Pastures and House Lawn,  Pastures, Gardens and House Lawn

What it Took to Get Our “Food Engine” Organic Beds Going

May 15, 2020 /
  • Early into excavation
  • Bottle form briar cable
  • Before the mulch was added
  • Briar tubers
  • Two mounds of the briar roasting in the sun
  • Briar leaves
  • Saved logs next to a small hugelkultur bed
  • Baby shrew
  • Squash and watermellon as a huge mound
  • “The Blueberry Bed”trash mountain featured here
  • “Mount James”
  • “The Banana Bed”
  • “The Kansas Bed”
  • Potatoes with flowers
  • Wild blueberry patch
We chose five oval shaped areas on the property with accumulations of organic richness to restore and start our deep layered bio-furnaces of nitrification, for the planting and growing of food. Ours are a loose variation on hugelkultur – a hill culture of compost and yardwaste on top of piled logs to facilitate their decay. Manure from pasture animals kept there plus tree trunks and stumps that had been bulldozed into loose piles created the best soil on the property, but the obstacles standing in our way have to be seen to be believed. There weren’t just thick, seven foot tall noxious weeds to yank before they could flower; hidden within two of these piles were hundreds of pounds of sharp, jagged trash to be carefully removed and carted to the county landfill, and I worked with the very real threat of running into rattlesnakes living in such a perfect lair.

Apparently, previous occupants at one point may have though that if you plant an old vacuum cleaner….you get another vacuum cleaner! I found buried within manure piles and thorny weed sapling roots a 1960’s Hoover upright, a busted TV set, car radios, an International Harvester battery charger, 1980’s phones, a CB radio, seven garden hoses, a balled-up above-ground swimming pool with mangled ladder, an EXIT sign, a boombox, an entire fiberglass roof, tons of busted glass, tires of every size, fishing rods, a small trawl net with floats, tackle boxes, a couch, electric motors, buckets full of cured plaster and hardware that we actually saved to re-use. The five baby shrews I found living inside the buried tacklebox found a new home in the leaf litter across the path from the excavation. A license plate even turned up during the excavation and I got the number!

Aaaand…that’s not all! Holding everything together like barbed wire was a subterranean net of a particularly nasty species of greenbriar with sharp needles. This sunlight-dreading vampire might be what is commonly called bull or cat briar, but I’ve never seen anything like it before. It spreads into a network of spiky pale chartreuse cables and segmented potatoes 6″ to 12″ underground with pretty green leaves on stems not taller than three feet, and one usually bleeds after merely brushing against it while passing. When the cables grew into tires and bottles they did so in the shape of the object. I removed the 90% of it I could find and then the stealthy survivors each time a sprig of green poked up throughout Winter and Spring. It is nearly impossible to eradicate but I’m almost there and down to only one shoot popping up per week. Sifting of glass and other fragmented small trash, a couple truck loads of chipper debris laid down thick and bordered with dead trees I cut down made the trash mountains officially beds.

The upside is that we were left five large bales of hay that I pitchforked apart and dragged by tarp to deposit as mulch to start the furnaces of decay while preventing the return of weeds. We both raked up and added twice as much in evergreen oak leaves after the March deciduation, and those quickly proved optimal for growing the potatoes that we’re already eating. The Manzano bananas, watermelon, citrus, blueberry, heat-hardy apple, peach, strawberry, canteloupe, sweet potato and squash are also quite taking to it. We will have to continually add organic debris to keep the bio-reaction and the magic going, just as we did in Estero with Nannertopia. Eventually we plan to add cold-hardy avocado trees and ease these into being permaculture beds. The fifth bed, “The Deer Form Bed”, is barely started and overrun with Virginia creeper vines.

James V. Freeman is an established visual artist (oil painting) with a deep interest in natural history, plants and farming. He has had numerous solo shows, a solo museum show, an upcoming museum show and his work has been featured in many publications to date. He currently has a studio in Williston, Fl at the family farm and homestead, "Cactus Island", and as a farmer, specializes in growing columnar cacti of the Caribbean and Gulf countries as well as the aquatic Madegascar Lace Plant. James and his mom Sharon manage and develop the permaculture homestead.

4 Comments

  • James V Freeman

    May 16, 2020 at 9:33 am

    They didn’t care about the land. Simply hiding the trash that took too much effort to move worked. It made the perfect environment for vampire Smilax and the rattlesnakes I thankfully didn’t meet. Several black racer snakes however did emerge from the trash to get a closer look at me.

  • Cathy

    June 1, 2020 at 5:50 pm

    Wow Jim and Sharon –so much WORK!! I’m really proud of you both (as I lazily sit here at my laptop…).
    I’m amazed at how utterly LAZY the former owners were & I’m breaking out in hives and rashes just VIEWING your pics LOL! Phew, that is a ton. Jeff and I once lived in a house where there was a CAR (YEP, an entire car) buried in our backyard. We kind of figured out where it was based on depressions in the grass but really…these sloths just couldn’t be bothered to get it to the local junkyard? Ha!
    Your project is just on a whole-other level! You are so inspirational & it’s great to see some authentic humans bettering their world “one shovel at a time!”
    Very glad you did not meet vicious types of snakes -_-
    I’ll continue to check back because I REALLY want to see a “cold-weather” Avacado” PROSPER SOON!

    love you guys!
    –Cathy

    • jvfreeman

      June 1, 2020 at 6:04 pm

      Thank you, Cathy! We are very lucky that one of the diamondbacks didn’t pop out to say Hi. Neighbor on our street shot one near his mailbox last week. Your buried car story is like something out of Lost. We hope very soon to buy and plant those avocados with rainy season here, California Medjool date palm seeds are now soaking, and on our semi-xeric sand hill they actually should produce properly sweet dates for food by my 60th birthday or so, haha. Love to you too!

Cactus Island Nursery