80 Wild Ginger Plants

This past week, I dug and planted about 80 wild ginger (Asarum canadense) plants. The plants came from fellow Quakers' wooded property. They are moving and want to make sure that as many natives as possible are saved. I planted the wild ginger in our forest garden (Back Yard).

From my permaculture reading, I was aware that Wild Ginger is a valuable ground cover as well as an edible native. (The root/rhizome has a strong, gingery flavor.)

The plant has heart-shaped leaves and is about 4 to 8 inches high.


The leaves, stem and bud are hairy.


Each plant, where the stems come together, has one flower. Because the flower is close to the ground, it is likely pollinated by crawling insects such as beetles, ants and flies.


What I was not aware of is how gorgeous the flowers are!

Sheet Composting - Did it work?

We installed sheet composting to control weeds and add nutrition to the forest garden in the Back Yard. Has it worked?

I don't have any easy way to determine if it has added nutrition, so I'm going to comment here on the extent to which it has controlled weeds.

The sheet composting has controlled weeds to my satisfaction. There are some weeds, primarily common blue violet (Viola papilionacea), where the sheet composting was pulled back, dug into or light around the edges; but I haven't seen any weeds where the sheet composting was intact.

I pulled the sheet composting away from the trunks of the woody trees and shrubs, so that bacteria, fungus, and insects would not start to break down the bark of these plants.

Here the sheet composting was pulled away from the mimosa trees (Albizia julibrissin).


Many fewer weeds exist where the hill was covered in sheet composting compared to where it was not covered in sheet composting.




I have started to see some more violets, but again it's where the sheet composting was dug into. After I put these rocks in for an additional path, some violets appeared.


While a lot of time is required to collect and distribute all the materials for sheet composting, I have been very happy with it.

Sheet Composting

Before we started the garden on the Back Yard, it was primarily covered with grass and weeds.

Back Yard before hardscaping (March 2007):


Back Yard after hardscaping (July 2007):


When we started the forest garden, David and I decided we wanted to use an organic approach to weed control. We considered a number of options that we eventually dismissed: landscaper's vinegar (too toxic), hand weeding (too time consuming), and burning (too dangerous in the city). We eventually settled on sheet composting.

Sheet composting is a method that not only controls weeds, it also adds nutrition to the soil without using fertilizers derived from fossil fuels. There are a variety of sheet composting approaches; I'll just describe what I did.

First, I cleared all the rocks away that I didn't want in the garden, then I used a weed wacker to trim all the existing grass and weeds as short as I could.


Then, a landscaper and I planted all the "woodies", the shrubs and trees that we wanted established in the fall.


Also, I collected the needed materials: cardboard (recycled boxes - ours and from generous neighbors), horse manure (purchased from Hefner's), leaves (collected from a couple block radius of our house), newpaper (collected from family and neighbors), and mulch (also from Hefner's).

Finally, with help from David and others, I layered everything from the rock wall to the point where the hill slopes steeply downward.

First cardboard,


then manure,


then leaves,


and newspaper,


and more newspaper,


and finally, mulch.


This is what the sheet composting looked like a week after it was put down (November 2007).