Lasagna Gardening

So for those of you who don't know this about me, I'm sort of a Mother Earth News, modern hippie sort of gal. I believe that we can live well, do the things we love and still take into consideration the importance of our actions, specifically how those actions affect others and the world around us.



Case in point, where have all the honey-bees gone? Many of you probably know this already, but honey-bees all over are disappearing. Just gone. Not leaving dead bodies, just leaving. And no one exactly knows why. There are many theories as to why this is happening, and people (especially farmers that rely on them for pollination of their crops) are panicking. Some people are actually stealing hives. Personally, I think it's a combination of pesticides, genetically engineered plants and loss of habitat. At our house, though, we seem to have plenty of bees. I took this top picture just this morning, as I sat in our front yard 'habitat', listening to the drone of at least 50 or so bees. It took me forever to get this picture; I'm working on improving my photo taking skills and bees are quick. But, I'll get to the story of our 'habitat' momentarily.

Here's my point about ecology... how in the world can we spray tons, literally tons, of pesticides on our crops, trees and landscapes, genetically engineer plants that actually produce their own pesticides, deplete the soil till the only way it can grow anything is with massive amounts of chemicals, cement over everything that's not precisely landscaped and then expect everything to be OK in our ecosystem? Um, duh. It just doesn't make any sense. Pesticides kill things. Why are we surprised?

So, here's what I've been doing for my part. I've been reading about Sheet Composting (also known as Lasagna gardening) lately. Really cool stuff. Basically, you just layer all the stuff that you normally would put in a compost bin on the ground. Worms and soil microorganisms work their way through it and eventually, you get beautiful black soil. I've done it in the back yard; it really works. And faster than any compost bin I've ever done too (I always forget to turn them). So, I finally got sick and tired of fighting against the crappy soil in our front yard, the grass wouldn't grow and it just looked awful. So, I took advantage of free labor (my kids- aged 8 to 17) and started sheet composting the entire front yard.

Our oldest was working off a massive punishment, so he got to spread last years pumpkins (which I collected from neighbors and have been frozen in several trash cans all winter) as one of the layers. It was bad, but no worse than one of the many awful diapers I've changed in my time. This is it...


We continued with the rest of the yard, laying down a quarter inch of soaked newspaper (to smother the grass), followed with manure and then hay. Once the hay goes down, you can't smell the stuff underneath, so we did it in batches. I found an excellent source of horse manure which is free of both antibiotics and de-wormer. Usually, you shouldn't use horse manure because almost all horses regularly get treated with the de-wormer, which, as the name implies, will kill worms, even the ones in your soil. Bad, bad, bad. So I found a lady that raises her horses organically (not that she's going to eat them- they just get treated with herbs instead). A very lucky find.



Here's a picture of all of us after we finished. The girls were volunteering; Sean was forced labor. I'm grateful either way. You can see that we ran out of shovels, and since I was the foreman, I took the snow shovel. Not so good for shoveling horse poo, though. I would also like to mention that we live in a non-covenant controlled community. And even with that, neighbors slowed down and pointed at us throughout the day. If you do this, I'd start in the backyard. Once you see how wonderful the soil is, you won't mind all the pointing. It's worth it.



After the last freeze date, we threw down a bunch of wildflower and cover crop seeds (mustard and radish mostly) A month after finishing the layers, we had this...



Those larger plants are sprouted pumpkin seeds. (And speaking of volunteer seeds, last year we harvested 3 pumpkins from plants that grew from compost. I can't even begin to tell you how great that was. Harvesting pumpkins that I didn't even plant.) This summer we should have a yard full of wildflowers and by fall our entire front yard should be one giant pumpkin patch (there's like 8 or 9 plants out there).

It started off as crappy, depleted soil and now it's a jungle. And full of bees. Yay!

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Related Posts

Lasagna Gardening 2008

Update on the Lasagna Gardening

Free Music!

I recently found a pretty cool website with free music. It's called Pandora. I know there's a lot of free music out there, but this one is great for those of us that are tired of the same stuff we've got on our playlists and want something new.

Basically, you enter a song (or an artist) and it creates a music station tailored to you. You can add more songs and also rate each song that plays to further customize. I like it because it plays stuff that I haven't heard too much of and am, therefore, tired of. You can create multiple stations for your multiple personalities (I guess that should be... multiple moods).

BTW, David Bowie makes a good first choice (thanks to my 8 year old daughter for suggesting him. What can I say? She's got pretty good taste in music).

Happy Listening.

Link

Present Idea for Kids

Recently, my daughter and I put together a pretty cool birthday present for one of the cousins (if we do say so ourselves). We thought of it for her specifically, because both of her grandparents are artists, (her "Pa" is Richard Wallich). But I think it would be good for most kids. It's a fun, and easy gift and I thought I would share it here as I was inspired to pass along this information by Mundane Super Hero who was asking for suggestions for just such things.



