Inner City Farmer

Here’s an example of how I am getting smarter in my old age. A year ago I was happy to drive across town and haul scavenged materials back to the homestead. One back injury later I have figured out that it’s better to allow others to do the heavy lifting.

Some of my ultimate goals for the farm are helping my fruit trees get big enough to actually bear fruit, turn my clay into usable soil, and controlling and trapping the flow of rainwater that hits my property, and to do all that I need lots and lots of mulch. While you can get it at the landfill for free, I recently discovered another way of acquiring it and all it took was a simple email. I asked the folks at Davey Tree Service if they wouldn’t mind dropping a load of wood chips in my driveway the next time they were in my neighborhood and the very next morning they did just that.

My neighbors probably think the huge pile of wood chips sitting in my driveway is an eyesore, but to me it’s beautiful, for it represents one more step along the path towards prosperity for the Inner City Farm.

 
On Tuesday I headed to the landfill near the airport to take advantage of one of my favorite things: free mulch!

Luckily, I have a vehicle that I am not very attached to so shoveling several yards of mulch into the back didn’t present much of a problem for me.

I took a fairly large dent out of the pile, but, trust me, there’s plenty more still there.

I used half the mulch I brought home in the garden, and the other half I am using to fill in the rudimentary French drains I dug under my gutters where the rain overflows and collects next to the house. Having pools of water so close to the house causes all sorts of problems. I’m also hoping to plant a bush in the hole next to the trench I dug so it can soak up all that excess water.

Initially, the trench worked perfectly as all the rainwater from the roof flowed into the trench and away from the house.

But, alas, when it rains in Texas, it rains hard, and the trench quickly filled up and started overflowing, which means it’s back to digging for me.

It recently came to my attention that some people thought I would never actually finish the Man Cave. This lack of faith stunned me. Sure, it’s taken me a little longer than I had initially thought–I ripped off the garage door and started making a cob wall in its place fifteen months ago–but never once has the plan deviated drastically from my original vision. I imagined a soothing room with an earthy feel, and here it is, very nearly complete. I never had a doubt.

Actually, that last statement is not entirely true. The ceiling in the Man Cave proved to be my white whale. If I had to do it over again, I would surely do it a different way. What made it so difficult, besides the constant battle against gravity, was that half the sheetrock was over twenty or perhaps even thirty years old and tended to crumble at the slightest touch. This didn’t work in my favor when I was stapling the reed matting to it or when I was pressing the base coat of plaster into the matting. Some spots still sag, but every bit of it is covered with the finish coat (thank you, D!) and now I can look ahead to putting in the earthen floor.

It won’t be easy. Between now and Sunday morning I have to move most of the rocks in the picture below into the Man Cave:

It’s a Herculean task, but I have performed many of those in the past couple years. Here are a few more. I hope to turn my clay pit into a pond this summer:

I am also in the process of ripping up all the grass in my front yard and turning it into a food forest:

Does anyone doubt that I will able to do all this? Surely, you know better than that.

One of my favorite parts of the building process is materials’ acquisition, i.e. scavenging. I always have my ears open for a new source of building supplies so when Kieran mentioned that you could get free rocks at the cemetery I had to investigate. He told me he used the rocks to make a raised garden bed, which seemed like an idea I wanted to replicate, so yesterday I headed to the Austin Memorial Park Cemetery to see what the deal was.

I assumed there was going to be some catch. I mean, rocks don’t grow on trees. You can build all sorts of incredible things with good stone. So when I stepped into the cemetery’s office I expected the guy behind the desk to mention that there was a fee or that or I had to return on a certain day. Nope. He just told me to drive straight ahead and help myself. I started imagining a little bitty pile tucked away in some far-off corner. Nope. This rock pile is endless. It’s so big it shows up on Google’s satellite photo of the graveyard. According to Kieran, the cemeteries have to excavate five feet of limestone every time they dig a new grave and all that rock ends up on this pile.

I am usually proprietary about my best scavenging finds, but in this case I don’t fear that the pile is going to be eroded anytime soon. I would suggest to anyone interested in making a raised bed to head straight there. I am planning to make one trip to the cemetery a week until I have enough rocks to build a stone wall in my backyard. I am imagining it will take over a year to amass enough stones, but time is one thing I have plenty of.

While I was busy insulating the future Man Cave with light clay straw, I made an interesting discovery. One of the batches of clay slip I was using contained too much organic matter, particularly straw, so I dumped it on the ground and didn’t think twice about it until several days had passed and I noticed little shoots of grass sprouting from the dirt. Big whoop, right?

Well, this was very exciting for me because my backyard is a barren wasteland. First, my free-ranging chickens ate every single green thing that came out of the ground. Then, I exacerbated the problem when I chopped down every single “trash tree” (mostly hackberries and lugustrums) so that all the little fruit trees I planted would get more sunlight. The exposed dirt got continually baked by the brutal Texas sun and what little rain came simply trickled through. My yard had effectively become a desert.

I have no desire for a putting-green backyard made out of finely manicured Bermuda grass, but I would like to create a green and healthy space. So the grass that arose from the clay slip I dumped on the ground got me pretty excited, so excited that I decided to recreate the accidental triumph all over my back yard. Basically, I took several bales of moldy and rotting straw that had been stored outside and gotten wet and I spread it all over the place. On top of the straw I shoveled some dirt from the many holes I have dug in other spots, and I occasionally wet it all down with a hose. The last rain storm we got certainly helped. Now little shoots of grass are coming up everywhere! It is a wonderful sight to behold.

I am such a greenhorn at being a green thumb that I am blown away by the results of my little experiment. To experienced gardeners my “experiment” is almost certainly a common practice: use mulch to help retain the moisture in your soil.