America is so dumb on so many levels.
Like really. Besides a lot of these things we have no control over, I want to at least plant things in the yard but I heard there’s this thing called HOA and you can’t do that either depending on where your house is. It’s really sad
We have no freedom in “The Land of the Free”.
My own property is being extensively reworked to produce a majority of our vegetables. We have already put about 185m² 2,000ft²) under direct cultivation in the back yard, and intend to wrap that garden around the entire property to the full 400m² (4.300ft²) available.
In the end, I don’t expect to have a single blade of grass on the property. It’ll all be flowers, fruiting trees and canes and bushes, and vegetables. All done in a modified Ruth Stout method, with a variation of flat-ground Hügelkultur thrown in.
Let’s just say that Bylaw is already pissed off with me, and I’m not even halfway done yet.
Fruit trees. It’s the way to go. So much less work in the log run.
You have any helpful links that assisted you with setup? I’ve been toying the idea but the soil here is horrible. Basically 6 inches of crap soil on top of bedrock. Any help is appreciated as I’m brand new to the idea. I do have some bucket planters that were gifted but other than that not much to start with.
You are starting way behind here, but I strongly recommend you hit up YouTube to get the basics on the Ruth Stout method and the Hügelkultur method.
I have modified both in the following ways:
First, I stripped away all topsoil. Whether you use or dispose of yours will depend on the availability of good topsoil in your area, and how good the current topsoil actually is. Then I dug down to provide myself with about 50cm (2-3ft) of vertical space to work with (accounting for the maximum height of the final soil level that I don’t want to exceed). If you aren’t doing this near a foundation, or you can still rework the soil to slope away from any foundation, you might be able to ignore this.
For the Hügelkultur method, I went with a flat layout instead of creating humps, and I used wood chips instead of logs and branches. I was aiming for a dense woody later that is laid down about a foot thick, and has about 8-12 inches of soil on top of it. This is meant far more as a decomposing layer that holds onto moisture, as I am in an area with sand and rocks further down that water just drains straight through. Bedrock might have this method as a good idea as well, just lay down an inch or two of sand before you put down the wood chips as a way of water running off if it gets saturated. And if possible, pack down the chips using a powered soil compactor, so you minimize the subsidence as the wood decomposes.
Once the topsoil is down, I finish the soil itself by bringing in several tons of horse manure, and rototilling it in. Horse manure because it doesn’t “burn” roots like steer/cow manure does. This is also why I went with an 8-12in layer of soil - so there is no chance of the rototiller reaching the wood chips. Also: June bugs and other root-sucking grubs love horse manure, be sure to spray with beneficial nematodes every year you supplement with manure.
For Ruth Stout (the soil cover), I have access to several acres of herbicide-free grass via a family orchard. I mow this through the year and pack it into a 8×4×4ft bin (this is fine for up to 1,000ft² of bedding cover, make it commensurately larger for larger gardens). Because I cut and pack when the grass is completely fresh and green, this starts the composting process that kills off any seeds, but the heat of the composting process also stops the process after a short while because I’m not turning over the pile to cool it off and introduce oxygen. This leaves me with lots of barely-composted grass clippings to use as an initial layer (about 60% of the total) when laying down the hay bedding. This suppresses weeds and holds in moisture much better than just hay alone.
You are likely to find green areas which are not treated with herbicide where the owners might permit you to mow and collect the grass clippings. Pretty much any green material, including heavily weed-filled areas, will suffice, as the seeds will be killed off during the composting stage. You want to avoid treated lawns because the herbicide will VERY negatively impact any vegetables you plant. In the end, you will be planting your garden through about a foot of thick hay and grass clippings; separate them by pushing them aside and plant directly into the soil. The grass and hay can also be considered as soil for bulbs and so forth, things like garlic can just be placed directly on top of the soil and re-covered. You will also have to recharge this layer every year by just putting more on top, do so in the early fall once you start shutting down your garden so you don’t disturb any beneficial insects that are bedding down for the winter.
Good luck.
That’s amazing to hear! If it’s possible and doesn’t doxx you, I’d love to see a picture or two
This person is like the only one with those kinds of plants, an AI can Geogeuser them already.
Ruth Stout
You had me excited to find a better method. Then it was “find a cheap source of hay”. Then you need a method to spread hay- which ain’t easy. I’ll stick with my cultivar which makes mulch in place.
Then it was “find a cheap source of hay”.
