Remove unwanted plant and get your beds looking beautiful.
Professional trimming, mowing and leaf blowing. Providing soil amendments and fertilization
Revitalize and beatify shrubs and small trees around your home.
Blue Dahlia can assist with seeding lawns or plants. Let us do the hard work of planting your nursery purchases.
Control overgrown hedges with professional hedge trimming.
Revitalize garden beds to suppress weeds and add nutrients to your soil. Increase plant health for productive gardens.
Offering a personalized, friendly, landscaping and gardening experience, specializing in landscape maintenance. Pruning, hedge trimming, mulching and planting.
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Instead of putting branches, leaves and grass clippings in bags by the curbside for the bin men... build a hugel bed.
Simply mound logs, branches, leaves, grass clippings, straw, cardboard, petroleum-free newspaper, manure, compost.
Whatever other biomass you have available, top with soil and plant your veggies.
Sheet mulching (lasagne gardening) is like composting in place. Above: just a suggestion as to sheet mulching layers. Nitrogen-rich material such as fresh grass clippings or green leaves put right on the hugelkultur wood would help jump start the composting process. Could also include seaweed, straw, dead leaves, leaf mould, etc...The first year of break down means the wood (and fungi) steal a lot of the nitrogen out of the surrounding environment, so adding nitrogen during the first year or planting crops that add nitrogen to the soil (like legumes) or planting species with minimal nitrogen requirements is necessary, unless there is plenty of organic material on top of the wood. After the wood absorbs nitrogen to its fill, the wood will start to break down and start to give nitrogen back in the process. In the end you will be left with a beautiful bed of nutrient rich soil.
Tree types that work well in hugelkultur:Hardwoods break down slowly and therefore your hugel bed will last longer, hold water for more years and add nutrients for more years. But softwoods are acceptable as well, a softwood bed will just disintegrate quicker. Mixing woods with softwoods and branches on top, to give off nutrients first, and hardwoods on bottom, sounds like a plan if you have access to multiple types of wood. Yet the newly decomposing softwoods at top will eat up a lot of nitrogen at first, so compensate for that.
Woods that work best:
Alders, apple, aspen, birch, cottonwood, maple, oak, poplar, willow (make sure it is dead or it will sprout).
Trees types that work okay:
Black cherry (use only rotted), camphor wood (well aged), cedar/juniper/yew (anti-microbial/anti-fungal, so use only at very bottom or unless already well aged. Cedar should be broken down before new plant roots reach it), eucalyptus (slightly anti-microbial), osage orange (exceptionally resistant to decay), Pacific yew (exceptionally resistant to decay), pine/fir/spruce (tannins and sap), red mulberry (exceptionally resistant to decay).
Tree types to avoid:
Black locust (will not decompose), black walnut (juglone toxin), old growth redwood (heartwood will not decompose and redwood compost can prevent seed germination).
"If you love growing your own food and but don’t have a lot of time to work in the garden, hugelkultur beds are the solution.
After the initial set up, nature will take over and all you will have to do is harvest your yield." www.thenaturelifeproject.com