Posts Tagged ‘soil improvement’

2 Apr

The Plant That I Can’t Do Without

Posted by wooddogs3 in edible landscaping, front yard gardening, home food production, urban farm animals, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , , , .

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If I were a poet, I would write a hymn to alfalfa.  This workhorse plant is now all over my small property, improving soil and feeding the animals and indirectly feeding me.  For the first couple of years I labored fruitlessly to try to grow enough grass or clover to make a picnic circle, but ultimately I gave up and seeded the area with alfalfa.  What a gain in utility.  Alfalfa thrives in my alkaline soil. Its roots are reported to go down as much as 30 feet deep, and it is fairly drought resistant.  It is a bit sparse the first year but then fills out nicely. It fixes nitrogen and improves the soil. Early in the spring, usually by mid-March in my area, the vibrant green leaves are forming clumps.  It is a remarkably nutritious green, however I don’t usually eat it myself, although I will clip a few tender leaves off the tips and put them in cooked greens mixtures.  Chickens love fresh alfalfa, and it is quite astounding how much of it they will eat. Of course, this is providing all sorts of nutrients and greatly increasing the beta-carotene and omega-3 fatty acids in the egg yolks.  The yolks are beautifully vibrant orange. I grab handfuls of stems and cut them close to the ground with scissors, then go to the chicken pens and cut the stems into lengths 1 to 2 inches long, to make the plant easier for the hens to eat.  They start jumping against the door as soon as they see the alfalfa coming.   My goat relishes a handful of fresh alfalfa as a snack, although mostly she eats dried alfalfa hay.  I have little patches of alfalfa all over the yard now, wherever I had a bare space to fill, and I let at least one patch go to flower for the pleasure of seeing the bees mob the blue-purple blossoms.  I would estimate that each clump is cut four to six times between March and October.

I still wish that I had a lush smooth clover lawn to picnic on; alfalfa is clumpy and by the end of the season it is stiff with all the stems that you cut. You can’t sit right down on it.   But a large sheepskin in between you and the alfalfa makes it a much more comfortable resting place, and it is far more useful and durable than clover. Currently I’m experimenting with planting fruiting trees and berries into the alfalfa patches to see how they coexist. My hope is that the alfalfa will provide some nitrogen for the trees. I hope to report back in a year or two.

If I think about my property as a factory, alfalfa is mining the nutrients from the subsoil, combining them with water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight to make edible food, and transporting the food to the general marketplace at the soil surface. The chickens are eating from the market, breaking down the 16-carbon omega-3 fatty acids found in plants, and re-forming them into 18 carbon omega-3s that people can readily utilize, as well as making proteins and concentrating caratinoids and other nutrients. They contribute eggs and sometimes meat back to the common marketplace, where I “buy” the foody products with my labor and feed input, and happily devour them. It’s a beautiful chain.

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These delicious eggs can be thought of as little bombs full of all the nutrients in alfalfa. But they are much easier for people to eat.

21 May

Passing Pleasures: wildflower meadows, and notes on a weeding service

Posted by wooddogs3 in front yard gardening, passing pleasures, Uncategorized, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .


At my new place there is a large backyard, completely barren and given over to weeds by the former owner. When we moved in last winter I decided to concentrate my most intensive efforts on other areas, but eventaully I wanted an orchard of dwarf fruit trees in the back yard and didn’t want any grass there. The soil was terrible, and I decided to till the area shallowly and plant desert/upland wildflowers, which are accustomed to struggling for survival. I used the “California Brilliant” mix from Peaceful Valley. I didn’t do any soil improvement.

Naturally the weeds came up as well as the wildflowers, and the whole area had to be weeded over by hand in the spring to give the infant wildflowers a chance. There was too much area for me to do alone, and I can personally recommend the Albuquerque weeding service “U weed me?” Liz, who can be reached at lizabkap@hotmail.com, is an armed forces veteran and a dependable, reliable person who spent more time on her knees with me in my back yard than seems reasonable, and never complained.

The wildflowers started blooming in late April, and something new comes into bloom every week or two. That area of my yard is a constant pleasure, and I walk through it every morning just to see what’s blooming. It needs some water but not as much as a lawn, and between the flowers, the bees, and the hummingbirds, it’s at least three times as interesting as a lawn. Before you decide on wildflowers, take into account that bare spots do occur, that weeding is necessary, and that the flowers have to be allowed to go to seed if you want to keep the meadow going, which isn’t necessarily going to be an attractive process. But you’ll have a glorious springtime.



I scattered a little of the mix in a vegetable bed just for fun, and some lovely chance combinations are occurring, like the Califirnia poppy above making itself at home in my lettuce bed.