Shadow Dance Stoneworks

Shadow Dance Stoneworks is proud to partner with Giving Tree Gardens this year to create beautiful, functional, and ecologically friendly landscapes that enhance your lifestyle and the environment. Shadow Dance Stoneworks and Giving Tree Gardens are based in the Twin Cities metro area, and we are excited to transform urban and suburban yards into permaculture based landscapes, with an emphasis on beautiful and productive outdoor living spaces, native and beneficial plantings, food production, and community building.

Shadow Dance Stoneworks (SDS) is proud to announce another partnership in the works, this time with a rural farm based in Osceola, Wisconsin. Living The Dream Farm (LTD Farm) is owned by Khaiti Kahleck, and she has built a farm from scratch on a little under two acres of a suburban lot that features an old farm home and a small barn. Her farm is focused primarily on two products at the moment; free range Khaki Campbell duck eggs and goat milk soap. This year she is raising pigs, goats, turkeys, chickens, and ducks, as well as greens and numerous other vegetables, and she plans on selling most of her products in CSA shares, and also to local restaurants and coops.

Visit her website here: Living The Dream Farm

Together, LTD Farm and SDS have embarked on a permaculture design for the farm that will include rotational grazing of pigs, goats, and ducks in a series of pastures, utilizing a polyculture of cover crops and vegetables that will help restore the soil in between grazing, along with the manure of the animals and the pig- a- tillers. A primary  goal of the overall permaculture design for the farm will be to eliminate outside inputs, not only for the animals and plants, but for the people who live there.  The flipside of that goal is to restore the circle of life on the farm in as many ways as possible. This goal has notably already been achieved, as previously purchased goats have given birth to offspring which have given birth to more offspring, and the successional generations have  been harvested for meat and milked, the milk producing goods such as goat milk soap and feta cheese, which have nourished Khaiti and her community with products grown in a full circle, organic manner.

LTD Farm will be utilizing aspects of permaculture, natural farming, biodynamic farming, and biointensive farming, as well as other methods, in the upcoming months and years. A large focus of the farm’s plan is about sharing knowledge as a community building and customer connecting experience. Workshops and education will play a large part in spreading the seeds of sustainable living in a modern society that is increasingly separated from the natural earthly cycles. LTD Farm is committed to spreading the goodness of the earth one duck egg at a time.

We built this low retaining wall of boulders and landscaped this front yard while I was at Local Roots Landscapers. There wasn’t much going on in the front yard here, other then the large evergreen tree. A lot of herbaceous plants are not friendly with evergreens, so I used native plants that have a natural friendship with or tolerance for evergreens. Our clients were two wonderfully friendly chaps who were interested in planting large amounts of berry bushes, so we added native serviceberry, chokecherry, and blueberry. They were also interested in discontinuing to mow the front slope. A retaining wall, mulch, and woody shrub combination helped solve that problem.

They finished the project by planting about a dozen blueberry hybrid bushes. I think the whole front yard was transformed from a semi-arid lawn desert into a fruitful, attractive, and low maintenance garden.

The clients wanted to keep some lawn around the lilac in the above picture so that the neighbor kids could run around it barefoot.

We used a combination of paper layers and wood mulch to keep the weeds down. This technique also helps to build soil health in certain situations, such as reclaiming a piece of lawn for gardens.

A boulder retaining wall can be a beautiful thing. In the city, the front of your house is the face of your property. It can really add value to your home if you create a beautiful, welcoming feeling by adding landscape features such as retaining walls and beautiful gardens. Here we have a homeowner who was looking to do something with an ugly, eroding slope of lawn under two huge evergreens. A boulder retaining wall was a natural fit.

A coworker and I built this while I was working at Local Roots Landscapers. I ordered about 4 tons of glacial boulders, and we used a large portion of those. Sometimes you get a large portion of really round boulders that are hard to work with, so there is the need to have more then enough on hand.

This wall was about 18 inches to 2 feet high.

The picture below is the patio from the other side. A patio has to slope away from the house foundation, and sometimes making sure the slope is perfect takes more time then you would imagine.

I built this small retaining wall out of Chilton wallstone. This is a very sunny spot, and I think that the mass of the stone will only add warmth to this planting bed. As backfill, I used excess topsoil mixed with organic compost, and the client was going to do the planting. I think the little wall adds a lot of character to the patio.