Many hay farmers will sell spoiled hay (unfit for animal consumption) for 50-25% of what you would pay for clean hay. Get evangelical about permaculture and the Ruth Stout method and some will just let you have spoiled hay for free.
Stables will frequently give spoiled hay away for free, except here you need to fork it up and pack it off by yourself, it won’t be baled for your convenience. Plus, a lot of bedding wasn’t meant to be eaten by the animals in the first place, and comes with embedded manure.
Remember, spoiled hay is spoiled. it’s not fit for feeding animals, and it’s not gonna be displayed in the Smithsonian as an example of premium hay. Many places that produce or consume hay just want to get rid of it, as it’s wholly undesirable for their main operations and just gets in the way.
Then you need a method to spread hay- which ain’t easy.
Gesundheit? If you are complaining about spreading hay - and I can cover my existing 185m² in a single afternoon with ease - then gardening in general is not going to be up your alley. Spreading hay is not supposed to be difficult or laborious. If it’s baled, unbale it and use your hands to break off chunks and crush it to floof it up and simply drop it in place. If it isn’t baled, get a fork, spear the hay, walk over to the garden with the fork full, then just shake the fork to loosen the clumps and let them fall.
Like, you are doing this while standing upright, some time between October and March, long before the first plant gets planted. If your plants are already in the ground, you’re doing it the hard and needlessly difficult way.
Kill that lawn! Let’s fucking go!
They really do have a lot of odd rules and personal regulations for a supposedly free country
All those plants tend to be invasive
that aphorism about pots and kettles needs to be reworded to human beings calling other species “invasive”.
no metaphor would be more fitting.
Tomatoes, potatoes, and cucumbers invasive? Plants are one of my hobbies and I don’t think this is true.
Can’t grow anything but grass because they stripped off all the topsoil from the land that used to be a farm.
If you want a garden you need to buy soil
Compost helps, storage is the issue. I’m ok with it open but not okay with the timber rattlers, cotton mouths and copperheads different scavengers would attract.
Compost helps but you need at least a year to get good compost and you need way more than an individual household can supply.
Yes, I’ve been discussing it with a neighbor. Storage is the current challenge. We need an old freezer with the coils gutted (snakes love coils, anyone with a boa or python for any length of time and a sofa can tell you!) or something. We’re looking.
snakes love coils, anyone with a boa or python for any length of time and a sofa can tell you!
That’s actually adorable (when it’s not wild/poisonous) and reminds me of how Odo’s quarters had interesting objects he liked to take the form of
I miss my snake.
Once you start growing plants, you’ll have much more compostable material than just the kitchen waste. You can also compost grass and tree leaves.
raised beds, kinda silly like a fridge in a heated house in a snow storm kinda way but they do work
Exactly. When I resodded our front lawn I kept finding building materials. I guess it’s common for construction workers to bury the trash when building a house rather than dispose of it correctly.
Every time I dig on my land I get two maybe three inches of topsoil and then the hardest goddamn clay I’ve ever encountered
Unfortunately you may need someone with a disc harrow or tiller to help the first time. It’s not preferred but I’ve no other ideas. Maybe Solar Punk does?
Which I would totally do if I had more than a 1/4 acre, most of which is taken up with a house and other structures. Getting a tractor and harrow out here for an 800 sq ft garden doesn’t make sense. I’ll probably do raised beds this year.
I can’t wait until I can move back to the country. The suburbs are the absolute worst.
I mean paying someone to borrow their/ till may be less expensive? That said, I like raised bed too. Easier to manage. Right now I’m looking at permaculture but not sure if I’m cut out for it.
Straw bale gardening sounds nifty, too. I’d try it if the previous owners of my place hadn’t already put in a couple of raised beds.
Alternate take, fix your 1/4 acre the natural way if you’re gonna be there a while.
Start a compost pile.
Aerate, plant clover, spread compost every year, plant a native tree or two and native plants underneath.
No need to till, just slowly amend.
I’m not planning on being here in four years so it doesn’t make sense to do anything that would make the house look “weird” and make it harder to sell.
it doesn’t make sense to do anything that would make the house look “weird” and make it harder to sell.
My guy you’re complaining about a problem you’re part of the cause of then.
Trees are weird? A healthy lawn is weird?
Why complain if you have the environment you want 🤷
Even if you have soil, in a whole lot of cities/municipalities/counties… there are zoning restrictions on growing certain amounts and kinds of plants/vegetables.
And HOAs. They all have their own restrictions as well.
Wanna collect rainwater?
Regulations on that too.
Wanna start a compost bin?
