Workshop with the LEAF Program

We had the pleasure of hosting the Learn-n-serve Environmental Anthropology Field (LEAF) School from Edmond’s community college at the Whidbey Institute at Chinook for the day. The LEAF School provides service-learning opportunities to students and community members interested in learning more about human interactions with the environment of Western Washington.

When the students arrived they were immediately put to work harvesting vegetables for their lunch. After the harvest of beets, carrots, and lots of salad greens, the harvest was taken to the kitchen for preparation by the chef. We went back to the garden to work up an appetite. The project for the day was re-terracing an uncultivated hillside within the garden. Cary, the care-taker of the garden, had previously tried to do this single handedly. She had

LEAF students making terraces

cleared the upper slope of blackberries, but the task of up-keeping a new part of the garden proved to be too overwhelming. As nature does, once the blackberries weren’t shading the ground anymore, the weeds, mostly grass, started to cover the earth back up. It was neat to see how much blackberries keep the soil underneath it free of weeds and rich in humus. They may seem like a nuisance now and the task of removing them maybe daunting, but they are keeping the soil nice and ready for you when you have the energy to use it.

After digging the terraces, we then sheet mulched the beds. We did this using the resources most readily available to us. One of those resources happened to be Alpaca manure. I did a bit research on the subject of Alpaca manure and found out a few things. This is from o2compost.com: “The alpaca is a ruminant with three stomachs; it converts grass and hay to energy very efficiently,. . . Alpaca manure is lower in organic matter content than the manure from most other barnyard livestock (cows, horses, goats and sheep) but still has enough to improve soil texture and water-holding capacity. This lower organic content allows alpaca manure to be spread directly onto plants without burning them.” Interesting stuff!

Sheet-mulching in action

We shoveled the alpaca manure directly onto the new beds to ensure interaction between the life in the soil and the manure. We then placed cardboard on top to suppress any weeds from growing and to hold in moisture. Because it had rained quite a lot in recent days, we did not need to wet the cardboard or water the soil before putting down the cardboard. Within three hours 20 people had nearly finished creating 6 brand new terraced beds with half of them ready for planting.

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