I’ve heard of Square-foot Gardening, but IKEA now has something new in mind: spherical gardening.
Read more at the link, but the idea is that the design ensures that all levels get air and light, and you can access it from both inside and out. Heck, it might even make a nice little reading nook or a meditation chamber. It certainly looks like the Yoda version of Darth Vader’s meditation chamber:
I like the idea but, seeing as it’s made out of wood, how long before weather and water make it unstable? We’ll have to check back in a few years and see how well it works.
The plans are available online. If anyone out there has built and used one of these, please drop me a line and let me know how it works!
There is one good thing about uprooting your family and moving to another state: You get to choose a new home. Having lived in two previous homes, we’ve learned a few things about what is important to us. One important factor is home food production. Even if it’s a small garden to supplement our grocery purchases, it’s important to us.
So when I went house shopping in our new town (I say “I” because my wife was 400 miles away and only able to offer guidance based on the MLS listings or from photos I sent) one of the main considerations was either the presence of food production space or the potential for it. In some ways, the having the room to put in gardens or trees was preferable, as we didn’t want to inherit any bad placement or planning.
As it was, though, the house we chose has both–established fruit trees and dedicated vegetable garden space and room for more if we choose. The house itself was nice, but one look at the yard and that clinched it. This house had “us” written all over it.
I’m sure we’ll find some of the former owners’ choices don’t work well for us, and some changes will need to be made, but few things indicate “this will work” as well as fruit hanging on the trees and a garden rapidly approaching the point of harvest. We know you can grow food here because we see it being done. We are literally enjoying the fruit of someone else’s labors.
So whatever difficulties our new situation may introduce into our plan to return to self-reliance, at least our yard is not one of them. In that regard, knowing what we wanted up front has paid off already.
The deck removal/garden bed project is pretty much complete. After clearing away the decking we dug up the area. I quickly found that someone had devoted a great deal of concrete to making…I don’t know what. Every few feet I’d dig up another inverted gumdrop of concrete that served no purpose I could ascertain other than to annoy me. I now have the world’s largest concrete gumdrop collection!
The lot, when cleared, looked much like this:
In digging up the area, too, I came to realize this was not going to be choice garden soil. Much of it hadn’t seen water in years, and was little better than packed clay. I spread what compost I could get from our composters over the area and dug it in. It still looked rather rough and clumpy, but I started putting in dividers and marking out pathways before the final attempt to condition the soil a bit better.
Today, while I had my father-in-law still here to help (thanks, Dad!) I went to the home improvement store and bought 21 bags of compost. Two-thirds of it actually went around various trees in our yard, but the rest got spread over the new garden area. The kids joined in, and were actually rather helpful. It’s amazing how quickly five rakes can smooth out a garden.
Of course all we’d really done to this point is just cover over the clumpy, clay-ish soil. Next we dug it all in. Amazingly enough, it worked! The dirt smoothed right out! It’s still not perfect, and I’ll be surprised if anything grows all that well in it this year, but it’s a start. We’ve got leftover seeds we can use, so it won’t be that costly to see what we can get to grow. If it does well, every bit will help.
I’m glad the project is finally done–well, except for getting rid of the rest of the scrap wood and the concrete gumdrop collection. There are plenty of other things I can focus on now, like thinning the peaches.
