Fruit Trees, Compost, and a Labyrinth!

Maybe it only looks like trash bags covering heaps of who-knows-what and a black bin to you, but it's so much more! This is the beginning of the Free Farm's composting system. There is a place for our food scraps from lunch, the invasive plants found at the site, and thick, woody materials, too. Composting space on a farm. Gotta have it! Below is a picture of our composting committee. Thanks so much, you three!
















The picture below shows Tree sharing his knowledge of fruit trees. He taught us how to prune the tree so it will stay low. He also cleared up a problem lots of folks run into during tree planting. Rather than digging a hole and surrounding the tree with all nutrient rich material, the native soil should be mixed with the organic matter.















Also, Pastor Megan has been making serious headway with the meditation labyrinth. Make sure to check out the link to see how fabulously it's coming along!

DIY: Build Your Own Labyrinth - Step 3

• See Step One

• See Step Two

This step: Layout beds for planting
Because our design is long and thin, some of our garden beds won't be full garden mounds. In these thin rows, we have made one foot width beds from bricks left over from the St. Paulus foundation. The more of these beds we plant, the easier it will be to tell where the labyrinth walking paths are. Below are some photos of our layout and and how we planted them.

At the end of the thin rows, the planting area expands to three feet wide as you can see here. In the 3 foot sections, is where our mounds will be. Mound planting is great for wet spaces. Wet plants go on the bottom of the mound and drier plants go closer to the top. Here we are going to be planting flowers, pretty looking, pretty smelling plants and some produce and herbs.

Below you can see that we planted some peppermint and chamomile.

DIY: Build Your Own Garden Labyrinth - Step Two

See step one

The next step in the labyrinth is to layout the labyrinth with rocks. Luckily, my feet are a men's size 12 so it was very easy for me to measure the size of the space and line it up to the grid on the labyrinth design.

I'll upload a picture of the design we used just in case you happen to have a lot the exact size as ours.
Here you can see how I marked the distance between each row to map out the space before making my long walking paths.

It took three days to layout.

Go to step 3

DIY: Make your own garden labyrinth - Part 1

Here is step one in how to make your own garden labyrinth. We're putting our garden in an abandoned lot where lots of wild weeds grow, so our first step is to put down a root barrier. Fitting with our theme of recycling and getting our supplies for free, we used cardboard for our root barrier.

Note: This DIY tip is the same for how to make pathways in your garden - we're just doing it on a much larger scale.

Step one: Put your cardboard on the ground, each piece overlapping the one before.
Step two: Water the cardboard.
Step three: cover the cardboard with wood chips. We got ours for free from the local dump. It's from all the Christmas trees they've picked up recently!

It's that easy. Cardboard, water and wood chips. Step one completed.


Go to step 2