Thanking God for the Weeds!

After the 5 beautiful inches of rain we got last night, I decided to play hookey from the market so I could tackle this:

Last week when it rained a bit, I discovered that I still had strawberries in the Trinity garden, but  most of the bigger weeds were just too hard to pull. Several spots on our farm look like this right now because we haven't had anyone who could run the rototiller and I just haven't had time to pull them all by hand. I'm not fretting over it though. I'm thanking God for the weeds.

When I was a young bride, Grampa Tom's work took us out in the boonies. I was pregnant and the closest jobs were about an hour away, so we settled on me being a stay-at-home mom. After the baby was born, I grew bored, so I decided to read the Old Testament. At the same time this townie girl was learning a whole lot about agriculture. One of the things that really fascinated me was the practice of Shemitah. Several great things happened once every seven years. The one thing that peaked my interest was that the Israelites were instructed to let their ground lay fallow during the Shemitah year. They didn't plant, they didn't plow and they didn't weed. In this way, the ground was replenished and fertilized. I thought that was amazing :)

With the availability of fertilizers today, we really don't need to do this, but back then it was vital. I'm considering this something of a Shemitah year for my ground. The bigger gardens will have the weeds plowed under and I am using the weeds from the smaller gardens to fill my huglekulture dog house garden! After last night's rain, it really needed some more weeds!

So tonight, the Trinity garden looks like this:

and the huglekulture dog house looks like this!

Thank You LORD for the weeds!

Hope Grampa Tom had a good night at the market :)

God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue

Hugelkultur Dog House

Since Grampa Tom was laid up, so many people have stepped forward to help us out. We are overwhelmed! Yesterday, my sister and brother-in-law from Waterloo came down to help with the garden. The big row gardens were too wet to work in, but it was a perfect day to rip sod and work on my hugelkultur dog house.

Hugelkultur is a raised bed garden style that was developed in Eastern Europe. The base of the garden is a wood pile covered with sod and compost. This type of bed has all the advantages of a regular raised bed plus! It creates more planting space because you can plant vertically as well as horizontally and the wood acts a sponge and long term fertilizer so you don't have to water or fertilize as much.

Most hugelkutures are built as 6-7 foot x 4-5 foot mounds with large logs at the base. My basic aim with this project was to build a nice warm dog house with a garden around it so I started with some pallets on the inside and then I stacked blocks around that to make nice dry walls.

Then I started building the garden beds.

 

I put up pallets and lined them with straw from my giant feather grass clump and paper feed bags to keep the dirt in. Then, I filled the beds with logs and twigs along with sod from the new garden bed.

I have been working on this for a few weeks now here and there so I had the walls about half way finished before my sister and her hubby showed up yesterday. It had taken me a long time, so I thought maybe we might get the walls to the 3/4 mark, but amazingly we got all the walls up, packed with wood and sod! It must have been Grampa Tom and my dog's expert supervision! Not really ;) Sharon and Clark worked their tails off!

We now have a large flower/herb bed on the corner of my in-laws drive way.

and some nicely filled hugelkultur walls!

The dog house still needs a roof. I'm planning on stuffing Saran wrapped pallets with packing peanuts and scrap styrofoam and wiring them to the top. I will top them with a large sheet of plastic or some tar paper and put some tin on top of that. The wood, dirt and sod that we put in will settle, probably by about a third, so I'm planning to keep filling the beds with yard waste and compost this summer.

 

TA-DA!!!! It doesn't look like much this year, but next year I hope to fill it with petunias tomatoes and gourds. Can't wait!
Tomorrow we are planning to tackle the big row gardens. We have some people coming to help and Grampa Tom is looking forward to his short stint of pure management :)


God Bless You All!

Grama Sue