Thursday, March 8, 2018

Welcome to the Crescent Farm

Partly as a hobby and also to produce quality food for the family, I have decided to turn my suburban lawn into a permaculture food producing powerhouse! This blog will chronicle my journey and hopefully provide a resource for those looking to turn their lawns into productive food forests!

Quite a bit has already happened and we are in the process of building up fertile soil to allow the garden to grow, so most of the pics will show works in progress...

A pile of wood chips.

From my research this is STEP 1 for anyone looking to convert their lawn into a permaculture food forest. You will need a MOUNTAIN of woodchips as a foundation. Yes literally a mountain! This huge pile of around 35 cubic meters of wood chips took me almost a week to move into my garden working on my own with a wheelbarrow.

I sourced the woodchips from a local woodchipper who gave me a mix of palm tree and gum tree from a job he had nearby. Best time to call is after a big storm, woodchippers will be busy and usually would love to drop of a load nearby so they don't have to go all the way to a landscape yard to get rid of their load. The palm tree mulch did have quite a few unchipped branches and leaves which did make it harder to shovel it into the wheelbarrow.

I am now almost done and have cleared out most of the pile, covering most of my sideyard and frontyard with at least 1 foot to 2 feet of woodchips. Left a small patch of grass in front and out back so the chickens could graze on some green as it would take a while before I could get some new edible vegetation growing.

Hopefully in a year's time they will break down and provide at least a couple inches of rich soil on top of the current poor soil which is just some lawn growing on rocky fill.

Welcome to the Crescent Farm

Partly as a hobby and also to produce quality food for the family, I have decided to turn my suburban lawn into a permaculture food produci...