Well your neighbor can complain it smells bad in the summer. Might attract dangerous critters.
Hell, probably just laying down a sufficient amount of top soil might be enough to get a visit from an HOA rep or a county zoning wonk.
Bad smells are a reasonable point though.
Imissions of all kind (noise, smell) should be regulated. If you put a compost bin at the edge of your property, your neighbor should have a right to demand its removal.
That’s just a common law tort called nuisance.
As a German this amount of regulations, rules and bureaucracy astonishes me :D
Im Germany, there might be similar regulations for collecting rain water or having a compost depending on your commune.
Yes, but everybody ignores them
I’m not denying this happens in some places, but it’s not universal. I live in the suburbs and grow veggies during the summer. The state I live in has “right to garden” laws that prevent a lot of HOA restrictions. My city also has a rain barrel program to encourage their use and offers discounts on barrels.
I figured they took the soil from digging the foundation and spread it around the yard in order to grade it and that’s why the street is lower than the yard.
They do, but after they strip most of the good stuff off the top. Which kind of makes sense because it’s gonna be ruined by the construction. Top soil is only about 5-10 inches deep in most places and pretty compressible so any foundation is going to be deeper.
The real crime is plowing up farmland for tract housing.
Grass (the trimmed always green lawn type) is more demanding than many other crops. If the grass is growing there, then the topsoil is good enough for some other things too. Also the topsoil is something you can develop, especially on such small scale as personal garden. Make compost, grow less demanding plants first nad your soil will get better. You can grow things on sand mixed with a bit of compost.
edit: looks like I’m wrong.
Do people in this thread really think the developer took the topsoil and sold it to someone else?
Bitch, please. Topsoil isn’t valuable enough to strip and truck somewhere. The tiny layer we humans can grow food in is just that thin in a large part of North America.
Deal with it.
They do though. They rip it all up and sell it off when they’re doing construction.
Source: used to work in commercial landscaping. Which on new jobsites involves bringing in new soil to replace the soil that’s gone.
That being said, there are places in the US where there isn’t much topsoil to begin with, it’s true.
Yeah but they don’t cart it off as part of some nefarious scheme to deprive home owners of the ability to grow their own produce.
Construction regulations dictate requirements for hardness and consistency. They test these metrics before construction can begin. The regulations have these requirements so peoples houses don’t… you know… fall over?
If you just bulldoze whatever and make the ground flat it’s going to be full of organic material that will decay and slump over time.
They have to remove that top soil, and of course it has some value so it can be sold rather than dumped.
Well, you’re not supposed to just plop houses on the ground, you should dig foundations on a stable substrate, and then build the house. It might require a bit more work of course.
Euuuh when you build a house fondation yes. But we’re talking about the garden next to it, right?
For a one off house yes, for developments of multiple blocks they just strip the lot.
jokes on you, here in the south the top soil is old swap and sometimes actual farm top soil, it is indeed bagged and sold off sometimes
The front and back yards are there to increase pervious cover. That’s it.
I work in municipal development and have worked in dense areas, suburbs, and now work in an enclave for the ultra-rich (average new house is about 7 million dollars in the city where I work). Every single developer wants to level all the trees and build as much on the lot as possible with zero pervious cover anywhere, and they don’t give the smallest fuck about flooding the downhill neighbors.
So, you guys are tearing out parking lots and removing parking minimums, right?
Turf is barely previous
StormTech under the parking lot is all the rage now.
It’s never, ever maintained properly and the inlets or “permeable” pavement gets plugged up and effectively gets turned into 100% IC almost every installation. My last city’s engineering team went from encouraging it to recommending it be banned when they saw what happens when it isn’t maintained.
There’s some pervious asphalt at my office that has over 10 years of fines in it and infiltrates <1”/hr. If you hit it with a vacuum it quickly clears to >50”/hr.
I live in the suburbs and really love it. My neighborhood is quiet and easy to walk around without much road noise. There’s a small park within our neighborhood that children play in and people take their dogs.
I have a front yard and back yard that’s mostly grass, but we do plant flowers and plants when the weathers nice. It gives me an excuse to be outside during the summer. And yeah, I do grow vegetables and garden in the backyard as do many others. The fenced in backyard makes it easy to have a pet with room to run.
Despite my neighborhood being quiet it’s adjacent to a commercial area, so I can walk within 10 minutes to a grocery store (a Walmart to be fair) and if I’d like, I can hop on public transit that has a bus stop right there. There’s restaurants, fast food, groceries and other small businesses like dry cleaners, hair stylists, banks, and gyms. All easily within 10 minutes of walking. The local public transit can get you to major shopping centers and downtown areas in a reasonable amount of time.
