Orchard Helper

Our Kitchen Garden

Last year I had a raised bed made from old fencing, 4 tire beds and 2 pallets. Oh, can’t forget the failed straw bale gardening experiment. This year I went bigger. I now have 4 raised beds, loads of tires next to the fence for vining plants (gourds, cantelope and cucumber), a lettuce bed and a carrot tire. I think I’ll get a few more tires. Some things did rather well in them. I’ll make more raised beds as I have time and resources. All of the things I use in my kitchen garden are free.

Oh, can’t forget the other part of the kitchen garden, the sunken corn hugel. See the linked post for more on that.

I started with cardboard, lots of it. And tires, lots of them.

This is the lettuce bed. I laid out cardboard and then put compost over it. I also have cardboard under and compost in all the tires.

The lettuce is already coming up. I had to chase a chicken out of it. Chased her all the way around the house. Then I fenced it like I should have to begin with.

If you haven’t guessed yet, I am not the best at planned design. So I simply cut all the wood in half. The new raised beds are as large as the wood would allow and that’s that.

I have cucumber and leeks in the big one, eggplant in another and okra in the last one. I have cardboard going around and in between the raised beds. Dirt is on it to keep it from blowing away. When I get it done enough I’ll be putting a nice layer of straw/hay to help with the ease of walking and to suppress weeds. Last year the surrounding plants made it almost impossible to reach the garden. I’m planning for that this year!

Here is a shot of Son’s photo bomb and asparagus in last years raised bed. Daughter is in the backpack which she loves. Oddly she’s not much for the outdoors and doesn’t like to walk much. Our ground is rather uneven and she horribly takes after my side of the family in the grace department.

I started some of the gourds inside. I have birdhouse gourds, apple gourds, giant gourds and cantaloupe. I’m hoping to make some birdhouses out of all the varieties- minus the cantaloupe.

This is pretty much it. We do have squash planted all over on the berms and potatoes as well. I think we are almost ready for growing!

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.

Mumm Napa Brut Prestige and Cave Aged Gruyere

Wine:

Mumm Napa Brut Prestige $25.99

[From the makers website] Brut Prestige is Mumm Napa’s signature sparkling wine. It is a relaxed, yet elegant, wine that earns sparkling accolades from consumers and critics alike. Brut Prestige features fine bright citrus, red apple, stone fruit and creamy vanilla aromas, with hints of toast, honey and gingerbread spice. Its vibrant flavors are balanced by fine acidity and a rich, lingering finish.

Cheese:

Cave Aged Gruyere $14.55

[From Wikipedia] Gruyère is sweet but slightly salty, with a flavor that varies widely with age. It is often described as creamy and nutty when young, becoming with age more assertive, earthy and complex. When fully aged (five months to a year) it tends to have small cracks which impart a slightly grainy texture.

Wine Review- The taste is not unpleasant. I thought it was a bit less sweet than I had expected. It has good flavor though and paired very well with the cheese. The chocolate made it taste a bit dryer though. So I wouldn’t drink this with chocolate or sweets. Something mildly savory, like the gruyere, went very well with this. It was a nice celebratory drink. 11 years of marriage and looking forward to many more! We recommend this wine.

Cheese Review- This cheese was nice. It had a good flavor. I thought it was mildly salty but not bad at all. It paired quite well with the wine. We actually finished off this cheese on another occasion and would recommend.

The Unintentional Pond

This was not supposed to happen. This was supposed to be another Krater. This is awful!

We were supposed to have 8 Kraters. We only have 6. This unintentional pond is the reason why. It was dug just like the rest of the Kraters. The front loader scooped out about 2′ of soil. Then it began raining. It rained, and rained, and rained. The Kraters all had water in them but this one, this was something else. We found things digging that we hadn’t expected. We knew our soil was clay. What we didn’t know is that sand and rock was not that far under the clay. It’s about 2-3′ under, in some places. Not 30′ away from this “pond” is a Krater with a rock bottom.

This Krater has black clay. Lots and lots of it. This black clay has proven to be amazing at holding water. So here we sat, with a 2′ deep pond we didn’t want to have. There was much debate about what to do with it. I bounced from keeping to annihilating this thing. I want ponds. Lots of them. What I don’t want is a pond in this location and I want a 2′ deep pond even less. What on earth would I do with a shallow pond?

So while I was out on the excavator I began scooping the clay from this pond. My hope was that I would breach the clay lining and the pond would drain. It turns out I did remove the lining in some spots. It’s hard to tell what you are doing when you are digging in muddy water. However, the pond has been draining, slowly, very slowly. This brings me relief as so far Son has lost a shoe and a dump truck in it.

We stopped digging Kraters because of the rain and because the last Krater is set to be next to this one. I don’t know what we’ll find. Will it be black clay? Will it be rock? I don’t know and I’m not sure I really want to find out.

I’m struggling with what to do with this giant hole after the water drains from this “pond”. I hesitate to plant into it because of how well it holds water. I just can’t leave it though. We think we’ll harvest all the black clay we can for the pond we DO want. After that it’s anyone’s guess. I suppose it’ll sit around for awhile until we finally get annoyed enough to do something. Part of me thinks we should fill it in. The other part thinks we should just plant water loving species in it. Aspen, cottonwood, willow. That seems like the lazier option so it’s probably what will end up happening.

It gave us some very peaceful and pretty sunsets though.

Son will really miss it!

Mini Krater Construction and Planting

Thanks to my bush experiment last year I decided Kraters were the way to go. Lots and lots of Kraters. So the first thing I did was make sure I was legally allowed to dig them. I am, so long as they remain under a certain size.

So the work began. We dug the initial holes with the front bucket loader.

texting and driving — Don’t text and drive. Unless you’re in the middle of a field on an excavator that has a top speed of .95 mph

Look ma, no hands!

Then I went in with our new excavator and did some ground softening/terracing work.

Of course, life is not complete without back breaking physical labor. So I went to work with the hoe refining my terraces. Then I had to add the topsoil back into the holes and hoe the terraces again.

It’s kind of hard to tell. The one krater has a rather unique design though. You see, I originally thought I’d be able to deepend the Kraters a bit. However, the kraters were pre-dug 20′ in diameter. The excavator has a 7′ reach. I wasn’t able to get to the middle, no matter how I tried. So I didn’t try to deepen any other kraters but the one ended up with an island in the middle. I find it a perfect place to plant a paw paw.

After I put the topsoil back on I cover cropped the works.

Husband and I took a day off to plant them out.

We had just a little big to plant…………………………..

The aronia berries are holding up to our hot weather nicely. The cover crop seeds are also coming up!

Finito.

I’ll update pictures when we have notable growth. It’s exciting!

Sweet Potato bed

Last year, for some unknown reason, I dug a hole. Not a particularly large hole but it was in an odd place and I wasn’t sure what it was doing there. Well, I’ve fixed it finally. While digging our mini kraters we found we had a lot of sand and rock in our ground. So we moved that sand/rock mix into the hole. I then covered it with top soil and compost, planted the sweet potato starts and mulched with hay. It’s looking good!!!

Here is the hole filled with the sand/rock dirt. My niece flattened it with the hoe.

Here we are putting the top soil and compost on.

Here is a lizard we found in the topsoil.

Here we are haying it. Daughter was very helpful in this regard.

I can’t wait to see how successful it is.