So Delmy Emerson, as indicated in the post below, can give us up to 12 cubic yards of shredded plant material per week. And the Red Door is going to give us 13 gallons of coffee grounds per unspecified time interval as soon as we get that trash can in the mail.
In other words, we can have as much green and brown organic material as we can possibly eat, wear, or smoke, whenever we want it, with about a week’s lead time. That’s actually kind of exciting.
So I’m planning an assault on some of the remaining sod in the areas that Alex and I have discussed gardenizing. We have plenty of compost, reliable sources of water and scrap cardboard/newspaper, and effectively infinite mulch. The plan, therefore, is this:
1) Water heavily, then put a 2 cm deep layer of wet cardboard and newspaper over the sod that we want to kill.
2) Cover that with organic material, in this case coffee grounds and chipped wood/leaves interlayered with some ripe compost from the bags we bought (they’re still out there). About six to eight inches of this — I’m thinking a good 3-4 inches of coffee+trimmings, then compost, then more coffee+trimmings on top of that.
3) Put up trellises and sidewalls. For the former, we might want to buy a bunch of netting, like what we used this year but less flimsy. It’s unclear whether B&G will be helping us with the latter. This is the most dubious step at present. Also, we’ll need to rearrange the drip hoses to keep it all irrigated.
4) Plant lots of beans on top. Beans have deep taproots which will penetrate the cardboard and perforate/nitrogenate our lousy clay soil, grow like crazy in this weather (see post below), and can be either eaten underripe or allowed to ripen and dry out. I’ve got a half-pound each of organic Good Mother Stallard and Rio Zape heirloom beans, which are fresh enough that they should grow with no trouble at all, and are reportedly very tasty. If we don’t get the trellises up, I guess we can plant bush beans instead just fine; we’ve still got seed beans, both Italian streaky shrimp beans and tiny Southern butter limas. In either case, I suspect this will result in a huge harvest, but maybe CDS and Tom Mannion will want some. As I said, very tasty.
5) When the bean plants die and dry out in the fall, we’ll pull them out and maybe check to see if the substrate has decomposed properly. At that point we can also throw on another barrel of compost, which will hopefully be ready by then, mulch again, and plant some winter crops in it.
Sound like a good plan?
Sustainability, tasty plants, and incriminating garden photos from Dabney House at Caltech