Orchard Helper

Experimenting with various garden techniques- triumphs and failures

2014 was a year of experimentation and learning for me. I moved the kitchen garden to a new location and used a variety of materials to make raised beds. I also tried many of the gardening techniques I’d found on Pinterest. Here is a list of what I tried and what worked:

PALLETS:

Verdict: Failure for onions. Might be a triumph with lettuce.

I grew onions in pallets this year and it was only mildly successful. I had ants move into one, which was partly good and partly horrible. They were army ants and I liked having them there as I saw them eat quite a few grubs. I did not like having them there because they swarmed whenever I watered or weeded. Unpleasant. I do think the idea of pallets is a good one, perhaps my technique was just off. I had to put more dirt in halfway through the season as it settled quite a lot. Keeping the dirt moist was also a problem. I mulched the rows with straw, but the pallets were thin and thus the dirt layer was as well. It just dried out pretty quickly. The onions I pulled in the fall would be considered pearls. I decided to save them for replanting this spring.

So would I do this again, maybe, but not for onions. I think this would work well with lettuce but that is about it.

RAISED BED:

Verdit: Triumph

Squash planted around watering hole

Asparagus (above and below)

Our property came with a pile of old wooden fencing. I’ve used it here and there for various things and this raised bed is one of them. It is about a foot high, and 10 feet square. I planted asparagus, pumpkins and zucchini into this bed. For the pumpkin and zucchini I put a big hole in the middle of the bed for watering and planted the seeds around it. It worked pretty well. Also around the entire perimeter I planted marigolds. They got HUGE!

I really have nothing bad to say about my raised bed. Everything in it grew large and fast. I had more zucchini than I knew what to do with. It worked great! In 2015 I’m going to plant my tomatoes and peppers into the raised bed instead of the straw bales.

STRAW BALES:

Verdict: Failure

Pumpkin plants growing in straw bale

Mushrooms growing out of straw bale

This picture sums up my straw bale experience. I fertilized with chicken poop for about 3 weeks before planting. I also added dirt into the planting hole and mulched with extra straw over the top after planting. Nothing did well in the bales. The straw bales were planted out weeks before my raised bed but the one pumpkin I planted in the bale never produced while I had several pumpkins from the raised bed plants. I had 4 bales. The pictured bale had bell pepper plants in it. I had 2 with tomatoes and one with squash. Again, nothing did well. I did have mushrooms popping out, which I was told meant my bale was decomposing like it was supposed to. It just didn’t work out. I would not do this again. The only benefit is that I had nicely fertilized straw to mulch my other beds with in the fall.

Fertilizing straw bales.

TIRES:

Verdict: Undecided

corn and beans

peas and sunflowers

Tires, my favorite material. I had one large, square, raised bed in the middle of my kitchen garden. On two sides I had two tires set up. I planted potatoes in one, carrots in another, beans and corn in another and sunflowers and peas in the last. The dirt was a mixture of my clay soil, horse manure compost, peat moss and straw mulch. The potatoes did very poorly. I had nothing eatable from that. BUT I just planted store bought potatoes which may be the reason for that. The carrots also did poorly but I know I did that. When I did the initial watering of the carrot tire it washed all the seeds to the very side of tire. Big mistake. So they never got very large. The peas did well and I did get some 4′ sunflowers as well. I got maybe 2 green beans and no corn. They grew up tall but nothing ever happened with them. I did plant peas and beans in my swales and they did much better there.

I will use tires again I think. I’ll try potatoes in them again. The other tires will be used for spreading herbs though. I’ll plant my veggies out in the berms, it did better there.

BROADCAST SEWING ON BERMS- LATE SEASON:

Verdict: Triumph

In late July I bought a ton of different seeds and simply threw them onto my berms. Not everything did well but most of it did amazing. I’m a big fan of broadcast sewing now!

Strawberry Pyramid

I have been quite obsessed with tires as a building material. I know many people dislike them because of the chemicals that can potentially leech out, but I love them. My first tire project was a sand box for the kids. After seeing how easy it was and how nicely they held plants I decided to make a strawberry pyramid. There is a local tire shop that is quite used to me now. In fact they searched around and brought me the top tire of the pyramid because they knew I would love the texture of the tread. I do indeed love it!

To start I laid out my tire pattern. Once I decided how to stack the tires I cut the sidewall off of one side of each tire. I then laid out the bottom tires and filled them with dirt. That beautiful little car in the pictures is what I used to transport compost from the neighbors horses. I had a big tarp (the one in the picture) in the trunk and I filled it up. It took several trips but I’m happy with the results.

The kids LOVED to climb this. In fact our daughter couldn’t walk but she could climb this thing like a champ. We got so interesting over here that the ducks even had to come investigate:

Like our pile of materials? All of those pallets went to the tree line to help with wind protection. We had some bushes die last winter. The boards went to various projects.