I mostly drive and what I love the most is that I can drive to heavily populated areas with activity within 5-10 minutes but my neighborhood itself is this quiet sleepy little suburb where kids play in cul-de-sacs without worrying about traffic and I know many of my neighbors by name.
I definitely get how suburbs can look bad, but it doesn’t mean they have to be.
I think that might be the point in that suburbs can be this way, but it’s mostly luck that you happen to have the 10 minute accessibility to the public transit piece, most seem to be a 10 minute vehicle ride away from facilities which is a huge downgrade
drive to heavily populated areas
This. This right here is a major problem with the suburbs. All the benefits for the people who have the privilege to live in one are great, with the negatives of driving externalized onto other people.
I understand what you’re saying, and being able to drive is definitely a privilege I have. Public transit exists. I can walk to a bus stop within 10 minutes of my home. It’ll take me all over including to a vibrant downtown. It can also take me to a local train station where I can ride affordably into many neighboring communities along my route, ultimately taking me to a major city.
Suburbs don’t have to be these horrible places they’re made out to be.
No, suburbs are great for the people who live there. What I’m pointing out is that the people who live in them don’t pay the costs. The people in the heavily populated areas have to deal with car noise, traffic congestion, pollution (like tire and brake dust) and its detriment to their health, and traffic danger of suburbanites driving through their neighborhoods, all the while subsidizing the suburbs with their tax money.
I think there’s a bit more nuance to it than that. I can look up a tax map for my state and see that for every dollar I pay in taxes that only 60 cents come back to where I live. It’s 98 cents back to the big city associated with my suburb.
The areas that get more in taxes than they pay in are the rural areas.
Your mindset is rooted in privilege.
So we can mow the grass silly.
I am interested in the replies
The answer to all questions is racism. We don’t have public transportation because it became illegal to forbid African Americans access, we don’t have public parks and services, because you can no longer have ‘‘whites only’’ signs up, we don’t have stores in these areas because you can’t stop immigrants from owning stores that whites see as ‘beneath them’ to work in, farming your own yard is trashy, because slaves were only allowed to farm food for themselves in small plots right next to the shacks they were allowed to sleep in, and why do we have remote single housing areas you can only access with cars that are over priced? To get away from the black people they could no longer red line to prevent living near them, and to create school districts non whites couldn’t be zoned for as they were priced out of the districts, and then they adjusted school funding so it was based on land value effectively creating whites only schools with high funding. As the white racist mom in the 70s who was upset about bussing said ‘‘if you let your kids grow up around theirs, eventually they’ll all start to mix’’
America spent so long cutting off its own nose to spite its face that it’s no wonder it believes today that its shit doesn’t stink.
For fucks sake why can’t there be a place that’s basically identical to america EXCEPT without the racism, homophobia, transphobia, and fascism. What the fuck is humanity doing, god damn.
Spain looks pretty good. Their sociological statistics at least paint a good picture, and many parts of Spain have been multi ethnic for centuries, and they are open to immigration.
Isn’t that basically Canada?
Yeah, but like Australia and NZ, they REALLY don’t want immigrants.
Idk Central Europe sounds pretty good
So many mixed feelings.
It’s less of an option for me and my ilk because of language barrier. But Americans’ inability to speak the various languages of Europe are a personal failing on the part of basically all Americans; our “education” system made us dependent, and our arrogance made us unwilling to accept both that we are stupid and that it is incumbent upon us to fix our own stupidity.
And now that I can’t afford groceries, medical care, AND utility bills at the same time, I neither have the time to learn a new language nor the mental space to do so.
Maybe it’s for the best that Americans can’t just casually flee to Europe. Europe is already struggling to suppress a resurgence of fascism even WITHOUT a massive influx of braindead center-right neoliberal mouth-breathers from Jesusland.
Well the lack of second language is not just a usa. In other mostly English as a first language countries you have the lowest rates of bilingualism
Imagine thinking there is no racism and homophobia in central Europe
Racist people dosen’t always mean racist systems and principalities.
For fucks sake why can’t there be a place that’s basically identical to america EXCEPT without the racism, homophobia, transphobia, and fascism.
Because such a place would be very, very, very different from America.
Of course, racism is the source of every problem.
Let’s forget the power that oil conglomerates and the automotive industry have on the government.
