Carbon Neutral

I found a link to an interesting site which helps you calculate your carbon footprint. Once you’ve done that you can figure ways to reduce or offset your load. You can see by the little badge in my side bar that I am 0% carbon neutral which, according to begreennow.com, is the equivalent of planting 0.00 trees. Woohoo! We’ll see if my numbers change.

I do plant trees, 2 so far this year, but it looks like the site is geared more toward buying carbon credits. I’ll look into it.

Cheers,
christopher

Italy

I have just spent a few weeks in Italy for a wedding and vacation. We stayed in Rimini, a town on the Adriatic Sea. I saw many small kitchen gardens and some impressive farms. The trip from the airport in Bologne takes you passed orchards full of espaliered fruit trees. I may just have to try that in the back yard.

The photo shows a medium sized orchard in downtown Rimini, it has grape vines, a pomagranate tree, a nut tree or two, as well as some other trees. This garden is about 2 blocks from the beach. I did not have a chance to talk to the owner and that may be for the better since I do not speak Italian aside from “please”, “thank you” and “let’s go”. I was especially enamored of the gardens around San Leo and the small section of Tuscanny (near San Sofia). I have a photo of a particularly nice garden in a tiny town, but it is blurry and does not do the place justice.

I can see how such great food comes from Italy and why the Slow Food movement started here.

cheers,
christopher

Polyculture bed

Here is a photo of the polyculture bed in my yard. this was taken at the same time as the volunteer tomatoes, some time in June. The bed is 12' x 4' and raised about 6".

Pictured is mostly lettuce, a few remaining radishes and calendula. We also planted dill, beans, and parsnips. As of today, pretty much all of the lettuce has bolted. It looks nice towering over the garden, but it is almost too bitter for me to eat.

More than the food value, I’m amazed at the variety of insects that now inhabit my yard. It is a mix of good and bad, there seems to be a balance. Of course I still have more slugs than I would prefer, but I’ve found several species of lady bug beetle. The least familiar is a redish pink one, Coleomegilla maculata.

I must go to work.

volunteers

Pictured here is the colony of volunteer tomato plants. I believe they are either small roma or large grape tomatos which have sprung forth from my first compost pile. This photo is a month or two old, we now have a decent crop, in various states of ripeness.

I shall try to post a more recent photo, trouble is clarity. Everything in that corner of the yard is starting to grow together.

There is now an unidentitied squash colony to the left, or possibly just a sprawling plant with 3 different shapes of leaves and two types of flowers stalks. I'm guessing spaghetti squash. To the right (lower right corner of photo), I have my first attempt at a poly-culture garden based on the first “recipe” in Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden. We’ve eaten a lot of lettuce and radishes, dill and now wait for the beans. Serving as a back drop we have what I figure to be an arborvitea.

Alright enough rambling. My original goal here was to post a photo.

Good night.

Oh, so slow to start.

The title could refer to either this blog or my home. We have lived here for about a year and a half. I spent most of the first year clearing junk, rotted landscape lumber and poison ivy out of the yard, as well as observing the general lay of the land. This may sound grand, but our plot is about 33' wide by 75' deep, and a third of that is house. I guess land can not be that big if you can easily measure it in feet. Maybe I should switch to metric, the numbers may be smaller, but very few around here know the size of a meter.

I have watched sun and shadow patterns, water flow, and soil composition. Suprisingly, we have a decent orientation. Southern exposure for the front of the house with a mature oak at a reasonable distance. The back yard gets a decent amount of sun in the summer, but almost no sun at the winter solstice until the end of the day, when it peeks around the neighbor’s house.

We are at the bottom of the “hill” for our row of townhouses, so most of the rainwater makes its way down to our yard’s NW corner. There is significant pooling during a heavy rainstorm as evidenced by the recent deluges, although it quickly disperses into the nearby grove. The front yard is fairly dry, most water runs off into the parking lot. The side yard (west) also pools in a decent rain, then runs back to the NW puddle.

Our soil is almost entirely clay, though it does contain a significant amount of rocks (landscaping gravel and what I think is local quartz), landscaping plastic, and construction debris. I have not yet tried a soil test. I probably should to find out what extra “nutrients” we have, I noticed one neighbor spilled motor oil on our front lawn (fairly sure it was an accident) and there was also a discarded gas can in the alley behind our townhouse row. With all the run-off in our yard I bet we will not recieve our organic certification any time soon.

Well, those are some of the basics. I will continue with what we are doing and what we have planned for the future.

Cheers,
christopher

Starting out

The intention of this blog is to record our experiments and escapades as we nurture (or destroy) our part of the Loving Forest.