Permaculture Update

Last spring I enrolled in a permaculture course at my local community college. I was delighted at how I could apply some of my past ecology and design courses to my own home. A few things I did in the spring, and an update on them:

What I did	Idea I started with	How it’s doing	What I’ll Change for Next Season
Cover Crops for soil improvement	A lot of the soil in our yard is hard clay, loaded with lava rocks from prior owners. I broadcasted peas, red clover and vetch on the first terrace in our yard, and planted it into the planter boxes in January.	I neglected it so it went to flower; at that point we had lots of pollinators visiting them so I left it, and harvested the seeds. Great for pollinators but not good for soil benefits.	Now that I have lots of seeds and a sense of the seasons here, I’ll plant earlier so I can chop and drop before planting with vegetables. I will selectively leave some because the chickens loved eating it.
Started a bounty of seedlings	I spent a lot of money on seeds and started a lot of seedlings. We don’t have a greenhouse so they were in our living room’s sunniest window for a long time.	I waited too long to put them into the ground and many of them grew leggy in their small pots; I was too worried about frost. Because I didn’t have proper irrigation set up, many of them also failed once I transplanted to the terrace and our planter beds. The ones that survived provided an anemic crop.. a few have just started producing (cucumbers, tomatoes) so I’ll update in another month (if I can protect them from the deer!)	I’ll plant earlier now that I know we don’t get frost here — our tomato plant from Costco survived the entire year and produced a great crop this summer. I’ll do a better job of amending the soil before planting seedlings. We want to build more permanent/bigger vegetable beds. Once that happens I can install irrigation. My mom put Irish Spring on sticks around our plants and we hope it will help deter the deer.
Terracing for erosion control	I built an a-frame and marked out two terraces on our steep slope. I built one of them by driving stakes, cross-setting branches, filling with soil, and seeding it with a wildflower erosion control mix. I used branches from a dead tree that we had taken down. The soil came from our lawn-removal and new landscape plantings.	I It has worked really nicely for erosion control! It is a lot of work to fill with soil and this is why I only did one of them.	Excited to use a bunch of old fencing from a wall we tore down to create terracing up and along our entire slope. The hardest part is moving soil to fill the terraces. I have just a home depot bucket and my own hands and feet.
Created usage zones	I created Zones 1-3, being: Relaxation/Leisure, Farming (includes vegetables beds and chicken coop), Buffer (steep slope that’s not yet usable)	All the doors in our house are on one side, which makes it a pain to access and care for Zone 2 on the other side. It also means that we use Zone 1 for our drop zone. Also.. we have construction materials literally anywhere we could find empty space… it’s a mess.	I’m not sure how to fix this. I welcome ideas your ideas!
Replacing non-productive plantings	Our steep slope has tons of juniper as well as other thorny or overgrown plantings.	Slowly cutting down all the juniper. It’s great for holding the slope in place but is a terrible plant with regard to fire control. Planting drought-tolerant species — salvias, California Fuchsia, Orchid Rockrose — as well as a few comfrey plants for chop-and-drop fertilizer in the future.	I think just slowly continuing to replace and improve plantings, slowly building up soil through application of mulch and jute. This is going to be a multi-year process, so I’m trying to practice patience.
Trying to use Chicken droppings	We tried to line the coop with lava rock, then a layer of mulch, thinking that I’d be able to replace the mulch over time and use the chicken dropping-mulch combo to improve soil on our hill	The lava rocks are too light. They have “floated up” and are now totally intermingled with the mulch.	Need to do a better job of strategically letting chickens roam around our vegetable beds and on the hill. My husband is afraid of animal predation so we can’t let them out unsupervised. I think we need some combination of fencing/aerial protection so we can let them out safely. Maybe I can build a series of PVC mini-enclosures and rotate the chickens through them, sort of like a micro-scale rotational farm.