Racism, like a bunch of other biogtry, is an important tool these oligarchs exploit to stay in power and gain support from ignorant and under-educated poor people.
Yes "what’s good for GM is good for America. " and so on. The runaway neoliberal capitalism is a huge problem, but racism is the true heart and soul of America.
Fossil capitalism filled the niche that resulted from racial segregation.
Why was there white flight? Racism. Why did they want to build freeways? For white flight. Don’t get cause and effect mixed up.
All these things are true and well documented. US housing policy is very much steeped in racism. Here’s a video that sums it up pretty well:
You can’t ![] videos.
So how do I videos?
I think you should put a text description:
Housing Discrimination: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Ok, changed it.
https://youtu.be/_-0J49_9lwc?si=LvvFx4upaSCdETy0
Or https://youtu.be/_-0J49_9lwc without trackers.
Or video
I grew in a town with lots of parks. Yes the smallest and shitest used to be black only. Basically just look for park in lower area. And we started building suburbs with redlines on day one the raciam didn’t need to wait for redlines to go away. The school district thing. That’s a bit more region based. Up North they mosrohad mono ethnic neighborhoods so they was less need to make seperate racial schools. The south although they had redlines and other housings policy creating black and white neighborhoods they also just went fully into making blackand white only schools.
American suburbanism is truly wild. When you see how people live outside of the U.S., it’s startling what we’re putting up with here for the wonders of spending hours in a car every week.
It’s technically against the law in my state to make a new neighborhood that doesn’t have an HOA. I live in a neighborhood without an HOA because it was built before the law was passed. No one’s running a tavern but we’ve got one neighbor who grows vegetables in a patch of their front yard. Another neighbor has a bunch of chickens and also a rooster. We’re technically not allowed to have roosters but who’s going to tell on them? Not me, for sure.
No HOA for me. Long term goal is to build a greenhouse that connects the garage to the house, build a rainwater system for drinking that collects from the greenhouse roof, and collect water for the plants from my garage and house. The put solar in the back yard and plant some fruit trees and berry bushes.
The biggest pain is my city won’t let you keep bees unless you have a certain amount of land, and I’d like to have a beehive passthrough for the greenhouse so my plants can get pollinated without letting pests in.
HOA truly scares me about American living. That a group of people can dictate what you can and can’t do with your own house is absolutely wild. How is that home ownership?
In Canada the only real rule is don’t leave your yard in disrepair.
don’t leave your yard in disrepair
Even that should be your own business, unless you’re endangering anyone
Also no chickens (usually)
Yeah depends on the municipality my area it’s fine but depends on yard size
HOA truly scares me about American living. That a group of people can dictate what you can and can’t do with your own house is absolutely wild. How is that home ownership?
You probably do have a group of people that can dictate what you can and can’t do with your own house. You just call them “local government”, “county government”, “provincial government”, “state government”, etc as appropriate to however your current region organizes things at the smallest level.
The difference is that the bad kinds of HOA are essentially extra-local government chartered into existence for just one neighborhood, and since the “real” government has covered most of the actually important issues, they need to do something to justify themselves and are local enough to actually pay attention to your front yard and make ordinances against things they think will lower property values.
Freedom \TM
It’s worth mentioning that in the majority of residential neighborhoods, either they do not have HOA enforcement or the HOA is entirely optional, in that you can pay to belong to the HOA and gain benefits like access to community centers and pools, but then have to abide by guidelines.
In these places, you can ignore HOA rules if you’re not interested in joining. I’ve greatly enjoyed telling their offended members that no, I will trim my shrubs when I feel like it, thank you very much.
There is still going to be a lot of regulations against like, turning your house into a tavern or something, but there is a little more freedom here in most places than people talk about. But it’s still pretty bad and getting worse, there are more and more “master planned” communities that turn entire countrysides into oceans of rooftops in these homogeneous people hatcheries where you have to get approval to grow flowers in your yard.
I moved to a suburb in a country with unbearable heat yet because of how the suburbs are designed, I still walk more than when I did in the US. Everything from barbershops and grocery stores, to pharmacies and bakeries are within a 10 minute walk. Though I usually wait until night fall to do so.
I didn’t know heat until I went to Kuwait in summer
Sounds like the Philippines. Hell, sounds like just about every other sane place on the planet.
The more resources you waste publicly, the better. It indicates that you can afford it and brag about it.
Think about jewelry, expensive purses, sneakers, flashy cars, unused lawns, Halloween/Christmas/whatever decorations, etc.
