The Campus Garden Initiative

This past weekend my friend William, permaculture extraordinaire, came over to help out in the garden.  What started out as an ordinary sheet mulching day turned into a log recovery mission.  We found some rotting logs behind XOX that looked neglected.  However, what appears to be just an old log from the outside contains an entire ecosystem underneath! William rolled over the log to reveal colonies of skinny salamanders, spiders (eeeee not my favorite), lots of insects, mold, native California snails, and beautiful, naturally composted soil. 

We carried the smaller logs back to the Hamm garden and laid them along the borders of the hedge.  Then we carefully transplanted the salamanders and as much of their dirt habitat as we could to the underside.  We were careful to place the logs over an area that has not yet been covered with the University compost soil.  Since we're not exactly sure what comes in that compost, we did not want to expose the salamanders to any toxins.  Their skin is so thin they are very vulnerable to the substances in their environment. 

Why did we do this? Besides just being fun, the log ecosystem will play an important role in the garden.  The salamanders and insects we found are mostly predators that will take out the insects that might try to move in and eat our crops. William saw a beatle he said might eat the slugs, which after seeing Anna Ruby's operation at Kairos with the beer cans seemed like a covenient slug-elimination solution.  Salamanders are also a good clean-o-meters on the garden, as long as they stick around, we're probably not harboring any toxins in the soil.

Next we grabbed another load of soil from where the logs used to be and carried it back to the garden to innoculate the University compost.  Yesterday Sarah was telling me that the compost adds nice structure to the soil, but it lacks certain nutrients.  William said that it likely didn't have very much soil life left, which was why we took the moldy/fungusy soil and spread it around.

Up Next...

Next on the agenda...more logs! The other ones were too heavy though so we have to figure out another way to move them over.  Sheet mulching continues to make slow but visible progress, and now I need to find lots of leaves to cover up the compost.  I'm also still looking for 50-gallon oil drums to set up that irrigation system... So far this garden has been an exercise in scavanging! I really haven't spent any money except for on seeds. The rest of the materials are usually available for free if you just look around a bit.  I went over to visit Kairos' garden yesterday (so cute!) and was inspired by Anna Ruby and Lucia to get a hummingbird feeder.

We've gotten almost 2/3 of the garden sheet mulched.  Last weekend, Katharine and Colleen planted some cover crops.  We used a mixture suggested by the "How to Grow More Vegetables" book, which consisted of wheat, rye, purple vetch, and bell beans (a substitute for fava).  Together, these will help fix carbon and nitrogen in the soil so we can avoid using external fertilizers in the garden.

Sadly, the first round fell prey to the birds.  We were pretty proud of ourselves for planting something until we noticed the feast going on in the backyard. The one upside is that these hungry visitors leave little nitrogen presents on the lawn when they relieve themselves.   I visited the community farm the other day and saw that they were using cloth to cover the crops.  It's thin enough to let in the sunlight and rain, and trap some heat close to the seeds, but thick enough to keep the birds out. We'll put some of that up soon.

We also talked to an ME PhD student at Stanford who runs a company that constructs drip irrigation systems fro small farmers in developing countries.  Since California is in the middle of a drought, and since we want to track all of the inputs to the garden, we're going to set up three gravity-powered drip irrigation systems around the yard for our water needs.  This consists of three 55-gallon oil drums set up on 1 meter platforms, with the tubes connected in long straight lines along the beds. Since you have to fill them up manually with a hose, we can keep close tabs on the extra water we're using.  It's also cheap! I'm buying a couple of drums this weekend that are $20 a piece, and the tubing is not too much per foot.  Hopefully someday we can complement this system with a rainwater cachement system from the roof to take advantage of the rainy season here.

Other progress, after an epic battle with the privet, we were finally able to free our pomengranite tree from it's bonds. 

On the agenda for this weekend:

• Finish sheet mulching
• Second attempt at cover crop with bird-proofing
• Pruning the apple and persimmon tree
• Finding oak or pine logs to rim the garden edge (hopefully can attract some endangered Stanford salamanders to eat the bugs!)
• Buy three drip irrigation drums

One thing I learned this week:

The compost pile is really, really warm; it steams in the early morning

January 16^th – 18^th,  2009

We laid down the first layer of sheet mulch over a third of the garden area this weekend.  First to go down was corrugated cardboard, pirated from dumpsters around campus and our kitchen, and newspapers to cover the cracks.  Hopefully this will smother the Bermuda grass and other not-so-useful weeds.  We wet down the cardboard/newspapers and layered about 4 inches of beautiful composted soil on top, compliments of Stanford.  This step was fairly low-tech, just two shovels, a wheelbarrow, and a hose.  The garden is already looking alive, even though it’s just soil so far.

 The next step is to start alternating layers of leaves and composted soil to make the ground as healthy and rich as possible before we start planting nitrogen-fixers like fava beans. 

 Just being out in the garden a few hours, I noticed that our rosemary bush, which I thought was a pesky overgrown herb, actually attracts lots of happy little bees.  There are also wrens and blue jays scrounging around the shrubs and soil for meals, a good indicator of pre-existing soil life! Unfortunately, the wildlife landscape also includes signs of gophers.  The natural predators in the area, foxes and coyotes, have so much urban garbage cans from which to dine that we can’t count on them to help with the rodent population.  We’ll have to plant some preempt them somehow…

Check out the pics below to see the garden "before" pics.