Oh Spring, Where Art Thou? Garden and Orchard Update

This is what my garden looked like at this time last year:

The north half of my vegetable garden, mid-May 2012

2012 had an extremely mild winter which was immediately followed by one of the hottest and driest summers on record. In May, our garden looked great! Just don't ask about July or August...

This spring has looked more like this:

Snow in May! 

The last time it snowed here in May was when my great-grandmother was a young girl. What a contrast to last year. 

The lingering cold has really slowed down everything in our garden and orchard, but although things are growing slowly, the good news is that everything is growing. We have had abundant rain that has put a dent in the drought and things are green for the first time in a long time. That feels good. 

GARDEN 

The north half of our vegetable garden, mid-May 2013

The south half of our garden, mid-May 2013

We added another three raised beds to our garden, so our vegetable garden consists of 528 intensively managed square feet. We still have to haul more bags of pea gravel to cover the new pathways. This fall we plan to add the final box to complete the garden and then start the process of doubling each box's depth. 

We follow the Square Foot Gardening method, but have changed things to suit us as we have gone along. The Square Foot Gardening method claims that you only need a 6" deep box, and for many plants, that is true. When there is a drought, however, deeper soil retains moisture a lot better and some plants really appreciate the extra depth.  

We put a lot of effort into starting our own transplants this year. After all the time and energy we poured into that, it was really disheartening when our transplants were subjected to snow and freezing rain time and time again. Even the cold hardy plants like cabbage and broccoli really took a beating, but they are slowly making a come-back. This would have been a great year to have cold frames or row covers set up. Oh well, some other year, perhaps. 

Broccoli to the rear, cauliflower in front

Radishes and cabbages. The cabbage in the front right was one of our original  group
that was planted and got frozen. The outer leaves died off, but it has grown back.
The cabbage to the rear of the photo was one we planted later on.  

Lettuces and spinach in various stages of growth

Forellenschluss lettuce

I love this lettuce! Forellenschluss is German for 'speckled like a trout'.

'Encore' lettuce mix

Doesn't this picture make you want to take a bottle of ranch dressing out to the garden and chow down right there? No? Maybe that is just me. ;)

Strawberry blossoms

'Little Marvel' peas in the foreground, Swiss Chard in the back. We are growing lots of chard
this year for poultry feed.   

These barely visible sprouts may not make the most interesting photo, but they are really exciting to us.
Carrots! Lots and lots of carrots! We have had the hardest time growing carrots. I think the moist,
cool conditions must have been just right for them to germinate.   

Garlic and some of our onions

The only fly in the ointment is our garlic. You can see that it is coming in pretty patchy. All of the cloves have sprouted, but most of them are still tiny. Strange.

ORCHARD

Things are slowly developing in the orchard, too.

'Montmorency' cherry blossom

One of our first tasks in the orchard this spring was to install limb spreaders in the trees that needed them.

May 5th - limb spreaders in place, starting to leaf out

It is important to attain a crotch angle (Yes, I just said that! I promise it is a real term!) of around 45 degrees between the limbs and the trunk. This assists light penetration and air circulation which are both important for healthy trees. Limbs with narrow crotch angles are also more prone to splitting away from the trunk under a heavy load of fruit. We will leave the limb spreaders in place until fall when the branches should have set into their new positions.

We also planted four new trees: a 'Stanley' prune plum, 'Surecrop' pie cherry, 'Sunglo' nectarine, and 'Contender' peach. Our orchard now consists of: 1 row each of blackberries and raspberries, 3 blueberry bushes, 3 apple, 3 pecan, 2 cherry, 2 pear, and 1 each of almond, peach, plum, and nectarine trees.

Our new 'Sunglo' nectarine

We have gotten the tree planting method espoused in The Holistic Orchard down to a science. If you want to learn the correct way to plant a fruit tree, check out the post I wrote on the subject here. We'll continue to get practice since our orchard is far from complete. (Insert Hubby Dear's groans as he reads this.) 

