orchard – Page 7 – Peacock Orchard

Cold Hardy Pistachio Experiment

After finding this post on Permies.com I had to try to grow pistachio on the farm. So I went to Ebay and purchased some seeds from someone in Turkey. They took a few weeks to arrive but arrive they did.

Ok. Great. They arrived and I didn’t research them at all. Quick Google of planting pistachio from seed. I see that a potassium nitrate mixture is said to help with germination rates. So I IM my husband to find out what household chemicals we can use to make potassium nitrate. I give him no context, just: “What household stuff can we mix to make potassium nitrate?” He replies with an explanation that includes a toxic gas byproduct. In typical fashion I ponder this for a few moments before asking him if soaking a banana peel in water won’t do the trick. I am sure that his brow furrowed as he saw that piece of brilliance pop up on his computer. I admit, bananas are the only thing I’m aware of with potassium. Sad, I know. At this point he requests information on WHY I want potassium nitrate. I think he saw that conversation going no where really fast. Anyway, I ended up soaking the seeds without the mixture added, as I am far too impatient to start to wait for an order to arrive in the mail.

I soaked them in simple well water overnight. Some of the seeds floated and some did not. I assume the floating seeds will not germinate but I planted them out anyway.

Sending good thoughts to this seed. Grow baby grow!

After soaking I planted the seeds out in one of my favorite containers, a plastic egg carton. They make eggcelent mini greenhouses. I also like how they allow me to see how things are developing.

And now, we wait.

Growing Fruit Trees From Seed

Life is tough in my household. You can’t eat anything without my demands following you. Such is the life for kids who like apples. I love buying them apples but they had best not throw that apple core away. I require the seeds from it first! Plus, the chickens like the cores so they’d best not throw them away regardless.

Apple seeds need stratified before they will germinate. I cold stratify my seeds in the refrigerator until they have just barely sprouted. Ok, not completely true. I once forgot I had seeds in there and they were leafed out before I planted them. They did not make it. Best to get them when they have just barely started.

A forgotten apple seed, leafed out in fridge and finally planted.

Whoo that picture is bad. I need a better camera. Anyway, you can barely see the leaves there. I believe these were fuji apple seeds and my very first stratification attempt. I remember they exist a lot better now!

So what I do is easy. I take out the seeds, put them on a wet paper towel and then put them into a cup that I have labeled with the name of the apple I took them from. I have all the cups stacked and put in a ziploc baggie. This is all kept in the veggie drawer of my refrigerator. Every once in awhile I take them out and check to see if any have sprouted.

If not, I put them back in the fridge. If they have I plant them in a plastic cup.

I planted 8 germinated apple seeds a week ago and today they look like this:

Growing quite well!

Now I am also trying to grow rootstock from crab apples I found on a tree in town. The same basic process as regular apples except harvesting these seeds requires more work.

So far none of them have germinated. They had been dried up hanging on the tree for most of the winter so we shall see what happens.

I also collected various locust seed pods on my daily walks with my parents. We all take our lunch break and walk. They have become quite used to my odd veering off and shoving of various debri into my coat pockets.

To germinate the locust seeds I simply put them in a small “greenhouse” like container with a bit of soil.

I have germinated many, many seeds this way. It also works. This container has seen many gardens!

The locust seeds did not need to be cold stratified and germinated in just a few days. I have 2 surviving seedlings that are growing quite happily in a windowsill right now.

I believe I only have a few survivors as the seeds had also been collected from the ground in the middle of winter. I did not pre-think most of these projects.

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.

This is a low spot in the driveway and you can see the collection basin, full of snow, as well.

Driveway snow in swale

This is a water collection basin behind the house. It isn’t well done and has lots of hills of dirt. Our son loves that part of it.

Enjoy this view of the only time she actually walked while we were outdoors. I keep telling her I gave her legs….

Orchard planting and seasonal progression- Year 1

I ordered my trees from Stark Bros and had them delivered in July, not a suggested time for tree planting but it is what it is. I immediately began my earthworks after placing the order. Then I painted tree stakes and laid out my plantings. I finished just in time.

I was amazed at how small the boxes were, and a little wary. I began unboxing and soaking my trees immediately.

Please excuse the mish mash of detritus in this picture. This is my unboxed tree showing some leaf budding. I went about painting the trees white while they soaked. It was July and I did not want my new trees to get sun burn.

All painted! You can see that I have a lot of shredded paper in there with my plants. I wasn’t going to be able to plant them all in one day, as I had 36 and was planting alone, so I “hilled” them in their containers.

Here is a happily planted and mulched tree looking very much like a stick. I just knew it would grow into a beauty! You can also see my hand painted stake used to identify the tree and plan out the planting.

It took some time but I managed to get one full berm planted and mulched. I left spaces in some spots for cherry trees, which had been sold out when I’d placed my order. The mulch is extremely moldy straw that has been sitting in a corner of our property since before we moved in.

I was extremely happy to find that within weeks I had some beautiful leafing. I was concerned about two of my trees though as they were not showing leaves. I hoped they made it. Thankfully they did, they just took a lot longer to adjust than the others.

Now look at this, a very happy boy helping me show the height and growth of our trees. This tree just shot out quite impressively. It is a Superior Plum tree, standard sized. My son happily walked the berm line with me nightly, talking about how excited he was to pick fruit off of the trees. I don’t believe he realized how long he’d be waiting though.

I did have some issues though. I am not positive but I believe we had some blight. You can see the black leaves in this picture. I took shears and cut all the black off, bleaching between prunings, and then burned the clippings. I hope I do not see it this year.

After I planted the trees I threw out a great variety of herb, salad, vegetable and flower seeds. It was late in the season but I had some amazing lettuce growth. This lettuce reached 3 feet in diameter with leaves bigger than my head. I had poppies and nasturtium do well. I also had a ton of various lettuces.

