Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Good morning. I wanted to show you something really exciting in my garden.

This is my artichoke patch. I got several artichokes here some different kinds that I’m experimenting with.

I planted them just last year so they’re about a year old. I love growing artichokes. They make these…. their flower is edible. They make that big flower but if you let that thing go to seed it’s this huge purple, bright purple,  like almost the color of my pants, lavendery beautiful thing that the insects just really love.

I’ve also been planting the cousin of the artichoke the cardoon, which is less well known for eating the flower buds but more well known for eating the leaves and the stems. So they make a really yummy spring green and I’m excited to be growing these ones. They’ve over wintered here. We did cover them once with a cloth when it got to really cold temperature not quite sure what would have happened if we didn’t, they might have still survived. They’re really hardy and grow really easily.

After they have grown for about a year ..you can see right here…. So you can see this see this is the mama plant here and then it’s made this little baby plant here.  It makes a side shoot so they just keep on making more and more of themselves.  You can propagate them vegetatively or just let them grow into a patch. They don’t need really high quality soil they can grow in pretty marginal areas and on the edges of things. Then you know in some harder less nutrient dense soil.

So yay for artichokes! It’s one of my favorite perennial landscape plants

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Hi all! This is Dr Monique Mazza from our home in Earthaven Ecovillage and I’m inviting you today to talk about our raised beds. These are  three or four raised beds that we have here.

Why do we have raised beds instead of planting right in the ground?

Well there’s several benefits. For the main reason, for us here in this setting, is because there are a lot of vole creatures. Voles and moles who like to burrow underneath. They’ll take the plant roots out so destroying the growth. So by creating a raised bed we have a secure environment these raised beds are lined with hardware cloth underneath at the bottom. So it’s an impermeable layer it allows drainage. It’s not plastic; it allows drainage of fluids and passage of roots but creatures can’t get up from it. So we’ve created little greenhouses here over the winter. This thick plastic has been been covering these collards that have been lovely and vibrant. Then we have a really nice crop of chickweed which is a highly mineral dense plant that’s great to eat as a spring tonic.

Raised beds hold a lot of moisture. So it’s a really great way to grow if you’re not into watering so much. The compactness of the soil holds a lot of moisture we have a drip system in place  on this bed that I’ll show you.

This is a bed where we’re demonstrating the use of shade cloth and usually we’ll put lettuces or something in here that likes to be a little cooler; spinach and lettuce in particular. This is kind of a cinching system that works that just kind of brings it up when you’re ready to harvest or plant. There’s a series of ropes here that just holds it up.

We have our three layers of three layers of drip tape here. You can see there’s a main line that comes in the bottom and then each bed is fed with a pipe off of a stand pipe further away. We could turn each bed on or off individually. That then leads into three little drip tapes that go down the entire bed so it is a slow way to irrigate with more penetration down into the soil. It keeps it more evenly irrigated.

This last bed we’ve had this great cover crop of clover growing all year. We like to keep them green and growing with something so that the earth is never bare. That keeps all of the healthy soil organisms alive all year. So, either cover crop or in this case we’ve just used chopped leaves to keep the beds warm.

Another benefit of having raised beds is if you’re in an environment that has had bad soil below, say clay soil, or a lot of rocky soil, or even an area where they may not have been using organic practices and you’re concerned about that, putting up a raised bed is pretty simple. So you can create your environment of brand new soil fill with your organic amendments your compost or healthy soil. Then you’re starting on top and you’re likely only growing vegetables that are going to create root system in the top six inches, eight inches, 12 inches max. Usually a raised bed is about 12 inches from the ground and the roots are only going to be exposed to the soil that you choose to put in there.  So it’s a great way to just start from scratch if the ground below is questionable.

Another benefit – it’s an opportunity to use materials that may be lying around. Most of this is just scrap wood that we found – pieces of sheet metal. If you look on the inside you can see this is old roofing material on one side and old sheet metal on the other side and it looks great. It’s really durable it allows the soil and water to be held in place so that’s one of the reasons why they’re so likely to retain moisture.