Our apple trees were just planted last spring, so I wasn't expecting any fruit this year. Our 'Jonafree' apple tree (the one with the spreaders pictured above) surprised me by going into bloom. 

'Jonafree' apple buds in various stages of development

A king blossom. The king blossom is the one in the center of a cluster of blossoms. It is the one that
will open first and  has the potential to form the largest fruit. 

'Earliblue' blueberry blossoms. 

Our blueberries are also blossoming. We've only had them a year as well, but the bushes are three years old and so this is the first year we could expect a small crop.

Of course our weather has been so wacky, I was worried that these blooms would be killed by frost. We continue to get frost warnings, so I did a little research to find out at what temperature the blooms would be killed. Here is a handy little sheet that summarizes killing frost temperatures for many types of trees.  This is another site just about apple trees and one about blueberries.

The upshot of those articles is that as long as it stays in the 30s, the blossoms will be safe. I just hope temperatures stabilize soon so that we can plant out our tomato and pepper transplants.

Has your spring been delayed like ours has been? What is growing in your garden?

Fall Orchard Update

We are entering our second year of planting and maintaining our survival orchard. (Here's my original post on the subject. I've made a few additions and changes to our plan since I first posted it.)

Apple trees, comfrey, and newly planted almond. Blueberries on the back right. 

The comfrey we planted thrived. Hopefully I can divide them sometime next year and get more plants to spread the happiness throughout the orchard.

Speaking of spreading something, I have been dumping duck poo and litter in the areas in between the trees. Duck poo is wonderful stuff for plants and will help improve the soil, which is something our hard-packed clay desperately needs. I am careful not to get it too close to the trees lest it "burn" the them, but that seems to be less of an issue with duck manure than chicken manure.

All the trees and bushes we planted over the past year survived despite the drought that continues unabated. If we do not get a lot of rain and snow this winter, the powers-that-be are going to add more water restrictions which are going to make it hard to keep things alive.

"Bluecrop" blueberry

Our blueberries will technically be old enough next year to give us a crop. They still seem pretty small to me, so I'll be interested in seeing what actually happens. Look how pretty blueberries get in the fall! Blueberries don't only produce delicious fruit; they also are beautiful landscaping plants. All you suburbanites with hoity-toity neighbors should take note! ;)

A sloooooow growing pecan tree

Last weekend we did two important fall orchard tasks. First, we put tree guards around the trunks of our trees. The tree guards will help keep voles, mice,and rabbits from eating the bark off the trees. Since the guards are white, they will also help reflect light on sunny winter days and prevent southwest injury. We will take the tree guards down in the spring because, according to The Holistic Orchard, they hold too much moisture against the trunk and provide cover for borers.

The fun (albeit exhausting) task was to plant our new trees: two pears and an almond.

Our new All-in-One Almond tree

I think nut trees are an essential part of any survival orchard. Last year we planted pecans, this year we planted an almond, and we will be adding walnuts in the future. You might be surprised to learn that folks as far north as Zone 5 can grow almonds. There are two varieties that will grow here, Hall's Hardy Almond and the All-in-One Almond. It seems that more people like the taste and texture of the All-in-One Almond and so that is the variety we went with. Either variety will make lovely ornamental trees in addition to producing lots of nuts.

One of our new pear trees. 

We planted two varieties of pears, Maxine (also known as Starking Delicious) and Seckel. These two varieties will cross-pollinate each other and have different strengths. Maxine is your typical Bartlett-type pear. It is great for eating fresh or canning and supposedly will last in cold storage for a while. Seckel pears are a smaller pear that are great for fresh eating but also dry well. We planting standard-sized pear trees so they will grow between 18-20 feet tall and 12-13 feet wide.

A drawing of the orchard layout, mostly to scale
The dots with circles around them are current plantings; plain dots are future plantings

We're making slow but steady progress. I look forward to the day when all this hard work will pay off!

