Back Yard Project: Applying More Pattern Language Principles

Rough sketches for the Lower Patio.

I am working on designs for the lower patio area where a broken down hot tub was removed. It is the most sheltered and sunniest place on the lot and I want to take advantage of the site conditions to grow plants.

I laid out some stakes to work out the optimum size of the raised beds. I placed a chair to help me visualise sitting in the warm spot amongst the flowers.

Pattern Language #241 is a 2-star pattern meaning it is a very important design consideration.

Problem: Where outdoor seats are set down without regard for view and climate, they will almost certainly be useless.

Solutions for locating outdoor seats, sitting walls, stair seats, garden seats need these characteristics:

1. Benches facing directly onto pedestrian activity.

2. Benches open to the south for sun exposure during winter months.

3. A wall on those sides where the winter winds come down. p. 1120

My design satisfies the first 2 characteristics being south facing and elevated to look down over the activity in the backyard. I am hoping the lower seating level and the raised beds full of plants will protect the area from the winds the site gets from Elk Lake about a kilometer away. Experience has shown the winds tend to be deflected up over the house as the land rises and I think the arbour and pergola will also serve to deflect the wind.

In the meantime, I can begin soil building.

The first step is to remove all of the big rocks in the soil.

I am sorting the rocks into rounded river rock that was brought onto the site by the previous owners and the native blasted rock most of which was created before the house foundations were built.

These different types of rock will be used for different purposes elsewhere on the site.

Choosing good spots for outdoor seats is far more important than building any fancy benches. Indeed, if the spot is right, the most simple kind of seat is perfect. p. 1120.

Backyard Project - Planting in the Gravel Bed Garden

Gravel Bed garden

The plants I planted a couple of months ago are thriving, confirming my design criteria for this bed will work.

All plants must be culinary and/or medicinal, able to thrive in full sun, suited to well-drained soil,  need only low levels of water, and have blue to purple flowers with the odd one having yellow flowers.

Confident my design will work I have visited several nearby nurseries to find plants that fit the spec.

Here I am making a path through the bed using low growing plants that can take light foot traffic. I have found many different types of thyme to begin the path.

The rosemary and sage I transplanted from other old beds are thriving. I will be able to take cuttings from the rosemary once the rains begin again.  I will propagate these cuttings for another project I have in mind.

I have marked the spots for the path plants with empty pots weighted down with stones. 

The thyme path meanders through the bed like a river. 

I have read lots of books and checked many websites to make a long list of suitable plants. I keep this list in my bag ready for when I am in the vicinity of a nursery. It is a list of plants for the spots either side of the path and between the stone wall.

I have found out I love reading about a plant, visualising how it would look in a particular spot, and checking on how well it would relate to the other plants around it. 

When I look at this Gravel Bed garden I see it full of mature plants and looking beautiful. I imagine walking slowly along the meandering paths smelling and tasting leaves and harvesting a few springs for the dish I am preparing in the kitchen. There is a spot for a bench which will slow me down even more. It is what I need.

Backyard Project: Soil Building verses Plant Growing

Once all of the soil beds had a layer of mulch topped with a deep layer of straw I planted literally hundreds of seeds and waited. Patiently. But nothing except the potatoes and a few nasturtiums appeared. A month later I thought I must have bought a nonviable batch of seeds so went to another place and bought more bulk seed. 

Weeks later still nothing.

Sammy thought the straw layer may be too thick preventing the seedlings from getting the light they needed to grow. 

We pulled back the straw and found these - they have lots of different names - pill bug, roly-poly, wood louse, armadillo bug, potato bug, among others. The deep straw and rich mulch provided ideal damp dark conditions for the pill bugs and many other insects, worms, slugs and ants to thrive. And they were feasting on every new shoot that dared to pop out of the ground. But at the same time, all of the bugs were doing an excellent job at breaking down the organic matter. The pill bug and his cousins are particularly adept at breaking down the cellulose in the mulch. They were well on their to making rich soil.

I had to make the decision - leave the bugs to do their work or plant more seeds so the plants can build up the soil? I decided to do both but in different beds.

Since the potato beds were doing relatively well I pulled off most of the straw on those beds. It exposed the soil to the light and it dried up a lot and I had the added task of heaping the soil up around each potato plant. There wasn't much extra soil so some of the growing potatoes were exposed to the light and developed green sides. Oh well, I was growing potatoes for soil building and there were still more than enough to eat.