And, as you get older, it’s sort of easier to garden. You sit here; it’s a nice place to sit- and do your weeding. It gives you a little bit of a built-in bench.

So many benefits of raised beds. You can paint them the color you want. I hope that you all are inspired and make your own! Thanks for joining us!

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Courtney Brooke: It’s a beautiful Wednesday morning garden session over here at the Gateway neighborhood. That’s some little garden gnome over here…

Good morning yarrow! Good morning snapdragons! Good morning oregano!

Sam: Wow! Like a little special plant kind of in the mix you know what this plant is right here?

Naia: What?

Sam: That’s  a little carrot so we’re going to let it grow. Just it’s so small but you can start to see its little carrotness kind of poking out of the soil there….. yeah……so we’ll let it grow…….

Naia: It’s okay we can eat it when it grows…..

Courtney Brooke: What’s this, Naia?

Naia: Kale!

Courtney Brooke: Kale, wow….and what’s this?

Naia: Uhhh, Chickweed!….

Courtney Brooke: Do you like eating chickweed?

Naia: Uh huh….

Courtney Brooke: Me too. should we eat some?

Naia: yeah……

Sam: What’s what’s your idea about how to use the chickweed later today Naia?

Naia: Like put it in this smoothie……

Sam: Put in the smoothie for the kids play group today….

Naia: yeah!

Courtney Brooke: Wow, that’s so special. Morning NikiAnne……

NikiAnne: Hey!……

Courtney Brooke: What are you taking care of?

NikiAnne: Reclaiming the laundry line from the elderberries.

Courtney Brooke: Wow, look at those beautiful elderberries…..Yeah.

NikiAnne: They like the sun but so does my laundry and in this space I want the laundry to win.

Courtney Brooke: Fair enough fair enough. Good morning birds! Hearing those birds songs!!!!

NikiAnne: Hey bee! You’re up early…. so cold out for you.

Naia: What???

NikiAnne: There’s a bee. Well i don’t even know where it went….

Courntey Brooke: oh honey bees…. honey bees….Naia, do you love honey bees? Do you love honey

Naia: Uh yeah!

Courtney Brooke: Yeah me too. Thank you to the bees!

Sam: Yeah, I kept bees for maybe ten years and the biggest and best honey I ever got was the summer that Naia was born. And then we still have that honey, so the the thought is like maybe every year of Naia’s life we can give her a dose of the honey so she can have the essence of the flowers that are blooming at the time of her birth.

Courtney Brooke: That is so special.

Naia: When I was a baby?

Courtney Brooke: Good morning Lena…

Lena: Good morning.

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Extra summer cabbage turns into lots of saurkraut.

Elderberries are made into syrup.

Potato harvest at Yellowroot Farm

Harvesting Potatoes….

and more potatoes.

Beautiful field of buckwheat cover crop at Horn of Plenty.

Salad with wild flowers – elder flower, day lilly, and red clover – all edible.

The orchard is bursting with Autumn Olives.

Harvesting the Autumn Olive fruit.

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On her next-to-last day at Earthaven, our Forest Children’s Collective tutor Amakiasu (center), and her kids Chioke, 17 (left) and Ayo, 13 (right), sheet-mulched the slope between Greg’s homesite and our place with cardboard and straw. You can also see one of our water-catchment tanks, the greenhouse (with a shower inside for lodgers and neighbors), and in the far left, Greg’s apartment and workshop, and his solar panels.

Another view of our cleaned-up slope. Our lodging units and greenhouse are at the top, and our row of compost bins below. Thanks to the sheet-mulching, people driving into Earthaven, our lodgers, and Greg won’t have to look at a jungly mass of pokeberries, sumacs, tiny poplar trees, blackberries-on-steroids, horse-thistle (eek!), and other assorted “please-don’t-grow-here!” plants. (For about 6 months anyway.) Someday this slope will grow berries!

Thank you, Amakiasu, Ayo, and Chioke. Goodbye . . . and . . . come back soon!

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