My roommate Ryan Harb is a hippy graduate student in the green building program at the University of Massachusetts, and I guess you could say our front yard is his thesis.
Ryan is turning what was once an ordinary front yard – neatly manicured grass growing out of rocky, poor quality soil – into an edible forest garden, with fruit trees, berry bushes, herbs and vegetables.
The raised beds you see in the slideshow above are the result of several weekends of sheet mulching, a kind of no-dig gardening in which compost is spread in a layer atop living grass, with cardboard, compost and mulch sitting atop that [order may vary]. The idea is to suppress weeds, killing the sod and depositing its nutrients back into the soil.
I hope that was a reasonable description; otherwise Ryan is going to give me shit.
You can see more pictures of the project over at Ryan’s blog, as well as periodic posts of the process so far.
[...] become the unofficial staff photographer for my housemate Ryan Harb’s permaculture project: turning our front yard into an edible forest garden. Today Ryan was out in the yard working, with occasional help from neighborhood kids who dig dirt, [...]