After I mounded up the soil around each potato plant I planted hundreds of seeds for the third time.

In the back straw-covered beds the bugs are hard at work.

In the front is a potato bed interplanted with 5 different types of beans and 2 different types of peas. While the beans, peas and potatoes are good companions, the beans and peas have root nodules the nitrogen fixing bugs like to live on.

Within the week, a welcome sight.

It is all about learning from experience.

Sprinkle Dyeing and Sun Printing Results

Here are my results from a day out in the sun sprinkle dyeing and sun printing.

This fabric had previously been dyed and still needed work.

I sprinkled on a mixed dye. It is interesting to see how the blue migrated further than the red before the damp fabric dried out. The red blob in the bottom is where I sprayed the fabric with water during the drying process.

This dye is made up of many different colours and is sold as black.

Sprinkle dyeing produces a distinctive look that is easily identified when used in a work.

Here are my sprinkle dye results washed and ironed. Admittedly some of the fabrics began as pre-dyed uglies but in most cases sprinkle dyeing has not improved them any. They are still ugly but I may find areas I need that I can cut out. That is the only reason why they will go back into my stash.

My sun printing results were much more promising.

In this sample, I used woven twig place mats and glass stones as resists.

The other samples were produced by twisting painted fabric into knots. The top right sampIe I added a spritz of water to after it was knotted.

So mixed results after a fun day out in the sun with friends.

Sprinkle Dyeing and Sun Printing at VISA, Victoria

During a Mark Makers' summer residency at the Vancouver Island School of Art (VISA) website we decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather and have a dyeing day outside.

We set up tables and brought out buckets of water to the backyard of the school.

I set up my sophisticated system for working with dye powder safely and gave a quick demo on how to fill salt shaker-type containers with dye powder.

While the air was still we explored different sprinkle dye techniques using Procion MX. 

Wet soda-soaked natural fabrics were folded, rolled and scrunched before sprinkling dye powder over them.

Eileen sprinkles dye on flat fabric.

Brenda sprinkles dye on a linen fabric already cut to shape for a garment.

This is a great way to use up old batches of dye powder. It works best with dyes made up from a mix of colours. The different colours separate out and migrate through the damp fabric at different rates.

After lunch, Dale gave us a demo of sun printing using transparent fabric paints on damp cloth. She showed us how many different resists will work to leave an impression.

With the sun overhead, we all got clear impressions of the resists. Brenda is using plastic shapes she has cut out and leaves as a resist on linen fabric she has painted with fabric paint. Others used flowers, grasses, bubble wrap, paper and cotton doilies as resisits. 

The dyed cloth was covered with plastic and taken home to batch before being rinsed and ironed.

Permaculture Plants - Comfrey, the Queen of Plants

Comfrey (Symphytum x uplandicum)

I have planted lots of comfrey in the garden for many reasons. Perhaps the most important one is that it fulfills one of the three ecological gardening principles - succession. Except for the Cut Flower bed, all of the beds in the Backyard Project were new with bare soil. By using comfrey as a first coloniser/pioneer plant it helps prepare the soil for other plants, soil organisms and insects. It starts a progression of life.

Comfrey is an insectary plant in that the flowers attract bees to the garden. Slugs devour the leaves while they work to break down organic matter in the soil. The slugs are a food magnet for birds, frogs, snakes and many other creatures needed in a garden.

I put my shoe beside a leaf to show you how big the comfrey leaves are getting. The plant has a long soil-busting taproot capable of bringing lots of minerals up to the surface. As the soft decaying leaves quickly decompose these minerals are released and made accessible to other plants.

The large leaves cover the soil holding in moisture while providing a cool home for the slugs and many other soil critters.

This is the 'mother bed' under a big leaf maple but it is not working to plan. It is dry under the tree, is not irrigated and the hose doesn't reach this far so I don't expect them to thrive over the summer.

The plants that are thriving and have grown the biggest leaves are in locations that correspond with the sunniest places I found when I did the 'Sun/Shade' analysis map.

Here is the comfrey growing along the bottom edge of the Leaf hugelkultur bed. The leaves are small and the plants are reaching towards the sunny south. But they are still doing a good job building up the soil by making mulch.