Basically, it's whatever craft supplies you find at the store (we got markers, paints and a big pad of paper) along with the book, I Ain't Gonna Paint No More, by Karen Beaumont and illustrated by David Catrow. It's a book about a little guy that paints all over his house and gets his paints taken away from him. Eventually, he swipes back the paints and uses his own body as a canvas. One of my favorite pages is at the beginning... all the walls and floor and even the family pet is covered in paint, but there is a nice, white, spankin' clean piece of paper on the easel. So cute. And so funny.

Also, Joey and I wrapped all the pieces individually with recycled craft paper that we decorated ourselves with markers. We would have used paints, but we didn't have the time for them to dry.

I only have one suggestion about this present... give it to kids over 5 years old or so and even then, only to relatively well-behaved ones. It would really suck to get blamed when the birthday boy or girl decides to decorate their own room with paint.

But that's a call you'll have to make.

Getting What I Want

I recently posted about painting my bathroom. I complained about how the paint had bubbled up on the walls in some places. I thought it was because I showered in there too soon after painting, but most paint stores that I've called since believe that I didn't clean the walls well enough. Actually, what happened was I cleaned the walls just fine, I just didn't rinse the bleach off well enough.

Anyway, this post is about how I ended up with the paint. It's as much about my personality as anything. And I was inspired to do this post by a post on Bella Knitting, titled Obsessions which was about how your personality comes through in your knitting (and other projects). First of all, here's the tile that inspired me when doing this room. It belonged to my mother, but I don't remember ever seeing it up in our house. It's a Mary Englebreit from 1976 and I just love it. I'm not a huge fan of ME's later stuff, but I love this one. I had to take it off the wall and photograph it under my light tent to prevent massive glare spots, so you can't see how it looks next to the wall color. Sorry.



For me, choosing colors to paint is always somewhat painful. There are just so many beautiful ones to choose from. For some reason, for the bathroom, I just picked a color that I immediately loved and stuck with it. I just stopped at the paint store and bought it. right there. on the spot. with no second guessing. This was a big deal for me.

So, I got home from the paint store, looked at the paint swatch, looked at the dot of paint on top of the can, looked at the swatch again. They were different colors. Not very different. But different enough. I asked Jeff, and he said they were the same color. I asked my daughter, and she said they were the same color. I asked my sister, and she agreed with me. It was missing the pink. The color that I wanted doesn't have a lot of pink, just the tiniest bit, but it was missing from the paint I now had.

So, I decided to go ahead and paint the bathroom (a friend was coming over to help and I just wanted to get it done). The color was fine. It looked nice. It was livable. But, as I lay in bed that night, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I got up and took the next picture to document my madness.


Do you see the difference? (Besides the texture and glossiness, that is.) So, I realized that my problem wasn't really about the paint color. It was about getting what I wanted. I've always been the one to accept things as they are. Once, when I was little, the shoe store didn't have the velcro shoes that I wanted. So I made up a reason to make me feel better, "Well, they would probably snag on the branches when I climb trees" and my dad was so proud of me for accepting things as they are, for inventing this justification of why I didn't want them anyway. Instead of asking to go to another shoe store, I took what they had and went home with lace-ups. My sister, on the other hand, once threw an absolute fit because the paper towel my mom gave her was missing the corner where it hadn't torn off evenly. Mostly we are this way because I am much lazier than my sister; she will do whatever it takes to make something happen. Me, not so much. But, I wonder how much deeper it goes than that.

So, I decided that I wanted the color that I had ordered and I was going to do my best to get it. I was going to make the effort, just to see what it felt like. I brought back the can, which was half empty, and explained myself. The clerk was in agreement with Jeff and Joey that the colors were very very very close to the same color. He told me he could add a bit more red to what I had, but he couldn't make any promises. I started to go when I realized that I hadn't tried very hard. I told him that the color was not what I had ordered, and while it was somewhat dumb of me to paint an entire bathroom a color I didn't like, still, I felt that I deserved to get what I paid for. I was nice, not ranting or anything, but I just kept repeating myself. After a minute or two, he decided to color match the swatch that I had brought in. And guess what... the formula for the color match of the swatch was not he same as the formula for the swatch. It should've been, but it wasn't. So, there in black and white, I had proof that I wasn't imagining things. It even had different colors (blue instead of black, gold instead of yellow), not just different proportions.

So, he mixed up a new batch of paint, which I used to repainted my bathroom. I'll not get into the unpleasantness with the bubbles because I am feeling rather proud of myself right now and would rather not dwell on the fact that sometime soon I'll have to re-repaint the bathroom after I sand the bubbled paint and reclean the wall.

So, here is one wall, with the new towels I bought, with the framed tile sitting on top of the towel rack because, well, I couldn't get one picture that showed all the things that I like about my new bathroom at once.


It felt good to do this. to make the effort. to get what I want. I doubt that I'll become obsessive and uptight and nit-picky because, like I mentioned, I'm fairly lazy. But it does feel good to know that when I really want to, I can get the things that I want.

