Garden work(s)

Lots of planting, mulching, designing and general human labor tasks have taken place recently.

Please feel free to join in this celebration of human labor on Tuesday afternoons after 2PM to help beautify your community space.

7524 Kolbe Lane
Wilsonville, Oregon 97070

Purple majesty potatoes were planted two weeks ago and are now above ground. Today they were hilled and strawed. About half of the garlic row was strawed as well with some dried grass clippings. Also planted some buckwheat covers over the trench where irrigation piping was laid and over some bare spots. Here's a primer on the alleopathic properties of buckwheat.

http://www.regional.org.au/au/allelopathy/2005/2/addenda/2751_iqbalzi.htm

Lots of the winter covers are resilient enough to take heavy machinery, constant foot traffic and mowing. The crimson clover is now in flower as are the strawberries and winter greens. Most of the spring greens are under row covers, lettuce and swiss chard will be harvested in a few weeks. Snap peas are stuggling due to period of sproadic rain and hot sun, the lack of hardening off may be affecting them negatively as well.

Fruit trees seem to be doing exceptionally well even after a tough winter freeze and blizzard to ring in the new year. Perphaps they'll bear some fruit the fall and surely some more trees will be planted this fall to ensure biodiversity and open pollination.

On that note...biodiversity is a practice that should be practiced in gardening. Tilling only expedites the rate of soil erosion, nutrient loss and desertification. In tilling land for annual crop production, the ecosystem becomes home to many plants that only seek to complete one task, reproduction. Go look anywhere the soil has been disturbed and not seeded. What you'll find is a handful of problematic weeds that do not compete with other plants in the ecosystem. No, they reproduce very quickly after tillage because there is no competition from other plants.

In Grave Danger of Falling Food:

In this piece Mollison deconstructs the modern agircultural system as a detriment to our health and food security. He speaks truth to ignorance on the subject of lawns.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=3162503821561656641&hl=en&fs=true"