eggs & tea blog

Recently i mowed the lawn and gathered the cut grass. Cut grass is useful, both as bedding that makes the chicken coop smell nice, and as a green matter input to the compost pipeline. This makes for happy chickens and nice organic compost for our eventual tea plantation:

Now, there are many people that say a lawn is a terrible thing, and they’re mostly right. A quick web search turns up “green lawns have to be maintained through use of chemicals that can pollute the groundwater and kill beneficial plants and insects; Americans spent $17.4 billion a year on their lawns; it the largest irrigated crop in the United States, consuming 50-70 percent of U.S. residential water…” You get the idea.

Well, those folks aren’t talking about the Wet Side of the Island of Hawaii! Here, lawn is not a foolish waste of environmental resources. It is a defense tactic against the ever-incroaching wall of Kikuyu grass (brought to Hawaii from Africa by cattle ranchers), which rapidly grows to several feet high, making land impassible and unusable. A lawn here consumes no chemicals and no water. However, mowing it provides a very large quantity of useful cut grass.

Related posts:

1. Farm biochar flowchart Deb asked me one day to write something about how...
2. Sunflowers – not very successful One of the ideas i wanted to try out for...
3. Propagating a mystery tea bush On our island, there is a shortage of tea plants....
4. Chipper/Shredder! For a long time, i’ve been trying to build large...
5. Tea and biochar! I’ve been studying biochar for a year now (see my...

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Saturday, October 7th, 2006 at 11:17 pm and is filed under chickens, crops, tea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.