How to Plant Blueberries

Blueberries have a reputation for being somewhat troublesome plants. The major issue is that they like acidic conditions and most of us do not have naturally acidic soil. No worries! If you plant blueberries correctly, you can give them exactly what they need and pave the way for bountiful harvests in the future.

I turned to my go-to book for all things fruit, The Holistic Orchard,for instruction. According to Michael Phillips, the first thing you have to do is dig a proper hole.

Hole-y cow!

As usual when you are planting fruit, you're going to dig a much larger hole than you probably think is necessary. This hole is about 3 feet across and 12 inches deep. We had three northern highbush-type blueberries ("Earliblue", "Bluecrop" and "Blueray" varieties) to plant and spaced them out five feet apart.

Now comes the fun part. And by fun part, I mean the really tedious but important part. Instead of adding back only the soil you just dug out, you are going to fill in the hole with materials that are going to nudge the pH of your soil in the acidic direction. Phillips recommends that you use 50% peat moss, 40% native soil, and 10% compost for a proper planting mixture.

A note about peat moss: the peat moss that you buy at a garden center is very dry and compressed.  It is better to moisten it ahead of time.

My peat moss has sprung a leak! 

Take the bale of peat moss and cut a hole in the top of the plastic. You can stick a hose down inside and fill the bale with water. It will hold A LOT of water. Let it sit for a couple of days to get thoroughly moistened.

Hubby Dear and I were perplexed as to the best way to insure that we got the proper amounts of soil, peat moss, and compost mixed throughout the planting hole. We ended up using a 5 gallon bucket as a measuring device and filled it up with the correct proportions of each of the ingredients. It took a long time, but it was a good way of mixing everything.

As you fill in your planting hole, you also need to sprinkle in some soil amendments. Every blueberry bush received 1 cup of rock phosphate, 1 cup of elemental sulfur, and 2 cups of greensand. The rock phosphate stimulates root growth and the greensand and sulfur will help with the iron uptake/pH concerns.

Greensand, elemental sulfur, and rock phosphate

We layered in buckets of the soil mixture, sprinkled in the amendments, and gently tucked in each plant.

Phew! Finally finished!

After we finished this project, I needed to be gently tucked into bed. Alas, my job was not done. Blueberries are one of those plants that need consistent moisture. Mulch will help keep moisture in the soil and also keep the weeds back.

Finished! 

And that's it! In a month, I will fertilize the blueberries with an organic fertilizer for acidic plants and repeat that again in the fall. In subsequent years, we will fertilize in the fall only. We planted gallon-sized blueberries that are already two years old. If all goes well, we will have our first crop of blueberries next year.

March 2012 in Review, Part III: A Whole Lot of Gardening

With the late Spring/early Summer-type weather we've been having, everything is about a month ahead of schedule. Our daffodils and forsythia have come and gone. The grass is lush and green and we've been working outside everyday. Here's what's going on in the garden. 

March Orchard Improvements

Our pitiful little cherry tree is finally getting some TLC

One of my goals this year is to make major strides towards establishing a survival orchard. I thought I should probably try and do something for this cherry tree I got for free four years ago before I start spending money on new trees! I pulled all the grass and weeds from around it in a 2' diameter. Then I bought some organic fruit tree fertilizer and gave it a generous serving. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I have ever fertilized this tree. Gee, I wonder why it is still 3 feet tall? ;) 
I learned from my orchard bible, The Holistic Orchard: Tree Fruits and Berries the Biological Way,that putting mulch right up against a fruit tree is a bad idea. It holds too much moisture against the trunk and is prime habitat for rodents that munch on bark. It is also a bad idea to lay down a circle of weed cloth underneath wood mulch or stone. Weed cloth creates an environment that favors bacteria at the expense of the fungi that are key to tree health. So, yes, I did that wrong when I planted my pecan trees last fall! It is better to put a thick layer of pea stone down and then mulch in a wider circle around that. Much more about mulch this month. (Hehe)

