A Community and Forum For Aquaponic Gardeners
TCLynx's Mess of a yard
So I've just uploaded a bunch of photos of my yard this time of year.
http://aquaponicscommunity.com/photo/albums/tclynxs-mess-of-a-yard
See having a farm in a sub-urban neighborhood is kinda a challenge on 1/3rd of an acre. Much of the yard I give over to the chickens and ducks and I tend to leave it grow weedy to give them better variety of foods to choose from. Drawback is it makes prepping the garden beds for re-planting after I fence the birds out more challenging having let the weeds take over. Benefit, the birds don't depend on the commercial feed nearly so much when they have a large weedy yard to eat from.
I just have to be careful that the most noticed parts of my yard don't look too weedy or tall grass taking over cause that would cause code enforcement to come tell me to mow it. (it really doesn't work well to run a mower over garden beds as they tend to be too soft so I wind up having to clip by hand with hedge trimmers.)
Anyway, I mostly avoid chemical fertilizers (except I've used azalea fertilizer for the blueberries) and chemical sprays are a definite no-no with the AP and birds around so though I won't claim "organic" my gardens are pretty darn natural.
I'm definitely still learning and much of it by trial and error. I'll see a new method and try new things. Some work and I keep doing them, others we decide not to bother with anymore.
We use lots of mushroom compost (mushroom farm is only about 3 miles away.)
We also use lots of free wood chip mulch.
Many of my garden areas were improved by using lasagna gardening methods and in some cases we simply covered the ground with cardboard and then loaded up on chips over top where we were not trying to make gardens. (Had a horrible time with painful sand spurs first two years here and best way to get rid of them I found was to lasagna or simply cardboard and wood chip over them. They haven't come back where we have improved the soil such.)
http://aquaponicscommunity.com/photo/albums/tclynxs-mess-of-a-yard
See having a farm in a sub-urban neighborhood is kinda a challenge on 1/3rd of an acre. Much of the yard I give over to the chickens and ducks and I tend to leave it grow weedy to give them better variety of foods to choose from. Drawback is it makes prepping the garden beds for re-planting after I fence the birds out more challenging having let the weeds take over. Benefit, the birds don't depend on the commercial feed nearly so much when they have a large weedy yard to eat from.
I just have to be careful that the most noticed parts of my yard don't look too weedy or tall grass taking over cause that would cause code enforcement to come tell me to mow it. (it really doesn't work well to run a mower over garden beds as they tend to be too soft so I wind up having to clip by hand with hedge trimmers.)
Anyway, I mostly avoid chemical fertilizers (except I've used azalea fertilizer for the blueberries) and chemical sprays are a definite no-no with the AP and birds around so though I won't claim "organic" my gardens are pretty darn natural.
I'm definitely still learning and much of it by trial and error. I'll see a new method and try new things. Some work and I keep doing them, others we decide not to bother with anymore.
We use lots of mushroom compost (mushroom farm is only about 3 miles away.)
We also use lots of free wood chip mulch.
Many of my garden areas were improved by using lasagna gardening methods and in some cases we simply covered the ground with cardboard and then loaded up on chips over top where we were not trying to make gardens. (Had a horrible time with painful sand spurs first two years here and best way to get rid of them I found was to lasagna or simply cardboard and wood chip over them. They haven't come back where we have improved the soil such.)
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