This three-year-old organic garden and landscape grows at the Southwestern edge of the Ozark Plateau in Northwest Arkansas, near Fayetteville. Our zone is 6b…moving to an intermittent 7-ish is recent years. Larrapin is part of the Peace Garden Network and is Certified Backyard Wildlife Habitat.

“Larrapin” is an old hill term that means delicious, yummy. Larrapin is the theme of this garden and landscape. Everything growing at Larrapin is delicious to someone: the gardeners, the birds, the wildlife, or the barnyard critters.

I first heard the term from my 80-something Arkansan Father-in-law. At a table of his wife’s fabulous cooking, he would regularly announce with great gusto, “Now that’s LARRAPIN!” I later found it in a dictionary of slang and it seems to be associated with the Texas/Oklahoma/Arkansas area…though other folks eastward and even midwestern folks have told me they heard the term from grandparents.

We have very little topsoil on this eroded hillside, and even that is poorly drained, rocky clay. Now there’s a challenge!  So the veggies are mostly in raised bed with highly amended soil. Soil building is a primary endeavor and it’s paying off. We compost like mad around here. The chickens really help with that.

This year I’ve started studying and practicing Permaculture. For me it brings together so many things I’d previously considered separate: organic & biointensive vegetable gardening, landscape design, sustainability, wildlife gardening, orchards and tree planting, respect for nature,  and just pure design elegance. Wow. Love it.

We started the garden in the late Fall of 2005. I started blogging about it at Blogger in 2007. You can see the old Larrapin Garden blog here.

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