Hi. I rather rudely just jumped in and posted a couple of times without introducing myself. Sorry about that. It's just that all of you were talking about...gardening. Hard to resist
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Good luck with the rabbits. At least they're delicious.
I wonder, if you're starting from scratch, if you could dig a deep square pit, lay chicken wire down in a box formation, fill it in to ground level, plant inside it, and have a fence the rabbits can't get under? Aussies, will that work? It's probably obscenely difficult work, it might not be worth it.
Keep us updated on the native plants. They're probably your best bet in an arid region. It bothers me seeing all the lawns in my neighborhood (I'm in coastal Massachusetts) when there are so many more environmentally-friendly groundcovers which don't require so much nitrogen and other terrible things.
I've heard the chicken wire idea before but in the past was just too lazy to try it. it seems that there are more rabbits here than there were even 6 or 7 miles NW of here. Rabbit city. I may try it this time, maybe under raised beds.
I really want to experiment with arid land plants. People out here do this more than people in town. We lived for a year in a lovely little rental that had the most amazing cactus garden, covering the whole front yard. After the landlady sold it, the new owners dug out every last cactus and succulent and put in a big lawn. I was aghast...
Funny you'd mention that. I worked on an archaeological site several years ago that had all appearances of the people there having used retaining ponds for irrigation of crops. Very cool and not all that frequent in this region of old! I would definitely consider something like that, eventually.
We live in a city, so we use our rain barrel to irrigate the garden. Not only is the water generally better for the plants, but it keeps the water bill down and helps offset flooding (even a tiny bit).
When I was a kid I fell in love with a picture from some science magazine that showed multiple ponds, going down a large slope, that were being used to cool the hot water coming off of some manufacturing plant... or was it a nuclear power plant? Anyway, the ponds gradually cooled the water, and the plant life was different for each to deal with the heat, and the plant life also cleaned the water. And when it was cool, I think it was cycled back into the system.
I would love to see more things like that in the world.
I've seen that kind of system used to clean polluted water! it is so cool! There's some university in the easter USA that has used it on a larger scale, campus-wide, but I can't offhand remember which university. In the past we've terraced runnoff and we've used gray water to water non-food plants. We're so newly back on the land and still pretty broke from the house-buying process, that we're moving slowly into our gardening.
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I wonder, if you're starting from scratch, if you could dig a deep square pit, lay chicken wire down in a box formation, fill it in to ground level, plant inside it, and have a fence the rabbits can't get under? Aussies, will that work? It's probably obscenely difficult work, it might not be worth it.
Keep us updated on the native plants. They're probably your best bet in an arid region. It bothers me seeing all the lawns in my neighborhood (I'm in coastal Massachusetts) when there are so many more environmentally-friendly groundcovers which don't require so much nitrogen and other terrible things.
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I really want to experiment with arid land plants. People out here do this more than people in town. We lived for a year in a lovely little rental that had the most amazing cactus garden, covering the whole front yard. After the landlady sold it, the new owners dug out every last cactus and succulent and put in a big lawn. I was aghast...
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When I was a kid I fell in love with a picture from some science magazine that showed multiple ponds, going down a large slope, that were being used to cool the hot water coming off of some manufacturing plant... or was it a nuclear power plant? Anyway, the ponds gradually cooled the water, and the plant life was different for each to deal with the heat, and the plant life also cleaned the water. And when it was cool, I think it was cycled back into the system.
I would love to see more things like that in the world.
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