Event and Live Chat: Sustainable Backyard Tour

Rain gardens, solar ovens, and more!

We’re excited to announce our participation in the Sustainable Backyard Tour, one of 40 gardens in the St. Louis, Missouri, area you can tour for free.

As far as origin stories go, this organization’s tale is aces. From the website:

The Sustainable Backyard Tour is an annual tour in the greater St. Louis area that began as a chicken coop tour in 2010. The response to that simple open-yard Sunday was overwhelming. So great was the interest, that the owners of two independent retailers—a green general store called Home Eco and Isabee’s Beekeeping Supplies Co.—worked together to create the First Annual Sustainable Backyard Tour in 2011.

Any tour that started with chickens is tops in our book. We’re busy prepping for the event right now and want to invite you to come on by our homestead-in-the-suburbs if you can. We’re showcasing:

• 150+ different native plants, shrubs, and trees forming the basis of our pollinator-supported, organic homestead

• Rainscaping, including a French drain, high-capacity gutters (to handle Midwestern deluges), rain barrels, and a rain garden

• A demo of our portable solar oven

• The chickshaw, housing our ancient-breed chickens

• A hugelkultur herb mound

• An annual vegetable garden amended via sheet-mulching, wood chips, and compost

• An orchard supported by dynamic accumulators such as comfrey and false indigo

• Budget- and wildlife-friendly bird baths and other features

We’ll also be running a live chat for paid subscribers that day, sharing images and stories from the tour. This way if you can’t get to the St. Louis area for the tour, you’re still included!

For those of you who can, we’d love to give you an in-person walkthrough of the garden you’ve read so much about here, but the Sustainable Backyard Tour has a lot more to offer as well, with 39 other gardens (!) to inspire your green adventures.

While the tour is free, please register so organizers can get an accurate account of attendance.

See you on tour day!