I figured I'd put in a post as to what I've been up to permaculture wise since we all parted ways, and I must say I feel like I've done a hefty sum already! As you may recall I have a friend whose backyard I'm fully in charge of, and had done ~200 sq. ft. of sheet mulching on before I left. It turns out that in Florida's heat, humidity, sunlight, and rain the process of sheet mulching goes at a fast pace; much of what I did just 2 months ago is already "composted," and I'll soon be starting the canopy and ground cover layers of that section of food forest soon. I've also been working on another ~450 sq. ft. of sheet mulching there, but I'm doing a bit of experimentation with it. In one part I did a bit of Hugelkultur with some quite thick on-site prunings. Another section has a bunch of cactus (again on-site pruning), so we'll see how well these various ways of sheet mulching work out over time. I also plan on posting some pics in a week or so to show the progress thus far.
We're on a budget (basically $0), so its exciting trying to get creative. There's a recycling center 2 miles away that has a free mulch/compost mix, which was very helpful for sheet mulching. I also decided to build a compost bin, and considering our budget decided that I'd try the wood pallet method. Just down the block is a grocer, which had some various sized pallets in the back we picked up (I also got all our cardboard for sheet mulching from this place). The only thing I had to buy was hinges to open the front gate... errr... pallet, thus making our entire 2 section compost bin $7.00; maybe $10 if you include gas. It looks suprisingly good as its adjacent to a wooden fence.
Luckily, there is mango, guava, orange, banana, avacado, and grapefruit trees on site. Oh, and grapes! Yay Florida! So I'm currently working on propogating these various plants with cuttings, which will hopefully root, grow, and be ready when the sheet mulching has worked its magic. I'm hoping by next spring to have the canopy layer of my very first food forest in place; of course these new plants wont be fruit bearing for several years, but such is life.
On a more invisible structure side I'm going to a Transition Movement meeting tonight @ 6:30 PM, and a Gaia's Garden meeting tomorrow. I found both these groups by searching for permaculture at meet-up.com. Worked like a charm. I'm ultimately hoping this will feed into my $0 budget for this project by providing people to seed swap with, learn techniques, get free plants, barter fruit for fruit (or veggies, nuts, etc.). I like this whole $0 budget thing because it forces you to be creative instead of taking the simple path of paying for convenience and ease. I also belive its inportant to reduce costs because there is usually a correlation between the amount of money you spent and the energy intensity of the product/service your getting. I will hopefully post some pics of these various projects in the next week or so.
I'd love to hear what everyone else has been doing to keep the permie spirit alive since going back to real life.
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