Farming and Orchard – Page 16

Planting predator proof grapes

I love our property but it comes with challenges. One of those challenges is living within oil drilling country. All of us noticed a huge influx of ground animals once the oil play began. They shy away from the vibrations and seek out calmer areas. Since they are not drilling near houses, they have sought out houses. The results have been pretty devastating:

The roots of this crab apple tree were completely consumed.

I have them traveling about in my berms, which is a pretty big concern for me. I have not noticed any dead fruit trees, yet, but I’m waiting.

So when it came time to plant my very expensive grapes, I wanted no ground animal intrusion.

I had many large tree pots from big box stores sitting around at home. So I cut the bottom out of 10 of them and then cut chicken wire large enough to cover the hole.

Then I began digging. I had to dig a hole big enough to hold the pots. I placed the chicken wire in the bottom of the hole and then placed the pot inside. I then filled the sides of the hole around the pot.

Daughter was pleased with the play area I had established for her. She was happy to throw dirt into the bottom for me.

Then just fill with dirt, compost and a grape seedling. I covered it with straw mulch as a finishing touch.

I had so many problems with my grapes. As you can see here I had mold, fungus and general death. Some of them pulled through with an organic fungicide spray and a few just died.

This is one of the plants that was suffering from fungus. It pulled through.

Same plant dying back in winter.

Same plant gone dormant.

I did move all of my grapes in the fall. I moved each of them under a standard sized fruit tree. I then mulched and held the mulch down with cement rip rap.

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.

Indoor Seed Starting Part 2

Part 1 can be found here.

The gardening never stops! Here is a bit more of what I’ve been up to and how I have been germinating my seeds.

Last year I received some random seeds from China. A “commercial sample” is what the customs form said. The odd thing is that I have no idea what company sent me the sample. The package does not say anywhere. So odd. There were 3 packets: Saffron, Lavender and Spearmint. I decided to plant them and see if they were still good and if they would germinate at all. They have all germinated and this is how I did it.

The seeds came in these nifty little foil baggies.

Now, I don’t know much about Saffron but I highly doubted that those were saffron seeds. What little I know of Saffron growing is bulbular. I could find nothing online about seeds. So I did a quick Google search and discovered that those are Safflower seeds, also known as “Bastard Saffron” as it is used the same way. Now Safflower has an amazing taproot. I certainly want to capitalize on that out in the orchard. Thus I planted a few safflower seeds and held the rest to be sown directly into my fruit tree guilds.

I just happened to have 3 plastic containers that had held ravioli for our dinner. So I cleaned them out and filled them with dirt. As a germination tray they work great!

I watered and bagged the “Saffron” and left it on the bathroom counter to germinate. You can see that I already have 2 other seed types set out for germination. In the background there is an egg carton with Black Crim Tomatoes and one with Jalapenos. The tomatoes have germinated already. The Jalapenos haven’t yet. As soon as I have a moment I will be cutting the individual cells of the egg carton apart to plant the tomatoes into cups to grow out.

The Safflower seeds germinated just fine. The Lavender did pretty well but the spearmint only has a few germinated seeds thus far. They are all sitting in a window now, growing away.

Last year I cut up a whole bunch of English Ivy to propagate. I wrapped each piece in newspaper and stuffed them in a plastic tray. I’s been sitting in our kitchen window since fall and I had honestly thought they had all died. I would forget to water them and such. Ivy appears to enjoy neglect as I have quite a few that appear ready for transplant. The plan for these babies is to plant 3 to a fence panel to grow up over the fence and hopefully make it a lot prettier than it is now. Plus a bit of wind block I hope!

I had a hard time getting any good pictures of this but I tried. I am having some sort of infestation in the house. I imagine this is a result of ordering plants from all over the globe. They are these little white dots all over a lot of my plants. I use tape and get them off. What could it be though? I finally just sprayed everything with an organic insecticide. I am a bit baffled on how an insecticide can be organic but…whatever.

Critters and Bugs, Oh My!

It has been an enlightening year on the farm. I am not sure if we simply had more bugs than ever or if I’m just noticing them for the first time.

