Spring fever

Winter is finally winding down and it's about time! We have been drawn outside by the longer, warmer days and now lots of exciting things are happening in the garden. Vegetables are being seeded, flowers are being seeded, trees are being seeded; we have big ol' seed orders coming in from all over the place. Chamomile, echinacea, comfrey, giant solomon's seal, lettuce, mustard greens, asparagus, stinging nettle AND MUCH MORE are going in the ground in the next couple months. Here are some of the seeds we picked up from fifth season a couple weeks ago:



Here's me seeding some trays:



and here's where they live- right next to our shower. The broccolis are growing like crazy, about an inch a day.





Quinten and I spent a couple days pruning some apple trees that were already on the property. They have never produced in their 10+ years and they have also never been properly taken care of. We took out at least 2/3 of the total tree mass from these overgrown monsters. Now they can breathe a bit; hopefully with a little love they will squeeze out some apples. Here you can see one of the trees in front of the pile of wood we took out of it.



I finally planted our sweetshoot bamboo that spent the winter in a haystack house. I want it to run a certain way, so I made trenches on either side that are cover cropped and full of good topsoil.






Here's a picture of Taz watching me put in an echinacea bed:



Our annual beds are coming to life. Potatoes have been planted, lettuce/mesculin has been seeded, and the onions are waking up from their winter hibernation. I fed them some kelp meal tea that was leftover from the bamboo and they are practically glowing now. You can also see one of our big compost piles, with lots of new leaves added that we raked up off the driveway.





Now it's time to start installing the fence (all the parts arrived yesterday), which is going to involve a huge amount of work and probably a significant learning curve on my part. Stay tuned for updates.

-Ash

Almost ready to start building the fence...

We decided to make our fence with metal T-posts, even though we prefer the look/eco factor of cedar posts. Every time we find a local supplier, they can't provide us with posts long enough to make a fence tall enough to keep out the deer. Or they can, but it will be several months of waiting. The t-posts should last long enough to justify the "where on the planet did these come from??" factor... I hope. We are at least going to buy the materials from a local business, instead of Lowes or Home Depot, even though it will cost a little more.

The number one thing that I'm worried about right now is how to keep our dogs within this fence, but also keep them out of the veggie beds. We will have to put up additional little fences around the beds. Part of the fenced-in area will be wooded, I'm hoping the dogs learn to poop in the woods and not anywhere near our food. But between the fence and the dogs, our predator problems should be zero. I'm hoping to get about ten chickens as soon as it warms up a bit, and we figure out how to get the chicken coop out to the field (maybe the tractor front loader can carry it somehow?).

This TED talk is about an ecological way to raise fish for human consumption. It talks about a system in Spain, which is great inspiration and encouragement for how we plan on raising our own fish (and all of our other livestock). The fish taste amazing, the local wildlife are thriving, there are zero inputs into the system, and the only outputs are delicious fish and clean water (which drains into the Atlantic).

Snow, snow, snow...

For those of you who are wondering why we are digging a bunch of holes in the ground, watch THIS video!

The snow pretty much killed any chance of the winter crops from producing any more, but I think the onions will be fine since they are underground?? The main problem with all the snow was that the neighbors couldn't see that the field wasn't a blank field any more, and they rode their ATVs around in it. Guess we better put up a fence.



If you look at this picture of the blueberries, you can see the big difference between the north side (snow hasn't melted) and the south side of the plants. We are thinking of putting thermal mass on the north side (rocks?) to absorb sunlight and let off the heat during the night. Ramsey in Winston-Salem says his yard is almost 5 degrees warmer than the surrounding lots because he has so much thermal mass set up.



We are planing on planting a bamboo plant soon. It is both edible and can be used for building. It is not the kind that spreads terribly quickly, but we do want it to be a whole grove one day... it's very useful to have quick-growing plants around.

Another quick growing tree to look into is the Empress Tree...