Organic Landscape Design

By David Braden

On July 5, 2010 I took my mother on a tour of all eight of our community gardens.  My mother is 84 now and still refers to herself as "the Farmer's Daughter".  She has had some difficulty accepting the conecpt of permaculture as something different than the "working the soil" she grew up with.  Anyway, here is how our gardens looked on that date:

Home Garden

We started with a review of my home garden for comparison.  I started working with the No Till, Deep Mulch in 2004 so parts of this garden are in their 6th year.  It is also an experiment in the minimum requirements - theoretically I should be able to maintain the fertility with just the grass I grow - but this garden is nitrogen short and I am still having trouble with beans and squashes.  I will keep adding small amounts of manure until the system balances.

Harvest Mountain - 44th and Xenon

Next we visited the Harvest Mountain Garden at 44th and Xenon because it is closest to our house.  This garden is new this year and unique in our system because it is on sandy soil along Clear Creek.  Each of the gardeners has used their own gardening technique, including some sheet mulching - and I would say that each gardener's success is directly related to the amount of attention they have paid to their plot.  We are suggesting more mulch and a drip system for the reasons discussed in Second Year Mulching.

(right click on photo to view image)

Golden Community Garden

The Golden Community Garden is probably the ultimate test of sheet mulching.  If you look at what this looked like in March 2010 you will see a dismal plain of unamended clay.  The drip system here is off, because it has been raining and the trenches we dug around the beds are still standing in water.  Most of our plants were put in as seed around the first of June and we are behind some of the other gardens using raised beds, imported soil and plants set in during May.  It is possible that our water management steps are inadequate to deal with the inability of the clay to absorb water - but, on the whole, I am pleased with where we are in this garden.

The Grange Garden

At the Grange garden we also have some successes and some failures.  Because of the weed problem last year, we did a preliminary sheet mulch with cardboard and hay on the entire area intending that the manure layers would be added later on a bed by bed basis.  Those gardeners who employed the sheet mulch technique are having good success.  I am thinking that some others tried to use traditional planting techniques and we needed to do a better job explaining the difference between traditional and deep mulch.

Main Street, Broomfield - The Church Garden

The garden at the Presbyterian Church in Broomfield is the only garden in its second year after sheet mulching.  You can see some of the bare soil in the foreground.  The soil here is excellent but, not all gardeners have undertaken the care necessary to produce crops and others are depleting their soil because they don't understand why we use a deep mulch system.

Hopefully we can do a better job of communicating with our gardeners and further develop the information necessary to be successful in a deep mulch system.

The Regis Garden

Regis is one of the most successful projects we have seen.  It is a happy set of circumstances where the materials and volunteers came together just as the weather warmed and the available plants were just the right size to set out.  On July 5 there are cherry tomatoes ripening and cucumbers and squashes going to waste on the vine.  Again, I am thinking that better information (skill development?) for our gardeners is in order.

The Digital Garden on Leetsdale

The Digital Garden on Leetsdale is another unique experiment in that the sheet mulching was done with wood chips (because they were delivered for free).  Obviously, Leo got enough manure into the wood chips because the plants in the sheet mulch are thriving.  I have not been involved with the planting of these beds (only some of the trees and shrubs) but I understand that Leo would welcome more gardeners willing to learn the deep mulch techniques.

Harvest Mountain - 12th and Vance

We have not yet done any work at the Garden at 12th and Vance.  The people who have tried to keep the weeds out contacted us to do a sheet mulch around the surviving plants.  The sheet mulching is scheduled to take place July 11 but David Ward was unable to get the manure delivered to this site before he left for two weeks because of lack of volunteers.  Barbara is considering her options and I am afraid that the July 11 event may be cancelled.  This would be an excellent opportunity to showcase the benefits of our system.

Vital Foods - 13th and Vivian

The Vital Foods garden is another example of what can happen when the materials and volunteers come together at the right time.  This garden was built and planted over the Memorial Day weekend and all the squashes were planted from seed.  It is only slightly behind the Regis garden that was planted two weeks earlier with plants.  Also, all the maintenance in this garden is done by the homeowner.  There are another four beds built the middle of June shown in this next view - compare the area not sheet mulched.

It is clear to me that we have the capacity to produce as much food as we want within the metro area.  The question is how do we accomplish that in a way that people choose over the way that they obtain their food now.  How do we make our community gardens an asset that provides a predictible supply of nutrients to the neighorhood - and how do we get the neighbors to support that.  Those are the questions I am asking and I am looking for help in finding the answers.