Whenever I plant plants I don't need to put a compost soil in the hole first. My sister showed me how to pick a few comfrey leaves, crunch them up and put them in the bottom of the hole before putting the plant on top. It is a mineral boost for the new plant.

I make up a herb tea for the plants by putting comfrey, nettle and horsetail in a big tub of water and leaving it until it has decayed. The plants and soil love this tonic.

I harvest the comfrey three times over the spring and summer laying it on the soil as fertiliser. At the end of August, I leave the plant to grow leaves to protect itself over the winter. 

I haven't even touched on the medicinal or culinary uses of comfrey - I'll save that for another post.

Comfrey well deserves its title 'Queen of Plants' in the permaculture garden.

The happy result of what I thought was a mistake.

A few years ago I planted some irises near the edge of the pond. During the winter rains, the pond water level rose and covered the irises. I thought that was the end of them because they would rot. But no, each spring they grow back out of the pond mud and put on a magnificent show.

Backyard Project: Garden Rooms

Gravel Bed Garden Room

This garden room came about because of the site conditions. Grass would not grow in this area of the back lawn. We found the reason why after the thin layer of topsoil was scraped away before the studio construction began. Bedrock was exposed. Thin soil exposed to 12 hours of sunshine and reflected heat from the house suited a hot dry garden bed.

Tom dug down around the bedrock to make a sunken 'U' shaped garden room. The 2 entrances to this room are accessed by flat rock steps.  

It has rock walls and grey/white washed gravel flooring. I laid out a length of yellow yarn to mark the path through the room.

I have started planting. I have gone around to other beds to find plants that would be happier in a place with full sun and free draining to dry soils - rosemary, thyme, sage, lavender.

Marking out the beginnings of another garden room.

The walls will be a hedge of pineapple guava (feijoa), fig trees and Callistemon (bottlebrush).

Another room is called Walter's Gorge. It is now bisected by the deer fence but still reads as a room because of the plantings - Japanese water irises, horsetail and a number of different ferns, as a start. The blackberry we cleared from this area a couple of years ago still tries to inhabit the gorge but doesn't take long to cut back now.

I am starting to develop the garden room next to the studio porch. The pink tulips, hyacinths, and alliums will be transferred to the Water Drop bed once they finish blooming and die back. To the left will be a hydrangea hedge. Cuttings have been planted and the whole bed mulched with straw. 

The floor of this room will be a meadow of native ground covers that can be walked on but doesn't need mowing. The soil is being built up before their planting.

Valerie Easton's book 'A Pattern Garden The Essential Elements of Garden Making' has been most helpful while designing these garden rooms. Her design philosophy is based on the Japanese concept wabi-sabi and the Pattern Language work of Christopher Alexander. She designs garden rooms using 14 of Christopher Alexander's patterns.

Studio Construction: First Wall Layer Completed

View from the inside looking south towards the sunny room.

The plywood wall layer is nearly finished.

The plywood is finished, including on the sunny room walls.

The first layer of paper/plastic-like materials is put around all openings in the building envelope. These must all be sealed against water and air/heat loss.

I joined the morning meeting so I could see the light coming through the seven clerestory windows now the plywood around them was cut out.

Yes, the effect is perfect. Thanks Jonathan for such a great design.

Ground level view of the east wall with the clerestory windows catching the morning light.

Studio Construction: Porch, Sunny Room and Electricity

The construction of the sunny room has begun.

It is called the sunny room according to the design book A Pattern Language.

It will be where I will sit and hand stitch, read, have tea and think.

This week the carpenters also built the porch and arcade that run along the west side of the building.

Those 6" x 6" cedar posts smell delicious while still freshly milled. They will be left unsealed to bleach to a soft gray. The oils in cedar will protect them from decay for many years. So no maintenance there.

The porch and arcade are designed to protect the west side of the building from the prevailing winds and rains. When it is raining, I will have a sheltered place to walk from the house along the arcade to the front door.

The architect, Jonathan Aitken, computer modeled the sun on the building over the year to work out how high and wide to make the roof of the porch. I want the low winter sun to warm the west wall and the light to penetrate right into the main room. While the porch will stop the strong summer sun from shining directly into the building. I need lots of natural light but not direct sunlight.

The porch is also wide enough to comfortably sit on.

The electrician made his first visit.

He put in some wires and the electrical box.

So it was a busy few days on the studio construction site.