard in 6-12 inches of leaves before.  Here's what we were doing, and why, and what worked and what didn't.