photos

Mike Thayer took these--and it was his idea to sheet mulch (and he volunteered to come help). We scavengened the cardboard from the nearby shopping center and apartment recycle bins. I'm wearing odd clothes because I had been biking. Thanks Mike!! Click each picture to zoom in. These were taken on Wednesday January 31st, I believe.


Above is a bed I'm not planning to plant in for a while, so I thought it would be fine to try sheet mulching this. . . but I'm not yet sure if my 91-year old grandma will tolerate it in the long term.

Above is the location I plan to plant the garden.

The compost pile.

Covering the apple succulent (what is the latin name?) with cardboard. Some is already wet because it had rained on some boxes that had been left outside behind Vons.

I've since added more mulch so not so much cardboard is showing.

We also inoculated the cardboard with some oyster (?) mushroom mycelium that Mike brought from the Earth Activist Training he had just attended.

So now the challenge is keeping the sheetmulched bed wet and making it look nice so my grandma won't fret about it. . . argh.

She tends to complain about every little thing that she thinks looks messy. Or any little thing that is a change (that is probably the main issue). And she is, generally, the embodiment of discouragment and negative thinking when it comes to my plan to grow a garden in the backyard (she claims her last husband Ed tried to grow things and failed miserably).

She is Bill Mollison's worst nightmare (He rails against people who seek neatness that is devoid of life and infertile).

But it is her house. . .

If I can avert some sort of standoff until good things start growing, then my hope is she won't give me such a hard time.

She does have a massive wall-paper picture of a tree by a lake with leaves on the ground under it. . .

Ok--enough about that.