gardening – Page 2 – Peacock Orchard

It’s time to begin gardening inside again.

Sons dresser is in use again as plant habitat. I dug up 4 pepper plants that I’s started late in the season. Some of them were setting fruit but there was no way they were going to survive the dropping temperatures to ripen. Inside they came. Also inside now is the ginger plant and jasmine plant that had hung out on the back porch all summer. They really enjoyed the summer weather and have grown nicely. Do you like the giant web in that window? We have 2 such spiders in separate windows doing a good job of collecting pests for us. We haven’t bothered them. We like spiders.

Thai hot pepper anyone?

I am having an issue with the black peppercorn plant still. It has been infested with these little white eggs for some time. I never see a bug, just the eggs. I keep doing stuff to get rid of them but so far, no luck. No real ID on what it is either. I suspect spider mites but I’m not sure.

I am quitting my day job in December. I have plans to alter our unfinished basement to become my new plant nursery. So stay tuned for that!

Wine Bottle Hot Box

We have been saving wine bottles for awhile. We have the benefit of other people’s bottles as well. Husband and I discussed various ways to make a hot box from wine bottles and the results are pretty nice if I do say so myself. We scavenged another wooden trough type structure from the local Kubota. Husband drilled holes in it and bam, hot box. We will be testing this as time goes on. Hot peppers are the current residents of the hot box.

A little bit about how this works and why you would want it:

The sun heats up the air inside of the wine bottles. The hot air then pushes through the neck of the bottle and into the soil, increasing soil temperature. This is a good way to increase your growing zone. We chose to put hot peppers in the hot box because of their love for hot soils. I hope to see them take off soon!

Sunken Hugelkulture

Hugelkulture isn’t something I looked too much into. We don’t have access to a lot of wood at our house and it’s so dry here I didn’t believe it would work well anyway. Last year I pruned our wind break line heavily. We had a lot of death and I was tired of looking at dead trees. So we finally had access too wood. Not a huge amount but enough to play around with. So I decided to try hugelkulture, sunken hugelkulture.

So like all of our projects we brought out the Kubota tractor and dug a hole. This hole was less than 24″ deep (power and water lines are usually 24″ deep) and around 8×8′ in size. Once the hole was dug (which I didn’t get pictures of) I began filling it with dead wood, biochar and chicken bedding.

I then covered it all back up and added a final layer of compost on the top.

I put tires along both ends of the sunken hugel. One line for potatoes and another for tomatoes. I then filled the tires with biochar and compost.

I planted sugar snap peas in the middle of the hugel and put a crib mattress frame for them to climb up.

We mounded compost and planted the corn seeds in the mounds. Around the mounds we planted bush beans. In the gaps between the tires I planted basil and other herbs.

This last weekend I brought over a wooden trough we got for free from the local Kubota store, filled it with dirt and now all I have to do is wait.

I’m not planting out my hard grown tomatoes until I know they are going to have ideal conditions.

Here are the tomatoes I grew from seed this year. This is the first time I’ve ever been successful. I think it’s because I put them in an unused fish tank with lights.

What is going on and some updates

Wow that 2 weeks of intense work turned into a month. So here is what has been happening while I’ve been AFK.

This is my lettuce and onion bed. Kids were “helping”.

Lettuce Sprouting

Here it is finished with compost and planted.

I also have a sunken hugel bed for corn and peas. I have it surrounded by tires that are going to hold potatoes and tomatoes.

I’m filling the tires in this pic. The pea trellis is the crib mattress from our son. Cribs, I love everything about them!

I’ve been hard at work kratering. Here they are in the process of being terraced. Still have to put the topsoil back on.

Here are a few kraters that I have finished and begun planting. The little tree with no label is a black locust. I have one for each krater and they are between each tree in the swales from last year.

We had a bit of a surprise pond. It was supposed to be another krater but it filled up with water and…well it’s still full. I went over with the excavator and tried to dig through the water holding layer but wasn’t successful. I’ll try again when I have time. I don’t really want a pond right there.

Thought I’d share my technique for keeping the kids entertained while I work. It didn’t work for very long before they were out in the mud, but it did work.

This is our new peacock, the old one was eaten. He’s small but very pretty, not very intelligent though.

Husband is making biochar here.

Flowers that have arrived on their own.

There is a lot more but I’ll have to update again later.

Gardening in winter- Outdoors

It may seem like there is not much to do in winter. That you can sit back and relax until it is time to get busy planting in spring. The opposite is actually true. I feel like winter is the busiest time for me, but perhaps that is because it is unpleasant work most of the time. When you do not have a high cold tolerance going out in freezing weather just sucks. You might be wondering what I could possibly have to do. Other than the animals, which require more intensive and hands on care when it is cold, plants need winter love too.

This winter has been rather stressful for me actually. This is the first winter with the orchard trees and a bad one as far as temp, wind and lack of moisture go. Our windbreak/tree line is in bad shape. I’ve been watching conifers die all over the place but I was hoping mine were established enough to persevere. They aren’t.

Dying pine

The tree line did help keep snow. That makes me happy!

We went out on March 1 to see how things were surviving. I think it is safe to say none of the black walnuts have made it. Between my lack of attention and rabbits, they all died. The fruit trees are looking very good though. The swales have done a very good job of collecting what snow we get. I bent a branch back on every tree just as a bit of a test and all but 1 appear to be healthy. The bubblegum plum that struggled last year does not appear to have made it through the winter. I suppose I won’t know for sure until spring.

The grapes, who knows. I made a lot of mistakes with the grapes. I planted them wrong, they caught every disease they could and then I pruned them badly and transplanted them worse. I have more grapes coming this year and I am going to do a lot better by them, I hope.

Helpers

Bend test

This tree….the wind just keep blowing it over.

The blackberries I’m unsure on. They did really great last year but they are looking a bit rough now. I’ve fenced them but the wind and rabbits keep getting through anyway. I can tell they’ve been really chewed up. I’m interested to see how they spring back.

I enjoyed seeing snow collecting not on our entire driveway but just in the swales we put in last year. Very refreshing! My little helpers enjoyed this trek outdoors as well.