Permaculture projects for the summer
Here's some of the projects I'm tackling this growing season
Whew, this spring has been incredibly busy and productive! As usual, I've given myself a lot of projects and taken on even more at the spur of the moment.
Here are three that I'm currently working on:
Primitive Strawberry Tower
Permaculture seeks to create closed-loop systems. There is no "waste": everything is the raw material for something else. This mimics natural systems, which recycle endlessly. It's a highly efficient, resilient, and sustainable way of doing things, and it's a big part of why "life finds a way."
One raw material that I've had laying around for some time is a bunch of pine rounds from when I felled trees to make room for my food forest. I've used them in a variety of ways, but there are still quite a few leftover.
Inspiration struck when I was thinking about how to get some of my strawberry plants off the ground; they're often grown in towers to keep the fragile berries from rotting or getting nibbled by slugs and mice.
I had just cleared an area of invasive Japanese barberry when I noticed it was free of other weeds and quite level. So I grabbed some rounds and built a little platform. Then I filled the crevices between the rounds with pond muck, weeds, and mud. I built another layer and another, until I had my tower. Then I stuck 19 bare root strawberries in there—one in each outward facing crevice, and mulched the whole thing with wool. The wool traps moisture, adds some slow release nitrogen, prevents erosion, and helps a bit with slug & deer deterrence.
So far the strawberries are growing really well. It's rained twice since I completed the tower, so I haven't had to water it yet. The form of the structure combined with the mulch should do a good job of retaining moisture.
These are first year plants, so I'm not expecting a ton of strawberries this year. But my hope is that the tower is covered in a healthy amount of foliage by the fall, ready to produce lots of berries next year.