Welcome

Several rainy days during a vacation week in May offer a good time for a gardener to transplant a blog from her head to the web. So here's the backstory: 

My adventures in edible landscaping and micro-farming began in fall 2003 when my partner, Richard, proposed that we dig up the lawn so we didn't have to mow. Our lawn was minimal, a skirting of green surrounding the house, itself surrounded by about a 6-acre wooded lot that had been left on its own. I wasn't sure about the "no lawn at all" part of the proposal, but I agreed to start. 

The grass on the sunny south side of the house was the first to go. With my usual enthusiasm, I was ready to begin the weekend after we hatched the plan; it was October. Richard insisted on a sketch to scale. I measured and sketched. Winter came, and the ground froze. Spring came, and it thawed.

The first warm day in May, my patience exhausted, I grabbed a shovel and begin to dig. Richard dug. Friends and family helped. By August, we had a sun-shaped patio outside the kitchen door.

The following spring, the grass between the "sun ray" paths was replaced with herb and perennial gardens, extending to encompass the standard "rectangle-shaped patch surrounded by grass" that had served as my vegetable garden.

We moved eastward around the house, and over the next two years, the front lawn with its traditional perennial flower borders gave way to to a network of mixed-use beds anchored by fruit trees and connected by paths of fieldstone gathered from the woods. We planted plums, pears, peaches, cherries and apricots in what had been the front lawn. The wetter areas out toward the road got elderberries and black locust (future fence posts). 

We integrated the beds, mixing vegetable plantings in with the flowers, and flowers in with the vegetable plantings. We learned about perennial vegetables, those plants that come back year after year, and could be eaten. They require less work than starting each spring only with seedlings.

We became more attentive to the flowering plants that attract predatory insects, the bugs that eat the bugs that eat our plants, and those that attract the pollinators.  We learned which flowers we could eat and planted more of those. 

We welcomed the wild bramble fruits (black cap raspberries and blackberries) as they migrated from the woodland edges in search of sun, smothering some of the remaining lawn. And we added blueberries to the woodland edges, grapes to cover an arbor over the deck, and strawberries as a border to the perennial beds. 

By year four, Richard was more actively managing the previously ignored woods, finding and selecting for cherry, black walnut, shag bark hickory, service berry, choke cherry, and beech amid the far more prevalent white pine, elm and ash. We planted hazelnuts in the understory and paw paw trees, the largest native northern U.S. fruit, often described as resembling a mango-banana custard and a prolific food source prior to its near disappearance in the early 20th century.  We began woodland patches of wild leeks and ostrich fern, the primary source for edible "fiddleheads" in early spring, along the stream. 

This is a do-it-ourselves, evolving project with as much "free" material and young plants as possible. We learn as we go, from experimentation, and from some useful books on "forest gardening," perennial agriculture, permaculture, and companion planting. 

In less than five years, in central upstate New York ("zone 5"), we grow most of the vegetables we eat year-round, and over half the fruit. We eat well. Very, very well. I began this adventure hating to cook and caring little about food. But a different kind of relationship with food grows when you raise it yourself. A different kind of understanding too. A different kind of relationship with and understanding of the natural world grows as well. More about all of that to come. 

Year five has brought us to the north side of the house, developing the vegetable and berry beds along the woods edge, just far enough from the house's shadow to get almost a full day of sun. Our blueberries are already much happier moved to the more acid piney soil here, among the filberts (American hazelnut). The remainder of the grass on this side will give way later this summer to a wooden ramp up to the front porch, providing access to the house for people with walkers, wheelchairs, and carts of winter heating wood. 

To the south and west of the house, Richard is creating clearings for a woodland orchard -- more plums, apples, cherries. More nut trees. Native shrubs, and other shrubs originating in Russia, Sweden and the Ukraine that are both ornamental and edible. 

Stay tuned. 

Top photo: Richard Lansdowne; Middle photo: Margo Hittleman; Bottom two photos: Dan Hittleman/ drhPHOTO