Forest to Garden

Finding potential bounty in a challenging landscape

“The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.”

Saint Hildegard of Bingen

This being the Lake Superior highlands, a sloping topology over which a massive mile-deep ice sheet slid during the melt of more than 10,000 years ago, the landscape is marked with varied low and high points. Moraines, or glacial rock deposits, are common, as are mixed wetlands.

It was July, 2016. Our road onto the property had been washed out by Spring melt, something we were just learning about, having first arrived the past Winter. I was walking the land surveying how it had grown in, the yard filled with wildflowers, and I found a nice surprise at the northwest corner of our clearing.

What I spotted that day appeared to be a natural pond, surrounded by grasses, elderberries, and our old friends the aspen trees. These are a pioneer species in the poplar family which quickly occupy an open space with the reckless abandon of an undisciplined teenager. The pond was pretty, and appeared to be holding water, but I didn’t yet know how important this space would be for our future plans.

7 years later, while much had changed in the form of our master plan for the homestead, much had stayed the same. We had partially filled in the low point I had discovered, to help mitigate the Summer mosquitos so common in our region through to the nearby Boundary Waters. We also had been working on new permaculture landscape structures where overgrown, dying trees had been — permaculture is a philosophy and approach for mimicking nature, creating healthier growing spaces while better managing surface water and nutrients than clearcut fields.

In keeping with this approach, we set about planning a new garden, with a nicely cleared perimeter to protect the structures from falling trees and branches. For scale, the cleared area would be nearly the size of an entire city residential lot. This would also further assist with our mosquito friends. At the same time, we had been considering options to capture rainwater as an irrigation solution for both the garden and our orchard, such as a buried tank with a pump.

The process of clearing and leveling comes first

After much deliberation and planning, we settled on something more inline with that vision from 2016: to excavate a pond in the existing space. This would provide far more irrigation water than a 2500 gallon buried tank, would be more in harmony with the original landscape, could harbor healthy biological material useful for orchard and garden, and could even host fish eventually. As a plus, where a tank needs to be winterized, ponds simply freeze in the winter, and we love ice skating! I looked into how big it would have to be to allow for a 3-on-3 hockey game, and sized the pond accordingly: it had to be at least 40 x 70 feet.

To collect rain for the pond, we intended to route water consolidated from roof gutters to pipes underground. This expanded surface area would enable much more capture volume than only direct rain.

We talked with our friends at the local sawmill and made a plan for wild-harvested Minnesota tamarack as the wood of choice for the garden structure. Tamarack, or larch, is much more resistant to ground-contact rot and bugs than cedar or even treated wood. Mary and I designed the space to support 16 raised beds, 12 of which would be 8 x 3 ft, 4 at 4 x 3 ft, and with a depth of 18” for comfortable harvesting.

Setting up the garden space

After leveling the space, we rented an auger for our Kubota compact track loader and set posts below the frost line. We used a Japanese technique called shou sugi ban, wherein wood is charred to further protect it from rot. 2 layers of water-permeable landscape fabric were laid, and we set about building the boxes.

Living in the forest, we have plenty of nicely rotting wood material. Following a German mound-gardening approach called Hügelkultur, the first layer we added to the boxes is old logs, wood chips, and sawdust. This has the added benefit of reducing the amount of soil required to fill them to the top. Over the years, the material will slowly feed the undersoil with nutrients, and roots will have an easier time in the voids, much more in keeping with the way plants grow naturally in the forest. Of course, this also means the soil will compact over time, and we’ll add more each season to top them off.

Garden boxes planted and simple gate installed

Since we were clearing, grading, and building for the first part of the season, we did end up having to plant later in our already-short growing season, but we were establishing a new permanent space for future years.

Once the garden was in place, in September came the pond excavation. I learned about soil content and the need for clay to retain water without a basin “leaking” and slowly draining underground. Minerals such as bentonite can be used to “seal” a leaking basin as the tiny particles expand when wet, and sink to the bottom. We also could have trucked in red clay from elsewhere, which would have been quite expensive for our design. While digging the garden posts, I saw significant ruddy clay coming up, and hoped for the best that the nearby pond subsoil would be the same.

Pond excavated and starting to fill

The pond basin ended up around 45 x 80 feet, and 8 feet deep, with a culvert at the North end to drain to a natural wetland, this prevents overflow. The subsoil did indeed appear to have some clay content, and by the end of the Fall season, a significant amount of water had been collected. The underground pipe from the roof gutter drainage feeds a rocky “stream” which is a fun feature.

With raw soil around the entire area, the pond was very muddy looking, but this is normal. That is caused by suspended clay particles in the water, effectively in solution and with a negative electrical charge. For 2024, if the particles have not settled on their own over Winter, we will use a positively-charged natural mineral to bind to the suspended clay and clarify the water.

As we approach the first full growing season for our new garden, I am also planning various potential solutions for irrigation, which I will share in future posts.

Pond starting to freeze in late Autumn

Given our past fun experiences skating on wild ice, we had high hopes that the pond would happen to freeze smoothly enough. By early December, we found a smooth rink under a modest snow cover! With the abnormally warm temperatures, we did have some periods of melt, and of course, rain for Christmas. We are excited for future skating opportunities and a lot more Winter ice activity.

One of our favorite parts of having a homestead is to be able to work with nature to support the surrounding ecosystem while providing for our family needs. Taking an otherwise unmanageable, overgrown lowland and creating a rich natural landscape for our animal friends, family fun, and food production is exactly the sort of improvement we envisioned in those first days here, 7 years prior.

Ponds can be a source for fun all year 'round!