Hi there fellow Steemians and Homesteaders! I wanted to give you guys a quick tour of what we've been up to on the Homestead.
There are a few reasons we were attracted to BTE (Back to Eden) gardening - the primary being it's supposed to be less maintenance. I'm not BTE expert, and this is the first one we've ever done, but it was worth a try if it truly is less maintenance. The hubby and I still work full time in town and have a VERY active toddler. Plus summer times are full of sports, sleepovers, social outings, and canning, so every summer the weeds go crazy, I struggle to get ahead of the molds and mildews and watering happens...occasionally at best.
The idea of BTE is to recreate what nature does...naturally. Leaves fall, trees fall and decompose. BTE gardening mulches the garden heavily with wood chips, leaves, pine needles, whatever you have naturally available to you. Heavily mulching the garden means less weeding, and less watering -- both wins in my book.
You also don't till, or even dig up the plants when they're done - this adds organic matter back to the soil, and leaves the microbes undisturbed. At our new homestead the ground is very hard-packed and full of clay. We need to build it up as much as possible.
As you can see in the video, we got cardboard from a friend who just moved to a new house - FREE. We got manure from a friend with horses - FREE. The logs you see holding the cardboard down from blowing away were cut from our own property and will become the fence posts for the wattle fence we're going to build around the garden - FREE. Even the wood shavings from the chicken coop are from a friend who does wood-working in his spare time - FREE. The chicken manure - maybe not VERY free, since I pay for feed. The wood chips that we'll lay down on top of the manure are from wood from our own property that we've run through a chipper/shredder - FREE.
I'm very proud of how big of a garden we're going to have for next to nothing.
If you're interested in learning more about BTE gardening, check out the documentary on youtube here:
While the term "Back to Eden" is relatively new, there was an article someone posted on Steem (if you know where it is I would love for you to leave the link to it in the comments please!!) from the early 1900's of a berry farmer who was growing on a commercial level in only woodchips.
I'll do a follow-up post when it's completed, and a step-by-step post on building our wattle fence if anyone is interested!
BTW - no, that isn't the sound of a dog being brutally murdered in the background towards the end of the video. It's the neighbor's new hound puppy