Note- Jenny, just to be clear... I don't think you're obsessive, uptight or nit-picky. Thanks for your help with everything.

Barcelona Baby!

I just took a quiz that was suggested by PicPerfic. It tells you which European city you belong in. Because it was only a few questions, I didn't think that it would be all that accurate, but my results sound perfect for me. I don't know though, I bet any European city would sound good to me, especially the ones that have siestas.

You Belong in Barcelona

When it comes to Europe, you don't want to decide between culture and fun. You want art by day and a big party by night. Barcelona is ideal for you. You can check out some Picasso, eat some tapas, take a siesta, and then dance all night!

What European City Do You Belong In?

BTW- this post was a little test to see if I could work with the html that the quiz websites give. Not bad, me thinks.

Nostalgia

This all started yesterday when I made some chai iced tea. I decided to get out my Great Muppet Caper glass, the one with Kermit on the bike, because I thought it would look cool filled with iced tea. It did. Anyway, three hours later, I was on eBay, looking at the rest of the Muppet glasses that I don't have. I looked at Fisher Price dolls, record players with those little plastic records and Strawberry Shortcake. Holy cow, it was amazing. I'm not sure what happened chemically in my brain, but just looking at the Fisher Price hospital, with the ambulance and scale and wheel chair, wow, it literally made me feel good all over, like I had a rush of endorphins or something. I briefly (like for 10 seconds) considered actually spending the $100 they were asking for the set. I could remember exactly how the wheels moved and how satisfyingly snug the little people fit into their various round holes.

When Jeff got home, I showed him some of the stuff that I had found, which started him on his own search for guns and bionic stuff. Eventually he ended up on PlaidStallions blog which includes pictures from 1970's catalogs. The photos are funny enough on their own, but the comments megomuseum adds are hilarious. The reason I'm mentioning it here is that some (OK, a lot) of the pictures reminded me of clothes that we wore ourselves. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I actually had pictures of us in those clothes. So, here they are.


This is the first of the catalog pictures titled Amish Lingerie.



Followed by a picture of me and my sister in dresses that our mom made.



Here is the next of the catalog pictures. Notice that this Foxy! shirt comes in "Chubby" size for one and a half bucks more.



And here's me in a shirt that my aunt made for me. My favorite part about this photo (besides the fact that I'm wearing a shirt that says 'Future Fox', of course) is the fact that this was a professional picture. My mom actually paid money to have someone take a picture of me in this shirt in 1977. How wonderful is that?


I've also got various pictures of my parents in matching sweaters, which PlaidStallion covers well on his site in a section titled Couples Shouldn't Dress Alike. You should check it out. The pictures I've included here don't do it justice... I'll include links to my favorites.

They're Called Spaceboots, Dur!
The Terrycloth Jumpsuit: Designed by Satan
The Adventures of L'il Larry Flint

Hope this inspires you to look through all your old photos, or burn them.

Don't do what Donnie Don't does- Painting

One of my favorite things about reading other people's blogs is learning new things. I love it when someone describes a project that they've been working on, either giving helpful tips for doing it or just inspiring me to try new things myself. When I started this blog, it was with that in mind. I try an awful lot of things around my house. Some of my projects work, many do not.

So with that in mind (and having just royally screwed up my latest project), I have decided to include a new section in my labels, "Don't do what Donnie Don't does". These are things that I suggest you do not do. (If you don't get the reference- it's from the Simpsons.)

The first bit of advice I would like to humbly offer is the following. After you paint your bathroom, DO NOT shower in there for quite awhile. I'm not sure exactly how long you need to wait, but I can tell you it's longer than 24 hours. I know this because 24 hours after I finished mine, I was overcome by the beauty of it. I simply *had* to hang up the shower curtain and take it for a test drive. As I washed my hair, I looked up and noticed tiny little bubbles forming all over the surface of the wall. Yep, in several spots, the paint had actually bubbled away from the wall. I'm assuming this was from the moisture from my somewhat steamy shower, since the bubbles were not there before. Jeff did read the back of the can of paint for me after I threw open the bathroom door mid-shower in an attempt to remove moisture. He jokingly said, "Not for use in bathrooms." Ha ha ha. Isn't he funny? Well, actually he is. But the point is, the can said nothing about how long you need to wait before exposing the wall to atmospheric moisture.

Originally, I had planned that my next post here would include a beautiful picture of my finished bathroom, complete with the story of how I ended up with the exact color that I wanted, but fate sent me bubbled paint. Maybe I'll get to the more inspiring post later, but for now, the moral of the story is this... after you paint a room and you think you've waited long enough to use it, wait longer.

Added Note- I actually don't think it was that I didn't wait long enough. All the paint experts I asked believed that it is because I didn't do a good enough job cleaning off the bleach that I used to kill the mildew before painting. So, don't do that either.