1: there was a large hedge of himalayan blackberry at my new place, happily occupying some prime real estate in the sun. oh yes, the berries were delicious! no doubt! and I had no intention of doing anything about it two months after moving in to this new studio but when the weather turned unbelievably gorgeous in October of 2013 and promised to remain so for a full month, well, I would put money down that every gardener in the region could not stay indoors. Me? I grabbed my pruning clippers and headed down to the offenders, initially intending to find a way to whip them into arches suitable for harvest.
from the back- the only way to attack
one half done
semi-hilarious irony: my new landlord didn't see them as a problem, claiming that he could keep them under control with the lawnmower, but I tell you (as him), they were climbing not just 30 feet up into the trees but also planting their runners into the grass and forest. a thorny veneer of green over a boney dry monoculture forest that had me ruminating on the homeless warrens I'd observed amongst the blackberry forest between interstates and under bridges in urban Portland. My mind wandered to bladerunner-style plant-hybridized communications between messanger-birds bearing the seeds of the sweet fruits embedded with crytographic messages from the disenfranchized: we are tribe "6xq", population 243 at location 98320, mission "_____", enemy "____", etc...... slowly cutting 4000 square feet of blackberry into 4 foot lengths allows the mind time to ramble.
look at the lovely mushrooms growing in a rotten stump behind the hedge that now isn't
after all that, I hired my neighbor with a backhoe to claw the roots out of the area, down to a foot or more, so now I have a huge area that is essentially double-dug in the sun.
input 2: biodynamic gardening? in my internet wanderings months ago, I blunder into a blog detailing the conversion of part of a dead lawn into a super-high yielding garden bed. double-dug, with added sand for drainage and compost for nutrients... and planted densely with starts. stuck in my head. biodynamic requires a lot more attention than I have to give but I can see spreading a few inches of compost on my newly loosened soil and throwing in some seeds in the way Ianto Evans does: densely sewn, and eating the thinnings, gradually replacing the whole plants you remove with the appropriate season's seed.
input 3: Peter pruned the orchard, leaving me with branches more than suitable for a lashed-together tomato playground. I will dip the end grain in mineral oil to slow the rot.
more to come! I found a place for nitrogen-fixing flowering seed mix