Spritzing and Spraying
I've spent a significant amount of my prepping budget over the last couple of  months on equipment and spray ingredients recommended in The Holistic Orchard for our fruit trees and berry bushes. The sprays aren't toxic pesticides or chemical fertilizers but are aimed at improving the overall health of the plants. It's all about helping the plant's own immune system fight off potential pathogens and insect pressure. Does this sound a bit New Age-y or otherwise weird? It's not, I promise! Read this for a bit more explanation.  

Solo 4 Gallon Backpack Sprayer

The weather has accelerated the spraying timetable so I've already sprayed two of four total spring sprays. I loaded up my nifty new backpack sprayer with a pungent concoction of water, neem oil, liquid fish, liquid kelp, effective microbes, and blackstrap molasses and slid on the 40+ lb contraption. It felt like a stubborn, smelly toddler was clinging to my back as I staggered across our homestead, spraying our cherry and pecan trees as well as the blackberry and raspberry bushes. Luckily, I'm used to stubborn, smelly toddlers so this was a breeze! 

Raspberries in the foreground, blackberries in the middle. Hopefully the holistic sprays will encourage bountiful harvests. 

Composting
We set up a compost bin primarily for chicken and rabbit waste. The majority of our food waste will be consumed by the chickens as they get older and we plan to use many of our spent garden plants as mulch in the chicken run.  

The bin is close to the coop and to the garden. 

When we were deciding where to set up the compost bin, we debated putting it somewhere that would be a bit out of the way but wouldn't be visible from the house. But then we remembered that our giant chicken run isn't exactly discreet! The compost bin is practically invisible in comparison.  
I'm looking forward to reducing the number of bags of compost we'll have to buy in the future for our garden endeavors. 

The Vegetable Garden

Hardly a day goes by when we're not planting something.

We planted onion transplants this year rather than trying to grow them from seed. 

Growing onions from transplants instead of seed seems like cheating, but maybe we'll actually get some good sized onions this year.

"Music" variety garlic

The garlic we planted last fall all sprouted and is doing great.

"Encore" lettuce mix and "Corvair" spinach

The first of many boxes of salad greens have sprouted. 

My usually June-bearing strawberries are in bloom

Last year's strawberries are blooming. In addition, we planted 75 new plants.

Peas! We outsmarted the mice this year

Hubby Dear's relentless trapping of mice in our garden has resulted in many more seeds surviving long enough to sprout. Yippee for peas!

I love our garden 

If you've been following my garden adventures, you might notice that we switched out the wooden lattice-style square foot grids for ones made of twine. We decided that the wooden grids simply take up too much room and make weeding and planting difficult. Hubby Dear installed metal screw eyes to the sides of the boxes and ran the twine through. We are much happier with the result.

Seed Starting Results

The seeds we planted in the little Jiffy Pot greenhouse took off rapidly. We're now in the process of hardening off the seedlings. 

Rosemary I overwintered indoors, the seedlings, and one of our new blueberry bushes

The sunflowers aren't enjoying the process very much and everything else is pretty leggy and windblown, but we may end up with a few successful transplants. We hedged our bets by directly sowing the same seeds in the garden and we'll keep whichever are the best looking plants in the whole lot. 
------
The beat goes on in April. More planting, hopefully we'll start harvesting! Coming soon: planting apple trees and blueberries.


Have you started your garden yet? What's growing at your house?

February in Review and March 2012 Preps

I know I think about TEOTWAWKI more than your average citizen, but hasn't the weather over the past year just been crazy? Last summer much of country experienced record heat and drought and now this?

These daffodils are at least two weeks ahead of schedule.

Our extremely mild winter has led these daffodils to believe it is mid-March. It makes me paranoid about further weather weirdness. Just what is in store for us this summer?

