Sepp Holzer
sastyk | October 6, 2011I don't live on a mountainside, but my town isn't called one of the "Hilltowns" for nothing, and Sepp Holzer's permaculture designs, set in a cold, steep place with stripped soil (my soil was literally stripped when the farm was a sod farm in the 1980s) comes closer to what my farm requires than almost anything else. I'm particularly taken by his methods of making large scale raised beds from brush.
He has a recent book on his techniques, and it is extremely valuable, even for a woman who doesn't have his same passion for earth moving equipment ;-). Neat stuff - a way of making land that…
sastyk | October 6, 2011Kate at "Living the Frugal Life" has a great post on the merits and techniques of sheet mulching in the garden. Since this has been the key to soil improvement (and we have dreadful soil) in our garden, I wanted to highlight it.
Significant soil improvement is one of them. This isn't exactly surprising; it's routinely mentioned as the "other" benefit of the technique besides weed control. But knowing intellectually that it would help the soil didn't quite prepare me for the fat earthworms I've been coming across. They're not inordinately long as worms go, but they are rotund. Wider…