One more Guild Idea

We finally got the yard bushwhacked back to just about normal after over a month a neglect. As we all know, crap happens, and the back yard just didn't top the priority list. Or it did, but it was raining since this is the rainy season. Needless to say, our backyard was up to my hips and we could have easily lost children back there. People outside of FL just don't understand the maintenance required to keep a lawn from returning to its wild native field-like state. It took a couple hours and involved a riding lawnmower, a push mower, a couple rakes and a shovel, but, finally, we have a backyard again.

All that to say, I can show some picks of where the first guild will go. I was thinking about the peach guild again and am considering combining the peach and banana guild for two reasons. 1. (Maintanence) It would be less work to have only one guild (for now) to water, fertilize (naturally of course) and to mow/weed whack around. 2. (Aesthetics) It would look a bit more suburban and keep with the overall design of the backyard.

It is definitely simpler, but it may be a really good starting place.

As you can see, I probably overestimated the space between the swing set and the peach guild in my previous designs. Here is the tree with my baby bananas and mulberry bushes. You can where I went ahead and scorched the earth so to speak with my lawn mower in preparation for mulching under/around the swing set. I am sick to death of this area getting taken over by grass and weeds and wasps and wolf spiders moving in as a result. I have to check for wasps every single time they want to play on their set and then there is the constant weed whacking around the base of the swing set. Ain't nobody got time for that! So I'm laying weed block and mulching the area.

Since I'm mulching that area, why not go ahead and connect it with the peach guild so there is just one large thing to drive the mower around and weed whack every couple weeks. Would be much simpler to my thinking. And it would keep the yard more continuous instead of looking like there are a bajillion little mulch islands all over the place. And the bananas would grow fast and help screen out the neighbors behind us. All about privacy we are.

So this is the idea I'm going to present to the hubby and see what he thinks. We are a team after all, and he is the one who usually does the mowing and weed whacking.

 

For the Good of the Guild

Lately, I've been thinking about guilds. I've had plenty of time to research them and jot down ideas while I've been sick with a headcold the last several days. What's a guild you ask? It's something everyone has seen but maybe never noticed in detail. It's basically a micro ecosystem designed around plants. It's also a permaculture buzz word along with food forest, sustainable, and micro climate. Many people have done fantastic articles and video series on permaculture guilds. If you want an in depth look at all that jazz look up Geoff Lawton, check out the Permies forums and go from there.

But I like to keep things simple, and have found that I learn well by putting knowledge into my own words and taking notes. So, here is my little sketch of a guild.

Guilds occur in nature all by themselves and a forest, prairie, jungle, swamp are all just giant guilds. Permaculture backyard sized guilds consist of several different trees and plants working together in a mutually beneficial way. They require less outside input (water and fertilizer) and support beneficial insects and plants that outcompete the "bad bugs" (aphids, hornworms, etc) and undesirable weeds.

The main parts or layers, as I like to think of them, of a guild are these:

1. Tree Canopy

2. Tree Sub Canopy

3. Shrubs/Berries

4. Herbaceous/Insectors/Mulch

5. Ground Cover

6. Root Plants/Bulbs

7. Vines

8. Fungi

 

So, I'm going to pull from a list I'm working on to give an 8 part example to better illustrate the concept. A possible guild could be: 1. Oak Tree, 2. Japanese Maple Tree, 3. Gardenia, 4. Salvia, 5. Pothos, 6. Daffodils, 7. Honeysuckle, 8. Lichen.

Each plant in the example fits into the ecosystem as a whole and together they suppress weeds, create wildlife and insect habitat, conserve water by shading and covering the soil with dropped leaves and branches, and require similar light and soil and temperature conditions to grow. There are many many ways a tiny guild becomes its own ecosystem that is more self sufficient than a single plant by itself. Again I point to the expert Geoff Lawton for further instruction, and that's all I'll say in the way of explanation.

