{"id":18,"date":"2010-11-22T02:14:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-22T02:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/de.robmann.net\/?p=18"},"modified":"2010-11-22T02:14:00","modified_gmt":"2010-11-22T02:14:00","slug":"our-goats-sheet-mulcing-and-the-rain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/de.robmann.net\/?p=18","title":{"rendered":"Our Goats, sheet mulcing and the rain"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Goats have been with us for over one month now. I have to say, they are not easy, not like the chickens. They are less messy, but  more work. They eat a lot. And I don’t quite have a safe system down yet for having them out to graze (or browse is really what they do), every day – especially unsupervised.<\/p>\n

Today we have rain – it’s about the 3rd or 4th rain storm we’ve had so far this fall – which is great, because it can be dry before December here. Kalvan is still coming to help every so often. We clean the straw out from the chicken and goat houses and bag it. Then we go up to our little ‘orchard’, fork the soil around one of the fruit trees and cover the area around the tree with wet cardboard. Then we cover that with an inch or two of the mushroom compost we get from our local mushroom producer., then layer the chicken and goat-poop filled straw on top of that.<\/p>\n

This is sheet mulching. We are in effect composting in place to add organic matter and nitrogen to the soil. This also encourages worms and other micro-organisms to populate this now moist, decomposing environment under the straw. And our sheet mulching has been kept wet with all the rain – if it dries out, the composting action stops. We do a little section every week.<\/p>\n

Aside from feeding the trees and improving our nutrient and organic matter-poor silty soil, this is an experiment in Kikuyu grass extermination. Any of you have have Kikuyu grass know, it is like the Blob – the thing you just can’t kill, no matter what you try. So short of covering the entire orchard in a storm of Roundup (I just refuse to give Monsanto a penny of our money), I am trying the smother method. I saw this suggested in Bill Mollison’s Permaculture Designers Manual<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’ll have to wait a season or two to see how it works, but I’ll let you know!<\/p>\n

If anyone out there has tried this, I’d love to hear from you!!<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Goats have been with us for over one month now. I have to say, they are not easy, not like the chickens. They are less messy, but  more work. They eat a lot. And I don’t quite have a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,15,11,14,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/de.robmann.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/de.robmann.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/de.robmann.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/de.robmann.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/de.robmann.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/de.robmann.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/de.robmann.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/de.robmann.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/de.robmann.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}