Our Big Plan

Here is a picture of the Big Plan for Lucky and Blessed Gardens! Zev Freidman and I worked on this plan over the course of about a year. The poster I read at Greenlife Grocery assured me that Zev was just the partner I was looking for. He specializes in long-term vision development, edible, medicinal and native plants, permaculture design and land restoration. Zev calls his business Urban Paradise Gardens. Zev really got what I dream of creating here and I've already learned so much.

He came over and we walked together on the property. We talked about my vision and all the kinds of plants I wanted to include. I want to use the principals of permaculture design and bio-dynamics to create habitat, grow food and build community. I want fruit trees and grape vines, veggies and flowers and berries. Zev turned me onto some great ideas, like using the shady slope under my big maple tree to create two native Southern Appalachian habitats -- one acidic for flame azalea and rhododendron and one rich for things like dwarf iris and blood root.

He took soil samples and sent them off to the county extension office. He taught me about sheet mulching to create beds and build soil. The great thing about sheet mulching is NO DIGGING! I don't need to buy a tiller or break my back digging. Just lay down the cardboard, wet it down, cover it with mulch. Next spring the space will be ready for planting. In fact this fall I'm going to put in some bulbs. I'll just poke through the cardboard to lay the bulbs into the ground.

What the goats left behind

Can you believe it?! The goats took 3 days to do this. Actually they took about 2 and 1/2 days. It was hot early this week and they slow down on their eating when it's hot. Penny decided to keep them over night on Tuesday because the moon was full and she expected they would just keep eating -- which they did. She told me the next day that at about midnight they all suddenly got frisky and started playing and running up and down the hill.

Goats in the hood!

Here are a few more photos of the goats on the day they arrived, Monday October 13. I was concerned that neighbors would fuss but everyone seemed to love seeing the goats. At one point Shelley and Penny had about 20 people inside the electric fence petting the goats and asking all the usual questions.

Goats to the rescue!

This morning 15 goats arrived at the future home of Lucky and Blessed Garden to tackle a dense kudzu thicket at our home in downtown Asheville. Kudzu, a wonderful plant but dangerously invasive in the Southern US, is very difficult to erradicate because it stores energy deep in the earth in a large tuber and spreads by sinking roots every foot or so along its rapidly growing vine. I could have had a bull-dozer come in to rip out the vines and dig down till we found the root. Bull-dozing would have been very expensive, destroyed the fertile soil underneath the kudzu, used a lot of fossil fuels and made a lot of noise. Instead I called Penny and Shelley at Got Your Goat Weed Management.

Goats are quiet, they fertilize and aerate the soil, they are affordable and they are super cute. After the goats eat up all the kudzu, I'll remove the dead vines and find the primary root limb. Then I'll cut it off and quickly dap some Round Up onto the cut. In early autumn, plants are bringing energy back down into their root systems in preparation for dormancy in winter. So the Round Up placed strategically will kill the big tuber deep down. I may end up digging that big tuber out, but it will be a targeted dig rather than destroying the entire lot.