Darn paranoia.

What did I manage to accomplish during this strange February?

February Preps:

1) I mastered the art of making delicious homemade pizza in five minutes with common ingredients from my food storage. A little practice (and the purchase of an amazing peel that really makes the process foolproof) was all it took.

2) Did you know how expensive quality outdoor extension cords are? I didn't, but I sure do now! I bought an 100 footer to power up my chicken coop. I comforted myself with the thought that an extension cord is a very good general prep, assuming that we have power!

3) I bought and am in the process of reading through an interesting gardening book, Gaia's Garden: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture. I still don't like the title, but I am getting a lot of ideas for our survival orchard. The good news is that many of the plants that are beneficial to include in orchard setups also have medicinal properties. One of my long-term goals was to plant a medicinal herb garden, so the orchard will end up being a two-for-one special.

4) Speaking of the orchard-to-be, I put in several orders for the more exotic items I need for our big planting day in March. You just can't find mycorrhizal inoculant and humic acids at the local farm supply store!

Behold, the fungus! This pricey mycorrhizal inoculant is the key
to growing fruit organically.

Unfortunately those orchard purchases used up all my budget, so I wasn't able to make any headway in the areas of first aid or food storage (unless you count our potential fruit harvests as future food storage!) Well, there's always next month.

The new boxes are yellow ones on the right. They will weather to the same color as the old boxes. 

Hubby Dear and I took advantage of our cuckoo weather and worked out in the garden quite a bit. We constructed the new garden boxes for part one of our expansion, laid down landscaping cloth, and put the boxes in place. The next step will be to make Mel's Mix and fill all the boxes. We'll be planting outside very soon.

My chicks will be arriving even before that.  The kids and I are practically giddy with excitement so we went ahead and set up their home.

For the first month or so, I want to keep the chicks indoors. I might regret that in a few weeks, but for now, I think I'll want to keep a close eye on the little buggers. We chose to set up their brooder in a bathroom since I can pretty much hose down the entire area if necessary. The amount of dust that chicks raise is supposed to be prodigious.

I put down several layers of cardboard, set up the plastic brooder guard to contain the wee beasties, and then put down a couple of inches of pine shavings.

Have a brooder, just need the chicks!

Then I covered up the shavings with a layer of paper towels. These towels will be replaced as necessary for the first week or so. This will encourage the chicks to eat their food, not the shavings. I tested the  heat lamp and adjusted its height so that the temperature at chick height will be around 95 degrees. All that's left to do is fill up the feeder and water fount and we're set.


March Preps: 

1) Chickens!  
-The little buggers will finally get here sometime between March 6-8.

2) Finish chicken moat
-The north end of the chicken moat still needs to be fenced in.

3) Buy a compost bin
-It's strange that we've never ventured into composting despite our interest in organic gardening. I guess I have been too focused on all the other aspects of gardening. Since we're about to have a flock of 17 chickens in addition to our two rabbits, waste management necessitates a venture into composting.

4) Plant orchard and cold-hardy garden vegetables
-March is the first really busy garden month. Our apples, blueberries, strawberries, and raspberry plants are due to arrive and we'll be planting peas, potatoes, and other spring vegetables soon.

5) Buy a few more odds and ends for the orchard 
-I still need to get items for the holistic sprays I'll be using on our fruit - neem oil, effective microbes, and molasses. I'll talk more about these things in future posts.

6) Begin upgrade of our bug out bags (BOBs)
-I know I've been pushing the homesteading aspect quite heavily recently; here's something for you hardcore survivalists. :) I bought our BOBs quite early on in my prepping career and I have learned a few things that I should do differently. I plan to make some changes and upgrade the quality of the equipment over the next few months.

7) First aid
-I'll work on this, I promise! I say that every month, but I really mean it this time. ;)


That's me. How did you prepare during the month of February and/or what do you have in store for March?