legitamize loafing~book review #12

The Elements of Organic Gardening by Charles, Prince of Wales

While most of this book is just eye candy for the frustrated city gardener, I gleaned a couple good ideas. First they talk about a thyme walk that the Prince planted himself. It was a big weedy mess. So they unplanted it, tilled a bunch of pea gravel into the clay soil, covered it with poly propylene, planted the thyme through the pp, and mulched with more pea gravel for a very low maintenance thyme walk (p. 96-97). I've got a similar problem with my pea gravel walks in my veggie garden; the crazy chickens escaped and emptied the raised beds of their soil all over the pea gravel. This gives me courage to till the mess into the clay and start over again.

Second I love raising bees for honey. Through this book I was made aware of Slovenian bee houses (p.71) ~a totally different way of keeping bees than I've ever heard of before. I'm sort of an organized plodder. I don't really like huge back breaking projects. Everything about keeping bees agrees with my minimalistic laziness except the big honey extraction each year. The Slovenian bee house is organized in such a way that it is a continual, pleasant job~sort of like keeping up the laundry daily as opposed to waiting until everything you own is dirty. To me organization is really the lazy girl's way of to legitimize loafing. I have a shed that could be converted to a bee house quite easily.