cover crop – Peacock Orchard

Sainfoin Year 4

Every year we eagerly await our sainfoin bloom. Acres of pink flowers blowing in the breeze. The sound of bees buzzing and watching butterflies flit from flower to flower fills me with joy. The sainfoin, it’s a success.

This year the pigs set out every morning to much their way through the field of growing sainfoin plants. I find how the pigs graze on the sainfoin quite interesting. They’ll take a bite of the top of a plant and then move on to bite a different one, leaving tracks through the fields as they explore all the plants with their mouths. It is also a very sustainable way of grazing. As they never eat an entire plant there are always flowers left to bloom and go to seed.

The field in it’s beginning growth this spring being grazed by our boar.

I don’t believe the sainfoin is as tall this year as it was last. It was a weird spring though, with snows into June and warmer weather in between. It killed many a plant and tree with the instability of the weather. Still, the field was tall enough that I lost the pigs in it entirely several times and freaked out thinking they’d wandered away or been taken.

We wandered through the fields many an evening trying to determine if the field was thickening and spreading or not. It has been determined that it is indeed spreading by seed beyond the original planting area. We can tell because we planted right up to the fence line and there are many plants on the other sides of the fences now.

We also have new critter activity in the area. We’ve had a badger going crazy digging holes everywhere, even in the sainfoin field. I’m interested to see what impact that has on the sainfoin around it next year.

Also, if you are wondering if it’s nutritious, enjoy this picture of Tu-Tu who clearly isn’t missing anything in her diet.

Sainfoin- An experiment still in progress

If you had asked me last year what I thought of our sainfoin experiment I would have told you it was a failure. A walk along the property today has proven otherwise. The sainfoin, It’s ALIVE! Right now it is the same size as last years seedlings. It has a million more leaves though.

I could be wrong, maybe it’s the size of them making me think this, but I swear there are more plants as well.

well it’s hard to see each plant but there are 6 plants in this frame. Last year I would have expected to see 2.

Our ground is awful, as you can see. I’m excited to see what difference the sainfoin makes of this mess. It’s coming up in all the cracks from what I see. Sainfoin does love dry. Dry is what we have.

I was assisted in todays sainfoin adventure by my plant scout and all around bossy photographer.

I was hindered by the girl who refuses to walk this much. So much. Wagon AND stroller much. Sigh

My kitchen gardens are finally ready for fall!

I love this pic because Son looks like the boss at a construction site.

In my previous post I discussed using straw mulch in one of my kitchen gardens over the winter to help prevent weeds and retain moisture. I intend to fence that garden still. All of the posts are in place and I just need to go out and attach the fence. However, the straw does attract a lot of garden pests so I am fine leaving it un-fenced until planting time this spring. The chickens are doing a lot of work in there right now.

The mulched garden is my largest garden. However, I also have the sunken hugel bed garden on the other side of the house. It has been completely harvested, the peppers dug up and brought inside to over winter. I thought I would try a cover crop on that garden. I had winter barley and I was excited to try Fukuoka style farming. Basically that means I was going to grow the winter barley and inter-sow my spring seeds among the maturing barley.

Why barley? It was cheap, I didn’t want to do wheat as we are surrounded by it and I thought it would be interesting to try eating it.

I broadcast sewed my barley seeds during a rain storm and was excited. At least until the next morning. The chickens, the ducks, the turkeys, the peacocks, hell, everyone. They were all eating my seeds. They ate every last one. This just will not do.

So I decided to do this up right. I took the bedding from the chicken coop and spread it over the entire garden area. Then I spread compost on top of that. Fenced it off, made a gate out of Sons old crib mattress and planted the barley again. Success!

I had 2 very good assistants helping me with every step of this project. Don’t you just love the little shovels my Mother-In-Law gave them!

Filling up another raised bed. I put raised beds all along the east side of this garden because of sunlight requirements. Should elevate those plants so they get enough sunlight and having them on the east side prevents them from shading out the garden.

Kids are spreading seed (mostly in one place as you can tell) while I finish the fence.

Where there is a will, there is a way. Chickens!

Gate from the old mattress and pallet wood. I kind of like the wonkiness of it. It’s so unique!

I took yarn and strung it over the top to prevent my peas flying in. I was ready to plant again.

So the barley has been planted again, I’ve watered it, it’s raining now, time will tell. I’ll keep you updated on the success of this experiment!

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.