Why do I care about guilds? Because I bought two Dwarf Everbearing Black Mulberry bushes. Huh? My hobbies always start so innocuously :) So I've been on the hunt for a black mulberry bush/tree for about a year, but have not found any locally until Monday while I was at Lowes, of all places, browsing their selection of fruit bushes and trees. I had actually stopped in to look at Crape Myrtles which they didn't have. I usually find things I want when I'm not looking for them. So, I grabbed my two mulberry bushes and began considering where to put them. I wanted to do them in pots, but it gets so. stinking. hot. and sunny here that unless they are inside my house, potted plants tend to croak due to over heating and moisture loss or root rot during the rainy season. So, I knew I wanted to be able to walk all the way around the bushes wherever they ended up to make fruit harvest and pruning a breeze. This led me to the center on my backyard. And what is in the center-ish of my backyard? My Florida Prince Peach Tree (who is thriving and has a couple blossoms!!!) But would the berries and tree play nice together? I began to research. And I fell into days of reading about mutually beneficial plantings of trees, berries, herbs, vines and all the goodness of a food forest, but shrunken down into a tiny guild centered around one tree and the little bushes and plants to help support it. Like I said, it all begins so innocuously.

I emerged days later from my research and have sketched out a few different ideas for my peach/mulberry guild which are my two biggest concerns. I should also point out that the design HAS TO BE aesthetically pleasing in the overall landscape of my backyard and can't be left to its own devises like most natural food foresty type guild grow to look. They look wild people. Just wild. And my better half likes form more than function, beauty over utility, and sees beauty in clean lines and designated defined spaces. So I want my guilds (because I have now planned out three...cough, cough, Intervention please!) to be very structured and suburban landscape-ish.

The peach centric guilds with two different options (I'm leaning towards the second).

In the first photo, you can see that my bottlebrush tree told me he needs friends, and that I've caught a whim to purchase two banana trees because of fortuitous circumstances so they too will need a little tropical guild. I planned a second guild option for them also that I like better than the first.

Some of my considerations have been size, soil conditions, how they behave in my climate, ease and inexpensive of the plants, if they'll provide food, and what they'll bring to the landscape as a whole functionally and aesthetically. Basically, I've had lots of fun. I just LOVE the design phase.

Hopefully I'll be acquiring my banana trees tomorrow. It's pretty much tomorrow or never because of circumstances, so here's hoping!

 

 

 

Late summer plantings

I have a couple things I just planted and am looking forward to harvesting and hopefully freezing for winter.

This is a little 3 sisters style bean patch I'm using to prep my garden bed for planting a viburnum hedge later in the year once the heat of summer has passed.

I planted this probably 10 days ago in the trench I dug earlier this year and added four bags of cheap compost and cow manure. I didn't bother to mix the manure with the natural dirt/sand in my yard, just dumped the bags in the trench and planted seeds right on top.

I like to grow field peas because they are hardy, heat and drought tolerant, and grow super quickly. They also taste great picked early as snap green beans or left to mature on the plant then shelled for the peas. I got the seeds from my family in Lake City, FL where a man named Mr. King has been growing these peas probably longer than I've been alive. He give bags of the fresh plump beans to my family every season and they shell them and freeze them. My aunt saves several pounds of the dried peas to plant in her garden and sends some down south for us to grow in our gardens. They are called Acre Peas and are a bush bean type plant.

This is a patch I planted over a month ago and they are vining out a bit and will soon flower. I don't stake them or help them along. Just plant them, water them, and pick them. The aphids get to them eventually, but usually I can spray off the aphids with the hose and then a million lady bugs come along to feast and help out with the infestation.

I have a very exact method for planting these peas. Not really :). I take a handful and toss them over the the raked and prepared bed with little regard to spacing, then I sprinkle a couple inches of garden dirt on top from a bucket or the bag and water it well everyday till they sprout once they are established I only water if it hasn't rained in several days or a week.

I planted acre peas, okra and Waltham butternut squash in this bed. The ham next to the bed was a volunteer. I kinda cared about spacing the half dozen or so okra seeds in the middle of the bed insomuch as I purposefully threw them into the dirt and said that was good enough. I did intentionally plant six butternut squash seeds with four under the palm tree and two more planted as an afterthought on the opposite end.

I've got some plans for planting my raised bed, but first the gutter and downspout needs to be moved. My attempts at protecting the garden from it did not work and between the compression and breaking down of my layers of hay and the torrential pour of the downspout, I lost 8" of dirt. So I'll need to build that back up before planting again.