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*For my first week with Baby Julius, I am hosting guest bloggers at The E is for Erin – each of these cool ladies has submitted a favorite post from her blog for me to share with you. I am reposting these pieces in their entirety but make sure to check them out where they live. Many thanks to these bloggers for helping out a fellow mama.*

Guest Blogger, Day 1: The Suburban Prairie

Kristine of The Suburban Prairie is a local friend and an Omaha transplant like me. She’s the mother of two girls, a fellow book lover, and a writer – I’ve had the honor of helping workshop some excerpts from the book she is working on, which has been so much fun for me. I totally love her sense of humor both in person and in her writing. One thing she has that I do not – and that I envy – is a green thumb; this post shows the springtime transformation of her front yard this year.

Spring on the Prairie

I love few things about living on the prairie as much as I love drying clothes and diapers on my clothesline. It fills me with self-sufficiency glee to look outside and see my sheets heaving in the gusts of wind, and there is NOTHING to compare with line-dried towels. OMG. They’re all rough and like a LOOFAH and they slough off the rest of your dead skin after the shower and they smell like YUM! Sunshine and fresh air!I really loathe those microfiber-ish towels that don’t really wick any moisture off your skin. It’s like IF I WANTED TO STILL FEEL WET AFTER TOWELLING, I wouldn’t bother towelling off at all. I’d just drip-dry.Anyway, this weekend is PERMACULTURE GO-FOR-IT time. We’re getting 3 cubic yards of compost and mulch delivered to our house, and Vee and I will take turns wheelbarrowing it to our tree circles and lasagna-ing the interiors. Have I ever shown you guys what our permaculturing yards look like? Hold on–here comes a photo fix.

Ok, so you get newspaper wet and then you lay down daffodil bulbs on top. This is going straight on top of “lawn”–we didn’t clear away anything.

Then you layer peat moss and compost on top of the newspaper and bulbs. And leaves–we did a layer of leaves as well. You can see two of them are completed here and the other one is in progress.

Boom! All three fruit tree guilds in the back! The next day, I tackled the front yard. We did them last fall so they’d have all winter to compress and compost.

You see that big newspapered bed in the foreground? 100 tulip bulbs, puppy, plus 200 alliums and 100 glory-of-the-snows. Right now, the glory of the snow is NOT the glory-of-the-snows since those bitches haven’t shown up AT ALL. I don’t know if I blame them or the fact that there’s been LIKE NO SNOW for them to glory in. But the tulips and alliums are SPRINGIN right up!

Front yard! So that’s what it looked like at the beginning of last fall, and it’s pretty much what it looks like right now, but you know all those interiors of the circles? They’re going to get filled in with lasagna-ing (that’s the name of the newspaper-peat moss-leaves-compost process) and CLOVER SEED. Yep, we’re PURPOSEFULLY PLANTING CLOVER SEED. It’ll attract bees, which are great because we need them to pollinate our fruit trees, and they won’t suck up all the nutrients from the fruit trees’ roots like grass does. Plus it’s low maintenance. Dude, we are ON OUR WAY to a clover lawn; we’re just starting with the guilds.

Permaculture paradise! I was born for this! Actually, that’s SUCH a huge lie. I remember when Vee and I were still dating I was all “I will never be one of those women who likes to GARDEN!” and then I’d shudder. I didn’t UNDERSTAND gardening or care about it and I was like TIME SUCK! WHY BOTHER? I wonder if it’s having kids or something? Wanting them to learn about the natural world while there’s still a natural world to learn about? Or the whole life cycle thing? Either way, gardening into permaculture (to a point; I’m not nearly as food-sourcey about it as a true permaculturist is) is my avocation. I really love it.

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