I cut some bushes down and threw all of the branches into my swales.

Most of the berm produce went to the poultry. I did save what seeds I could for this springs planting. The kids loved bringing the poultry goodies.

I find kids will try about anything if they can pick it. Though that doesn’t mean they’ll like it, as seen here:

We had quite a few beets grow and the turnips grew absolutely massive in size. My son happily washed and bit into every plant he picked. He thought the beet was sweet but he had quite an attack when he bit into a turnip. I licked it and understood why, it was incredibly spicy. The chickens adored those turnips though.

(excuse the mattress behind the kids in this picture. It is our old bed, which I stripped down to the frame and intend to use as a trellis this spring. You can see the stripped frame in one of the pictures below.)

I did prune, not much, but a bit. My Son was anxious to help me with that job. Here he is cutting some suckers off of the bottom of the tree. Great view of one of my tree markers as well. Superior is the type of fruit, Then you can see Plum written under it and the S stands for Standard sized root stock. So this will be a standard sized superior plum tree.

Then it was fall and time to protect my trees. I ended up transplanting my grapes onto the berms, under the standard sized fruit trees. Where I planted a grape I used cement to hold down the mulch. It has worked quite well so far. I used the walls of tires to hold the mulch down around my black walnut trees. That has also been a successful method of holding mulch. We get some impressively fierce winds out here, 40-50mph is normal for us.

Now to wait and see what happens this spring. Did all of my trees survive? I am hopeful. The berms and swales did an impressive job of collecting snow so I believe my trees have received a decent amount of water. It has been a rather dry winter so far. We still have snow collected in the swales and in some of the water diversion ditches so I would say the earthworks did the trick.

Earthworks Update

I had originally planned on doing a single post to sum up the earthworks I had done. However, it was so long I had to break it into two parts. The previous Earthworks post was all about the construction. This post is all about the swales and basins in action.

Our driveway is a nightmare in all but bone dry conditions. Our driveway is lower than the surrounding land and simply collects and stores water. The ducks appreciate that and move from the pond I built them to the driveway after every rain storm.

We appreciate it a bit less as our cars are small and have to be towed out of the mud regularly. So I finally decided to dig a trench on one side of the driveway with the tractor. We were able to do that and use the back blade to make it fairly decent. The dirt dug from the trench was put back onto the driveway to try to get it crowned. It is working fairly well.

Here is the amount of water our driveway holds after a single rainstorm. This is just a small section of our driveway as well. This water used to spread out into large ponds all over our driveway. The trench has kept the water to one side for the most part. The trench is also draining into a small retention pond.

This is one of my swales collecting driveway water. It is slowly draining away. Works great!

This i a diversion ditch we dug from the driveway and into the swale.Another angle of the diversion ditch with the swale seen through the bushes.

My ditch digging helper!

Now all of that was just one rain storm. I also took some pictures after a snow storm.

I just had to share a picture of this rabbit trail. It is insane how many rabbits we have!

This is a swale on the nut forest side of our orchard. So far I only have a few walnuts planted in it. These swales were a bit smaller than the fruit tree swales. As you get closer to the edge of our property the swales completely disappeared under the snow. They held a lot of snow for us.

Now this was the retention pond I did at the lowest point of our property. It is hard to see how deep the snow is here but it was over a foot. It filled up quite well. My son is in this picture doing snow angels in it. He loved our adventure out into the snow.

This is what the fruit tree swales looked like. They did collect a fair amount of snow.

And this is the retention basin that our driveway drains into. It is over 2 feet deep and it filled in completely. I think this shows me how great retention basins are for our property with the wind. I am going to do many, many more in 2015.

My First Earthworks

Once I caught on to permaculture it took very little time for me to put it into action. My first priority was to set up a few swales for the fruit trees I’d ordered.

It took me several days to dig out all of the swales. Of course, it may have gone faster if I hadn’t been doing it with kids on my lap. They’d inevitably fall asleep and then I’d have dead weight and drool on my arm. I’d just dig until I couldn’t take the weight anymore. The kids loved watching me dig though.

My swales are not exactly on contour. I eye balled it and then what happened in the tractor, happened. I wanted water to drain into the swales and away from the driveway. So far that has been successful, so these swales are perfect for our needs.

There is a large amount of space between my swales. I have debated extensively on what I should do. More swales? Infiltration Basins? Free space? I finally decided on infiltration basins that will have trees planted into the bottom. I think with our wind blown environment that plantings done below ground level do the best. I actually tested planting bushes into 1′ deep holes. I documented that here.

This is a pic of how far the first swale is from the house.

So this is my busy little tractor with the back blade smoothing out the base of the swales.

This is a finished swale. Not the most even berm on the downhill side of it, but I’m happy! I worried about the electrical line coming through at that low spot so I did not dig as deep and I did not plant any trees near it.

Lovely little tractor in the swale. I didn’t have the foresight to get pics WHILE I was doing it. It was only when I was done that I thought to take pictures.

Now, this is not a swale. This is a mini retention basin. This is the lowest part of our property and I was hoping to keep some water and dirt on my property and not the farmers. So this was done on both sides of that fence (which is soon to be removed). I hoped it would also help with the road which is AWFUL at all the low spots. I must say I haven’t seen a difference in the road there yet. Unfortunate! I’m going to be working more on this basin I believe. I hope to turn it into a full blown pond. Permits will be needed for that and probably an excavator.

This is from the bottom of the retention basin. You can barely see the tractor at the top of the slope there. It’s steep here but the rest of the property is pretty flat.

All told I made 4 swales and 3 basins. One of the basins is ineffective and I’ll be filling it in this spring, but the rest were wonderful. I intend to dig many, many mini basins in the future to help catch blowing snow.