I fall asleep to the serenade of the chorus of neighborhood toads. I awake to the pleasant song of the wood thrush and the red-bellied woodpecker call. There is deer scat in my yard. This little wooded oasis of ours is in the median between the city and a shopping plaza chain store wasteland, yet you’d never know.

Its inarguably beautiful. The problem with all this is that the area isn’t conducive to food production, at least in the conventional sense. We have trees, probably approaching 100 feet, surrounding our yard and that of our neighbors, not to even mention the half acre mature woodlot adjacent to us. This means lots of shade. It means birds and deer and other things that like to eat. Not to mention the clay soil. It means I have to get somewhat creative.

But such is the dilemma in our modern age. Hunting and gathering will not sustain nearly seven billion people and counting. And the majority of this population resides in urban settings. Learning to work with what you’ve got today is not only a cliche, it’s a survival strategy.

So, we have decided to have two main “gardens”, as well as some other strategic placement of random edible plants. One garden is a 2000 square foot fenced in area that most would recognize as a typical vegetable garden. But as we develop it, hopefully one can see where we attempt to apply ecological or otherwise organic methods of gardening to this seemingly conventional garden.

The second area will be an experiment in the permaculture principle of the edible forest. We are extending the woodlot next to us into our yard. Already we have planted three nut trees, a mulberry tree and several varieties of brambles that will compose part of the shrub layer. This is just the beginning however. In this area we will attempt to recreate a successional forest ecosystem, that which is natural to this area.

In the coming months, we have some sheet mulching and fencing to take care of, and more importantly, taking some time to get more intimate with our new yard.

But before that, the next project is the chicken coop and run. In fact, the basic prefab coop which we mail ordered and are planning to soup up a bit just arrived on our front porch earlier today.

Have you ever heard of a chicken moat? Stay tuned…

In the meantime, check out our Picassa Web Album . There’s not much yet, but it will soon be filled with more pictures of chickens than one could hope for.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 12:23 am and is filed under Permaculture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.