As for the strawberries, I did plant and they grew pretty well. Not a harvest-able amount but my son was happily picking and eating whenever a berry turned red. I have more berries to plant this spring so I hope we get enough for shortcake. Unfortunately, I foolishly didn’t take any more pictures of it and there is nothing to see right now. I will update in summer 2015.

As far as strawberry varieties, I really want to see if I can get some amazing ones growing. I’ve bought the following seeds/roots:
Pineberry, Alpine Strawberry and Evie Everbearing Strawberry.

So far the pineberry has not germinated. I have had success with growing strawberries from seed in the past, so I’m hoping the seeds will germinate soon. If not I will buy the bare root plants I found on Amazon. I really want to try the pineberry variety.

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Bush planting experiment

I have 40 acres of mostly unused land with pretty much dead dirt. Our house came with an established tree line/wind break that has Caragana bushes as the first planting. These bushes are thriving and sending out constant new shoots. These bushes also fix nitrogen. So I decided to dig up some shoots and see if I could plant them in a far corner of the property. I dug up 11 saplings and marched over to a dead corner of our land. There I dug holes as deep as the shovel head, about 1′. Then I planted the saplings in the bottom and filled the hole entirely with mulch. I forgot about them for awhile and when I finally remembered to go check they were looking a little wilted. So I took some wine bottles (I save all my wine bottles) and filled them with water. The wine bottles work just like those aqua globes you see advertised on TV. I only filled the bottles once. Otherwise the bushes were on their own. I’d say 80% survived my neglect. I would probably have some amazing bushes this spring, except the rabbits got to them. I’m not sure if any will recover from that.

Caragana parent bush in established tree line.

Sapling as seen in hole without mulch. This was taken the day we watered them.

Son helping me insert watering wine bottles into plant holes.

Plant covered in mulch and growing well.

Pictures of the bushes now. Showing some green but chewed up by rabbits.

If you want to get some nitrogen fixing Caragana seeds
and give them a try I find them prolific and a joy to have around. The bees love them as well.

On another plus side, I now have well fertilized holes on my property thanks to this experiment and rabbits.

Blue’s first tail display

Blue has grown a mighty fine train. This weekend was the first time I’ve seen him display it. I had to take the pictures from inside the house. I didn’t want to spook him off. Still, marvelous!

Oh, but the ladies were not impressed.

This is our front lawn. I had swept a bunch of cat food out onto it and the peas have been busy hunting it out.

Blue kept trying to threaten this rooster but the rooster was unimpressed. Blue needn’t waste his time. This rooster is very young still but I have a feeling we will be forced to eat him. He’s a bit….too friendly with people. I think he’ll get mean.

I’ve raised these peas since they were 6 weeks old. I’ve lost 2 but the remaining 3 are marvelous!

Here is a baby pic.

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.

La Vieille Ferme Recolte 2012 Wine and La Tournette French Raclette Cheese

Wine:

La Vieille Ferme Recolte 2012 $9.99

[Abbreviated from back of bottle] This full-bodied and fruity wine comes from vines grow high on the flops of mount ventoux, one of the best vineyards in the Rhone valley…..A blend of Grenache, Syrah, Carignan, and Chateu de grapes……..full of fruit and spice aromas, it has soft tannins and good body.

Cheese:

La Tournette French Raclette Cheese $7.61

[I made this up after minimal research] La Tournette is a mountain in France and Raclette is the process of scraping off the melted part of cheese for a meal. So, while I couldn’t find a direct definition for this cheese I imagine this is made in the mountain region and meant for melting.

Wine Review- Not too dry or bitter. Pairs well with the cheese. The cheese seems to bring out a sweeter flavor in the wine. A Honeycrisp apple also helps bring out a sweeter flavor in the wine. The wine has a spicier flavor on its own. Of course, the more you drink the better the wine tastes! We did end up drinking the entire bottle so it’s a winner in my book.

Cheese Review- Well, Daughter spit it out. She did not like it. I found it to have a smoky flavor that was quite pleasant with French bread or honeycrisp apple. I wished I’d bought grapes as I thought it would have been an amazing pairing. Alone the cheese is a bit bitter and sharp. Still, not unpleasant.

Ok, so this is our first review. Let me set the scene. I bake the bread, clean my cheese plate, cut the apple and plate everything. The kids can smell food from miles away. As soon as those platters of food hit the table both kids were surrounding it begging to eat. I insisted they clear out so I could get a few pictures with our crappy camera. That achieved, the family crowded around and began eating. It didn’t take long for Ella to end up on the table, the wine had to be removed. Then Ella was removed for fear she would fall off the table. Then we were trying to talk but the kids kept interrupting.

Finally I set both kids up with apples and crayons and we were able to review the wine and cheese. We were also able to laugh a lot about our life as Ella kept trying to color on her hands. I ended up making paper airplanes and reading books. A bottle of wine mellowed us out quite nicely though and we had fun chasing the kids about before researching whales on Youtube.