We have always had a plethora of spiders hanging around the house. We don’t disturb them and they don’t disturb us. We get some massive Cat eye spiders on our front porch. The kids love to look at them and feed them the occasional pest. One spider that I was aware we had around, but had never seen so many of, is the black widow. I have had to give the kids a few lectures on not picking up bugs, don’t stick your hands in dark places, come get us if you see a black spider, etc. They freak me out honestly. I don’t relish getting bit but I can’t imagine what I would do if one of the kids got bit. Lose my mind I imagine. So, while we tend to have a lassez faire attitude with most bugs, but particularly spiders, I’ve been killing these.

These spiders were all found in and around the kids outdoor play equipment. Really upsetting for me!

Now this next bug is a complete mystery. I found a few of them around last year and have no idea what they are. They look like massive ants to me. This one was easily an inch long. If you have any ideas please leave me a comment.

We tend to have waves of grasshoppers around the property. One year it felt like a plague had descended upon us. You couldn’t take a single step without the things hopping about. Not so terrible if they didn’t hop into your shoe. Oh so disgusting! We have chickens now though. I think it has helped with our grasshopper population. Now we have enough to amuse us but not so much that going outside is a nightmare. Our son really enjoys the grasshoppers.

Now some bugs make perfect poultry food. Whenever we see “puddles” we make sure to grab them to take the the birds. Slimy little slugs. I might need more ducks if we keep getting so many. The birds really love them though! Another thing they love are grubs. I dug quite a few out of the garden last year. The birds love to see us coming.

Now our bids are free range. They just don’t tend to range all that far. They get a bit farther out every year. Maybe someday I won’t have to get rid of insect pests myself.

“puddles”

grubs

We had a very special visitor this fall. He was found on our sons bulldozer. I think he had an injured leg. I took a few pictures and then removed him from the kid danger zone. I hope to see many more praying mantis in the future.

One bug that I detest are the red biting ants we have EVERYWHERE. They are terrible things and they kill so much land with their mounts.

Not all bugs that we have are unwanted. In fact, I raise meal worms for the birds.

Now we also have some interesting critters about. I found a salamander in the chicken run once. Unfortunately it was quite dead. We found a small little lizard in the berms. It is the first time any of us had seen this particular type of lizard. Since our son was not with us at the time I made sure to hold it just until he could see it. He loved it! We also save frogs every year. As the puddles dry up we go around fishing the tadpoles out and bringing them home to grow out. Then we release them back to the wild. Everyone enjoys the frogs!

No Freeze, No Fuss, Automatic Poultry Waterer

As most animal owners know, water is the biggest issue in winter. I bought this Awesome Waterer after spending several winters miserably hauling water out to the barn in milk jugs. My problem is that I have ducks and chickens together. So, as soon as I bring out water the ducks dive in and splash it all out of the dish.

I bought the waterer and tested it through the summer. I wanted to see if it could handle the duck stress. It did so admirably. So the next step was winterizing it. To do that I needed to buy a very short hose. I tried to find one at a local box store but I waited too late into fall and could find none. So I ended up buying this 4′ Utility Hose. I then had to buy some heat tape to keep it all from freezing. This proved difficult again as I wanted an odd size of tape. I ended up purchasing this heat tape. It was just long enough. Home Depot does carry this brand of heat tape but I could only find 6′ and 12′ in my store. I needed enough to go over our spigot and run around the water dish. 9′ was just barely long enough. I then bought some pipe insulation and set it all up. I used electrical tape to tape it all together.

Here is my lovely finished product. I have always used 1/2 a dog kennel for summer watering so I put the dish inside it and filled around it with sand to keep down on the mess. I need to buy more sand to perfect it.

I did end up adding more tape to the section of hose that you can see in this picture.

My welshies hang about the water area. I just empty it out once a day. When it is really cold (in the single digits) I do have to go break the ice off the very top of it in the mornings. Otherwise it is doing really well. It has only frozen once, and then because someone unplugged the heat tape. I don’t want to point fingers but I have noticed a particular chicken that thinks it needs to perch on the extension cord.

This post contains affiliate links. I bought those exact products from Amazon and attest to their greatness.

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.