It’s spring in Oregon and we are deep in the final cleanup of last year’s gardens, repairing planter boxes, and new garden projects. All of this, as well as wrapping up the year’s shipping season for the nursery, and ongoing grafting, seeding, propagating, transplanting and planting out of the cooler weather cultivars make this a very hectic time of year.
But it also means it’s a time where days are predominantly spent out of doors, either in the gardens or the greenhouse, and all of it feels brilliantly alive and magical.
New spots including woven branch retaining wall beds for special plantings have given me space to play creatively as I plan for hydrangeas, weigelias and roses started long ago and still waiting to find their forever homes.
Best of all, the evolution of our regenerative systems are lining up perfectly to go into place in all the new planting sites!
Last year’s test beds of rhubarb and scarlet runner beans proved out so spectacularly that we’ve expanded the plan to use it everywhere.
It was really the perfect storm- the biochar source we’d found the year before gave us access to large quantities of raw biochar at super affordable rates, and a random ad offering some ‘unwanted’ sheep wool on a one-time basis, that got us to take the plunge.
I’d been watching Chloe’s “Blooms and Greens” video shorts on the benefits of sheep wool for everything from mulches to bed liners until I was more than ready to give it a try.
After all, we live in Oregon. There are a lot of sheep here – and everyone tells me there is no market for the wool – so only dedicated spinners and artisans are working their own wool and even they cannot keep up with the supply. I’ve heard of barns stuffed full of old wool, and been shown back sheds stuffed with bags of fleeces since I’d moved here 15 years ago…
Now all I had to do was find some of it… I almost gave up on my “Wanted: Sheep Wool” ad on Craigslist after more than two months, but once March arrived, so did the folks wanting to give me their fleeces! Hooray
We used the small amount of wool we got last year to do some testing, starting by mulching the potatoes and then lining some of the new beds with it.
The plan as we tested it, was simple: layering cardboard or wood as the bottom layer – the larger berms for berries and trees get old, rotted wood from the forest floor and branch trimmings from around the property, garden beds get cardboard. Then wool spread across the whole surface. Next comes biochar and organic matter, leaves small sticks etc – and then a top dressing of compost to plant into.
The design encourages fungal life at the base with carbon and offers slow release sulfur and nitrogen from the wool. The biochar provides housing and microbial life as we charge it with minerals and worm compost tea made with fish hydrolysate and ‘brewed’ for 24 hours with high aeration and water/tea circulation through a pond pump system we designed a few years ago which super charges microbial life.
With this base and a compost topping to plant into, the plants more or less erupted out of the beds.
In the first bed, I transplanted out my experimental rhubarb grown from EFN* seed in May, and had the surprise of the summer as the new plants outgrew everything in my existing rhubarb bed two to one. I have never seen such enormous rhubarb leaves, ever.
The nasturtiums along the borders of the bed spilled out across the hillside and filled the surrounding area. The interplanted broccoli produced multiple crops over the summer and into fall. It was a real showstopper, great mounds of orange and red nasturtium’s, broccoli crowns and huge rhubarb leaves at the foot of the slope behind the house.
I used the same approach for the new planting site for scarlet runner beans along the driveway fence out front.
I set it up with wool, biochar and compost and planted it with scarlet runner beans to ride the fence, and a community of flowering annuals to rim the periphery. Cosmos, zinnia, nasturtium, a few pockets of sweet alyssum and a couple calendula.
The result was similar. The beans took the fence, the wires above the fence and then came back halfway to the ground by September. The flowers created a jungle so thick the path vanished beneath them. It was glorious. And full of bees and hummingbirds, which was my main aim in planting it. I love runner beans, but only when they are very young and tender, or as dried beans, but I’ll plant them just for those rivers of scarlet flowers any day.
Now it’s April in a year where March was more like May than March, and April is threatening to take us back to March. We need the rain, and the cool weather slows things down a bit to give us time to catch up, so It’s all good.
The snapdragons and hollyhocks (grown in soil snails again this year) are already out in their new beds along the front fences, with the grown out Confederate Star Jasmine cuttings from downtown Eugene planted out on the other side. We’ll find out if they truly are ‘deer resistant’ I suppose.
The California poppies are coming up right on schedule in all kinds of interesting new locations. This year they seem to favor the strawberry patch for some reason, and for the most part, I let them stay.
All the new planting sites are waiting patiently for the sheep to be sheered when this round of spring rain comes to an end. Don’t want the sheep to get chilly, they tell us. And we are happy to hear that now their friends want to give us their fleeces as well. No one likes putting wool in the landfill. We’re more than happy to take it.
In the meantime, we get back to our building projects, working in the cover of rooves and greenhouses, and contemplate if we have it in us to take on that long awaited retaining wall in the front orchard. If it keeps raining, it might be possible.
The new sites are prepped and as soon as the wool arrives we’ll put all the pieces together. We should really make a photo diary of the whole process and put it here when it’s done.
I’ve been researching wool garden walls as they make them in Turkey to hold terraced beds on slope, retaining moisture and holding the soil in place Because wool is mostly Keratine, a protein, or tightly bound nitrogen source, it acts as a reservoir for the soil microbes which is the only way it can be unlocked to be made useful to the plants. This is why the biochar and worm compost tea work so well with wool and carbon. None of it can happen without the microbial life, but when we feed the soil, the whole system thrives. We don’t need fertilizers, because the soil is alive and doing its job just as it does In nature.
Imagine the implications of this across the planet… All those ‘waste materials’ moving back into the life cycles which support and feed us all. One garden at a time.
We don’t need chemical agriculture to feed the world. We need to stop throwing away the building blocks of life into the trash and start treating the earth as if we were the intelligent species we were meant to be and steward a whole new way of working with plants and animals all over this planet.
The good news is a lot of us are already doing it.
*Experimental Farm Network
