Green Options

Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay up to date.

I’m celebrating Boxing Day in a new way this year - I’m putting all the cardboard boxes saved up from Shipping Month, aka December, to use in my Permaculture garden, by making sheet mulch.

Google sheet mulch and Permaculture. (For those not in the know, Permaculture is a fairly recent term for cultivating an edible landscape that establishes positively reinforcing relationships between water, soil, insects, microbes, sun, etc…for the purpose of sustainably and organically feeding its designing human.)

Sheet mulches are an easy way to ‘compost in place’, delivering all the water-borne yummies to the plants instead of under the compost pile. Design-wise, sheet mulching also avoids the not-so-Neighborhood-Association-Friendly look of compost piles, so it’s a tricky way to subvert the negative effects of suburban sprawl - grow a food landscape!

Container architecture is a way of up-cycling one of the waste products of international shipping. Over 7 million shipping containers enter U.S. ports each year, and only 2 million leave. A reflection of imbalanced international trade, the result is an excess of containers, dotting the landscape across the country. In the spirit of resourcefulness, however, that is changing as shipping containers are becoming inexpensive or less-expensive green alternatives to standard construction.

[...]