Experiment – Peacock Orchard

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 review of three potato gardening methods

I have finally completed the experiment. The potato tires were the last to be harvested and I am ready to give a review of the various methods I used. I did not do a lot of the container methods as I am terrible at remembering to water and we live in an arid region. I did not think they’d survive my climate and neglect in a container.

The first method I used was simply placing the potatoes on top of the soil of a raised bed and covering them with straw. Super simple. Good yields. Easy to harvest as well since they did not go very deep in the soil. My only issue with this was that the poultry liked to dig them up.

Potato tower being planted.

The second method was a potato tower made of tires. I only had it 2 tires high and perhaps I waited too long to put the second tire on. There were no potatoes in the second tire. Yields were less with this method than with the straw method. Also, it was dangerous. While I know the spiders were doing me a great service by eating pests I had quite a fright when I flipped the first tire and found a black widow living between the 2 tires. I found quite a few in my harvest. I won’t do this method again. It’s too labor intensive, yields were not great and it’s a risk to my health.

The third was perhaps the laziest method of them all since I never watered them, ever. I simply buried the seed potatoes in the berms. They did grow. They even produced a few seeds. However, I believe most of them to have been eaten by ground animals. That’s ok by me. Rather they eat the potatoes than my tree roots.

Experimentation on the farm

We are always experimenting to see what works best for our area. Last year it was swales and berms, which have been fairly successful. This year it will be different earth works and a deeper look into our personal food systems. Below is a list of our current experiments:

Corn- The best way to grow it. Sunken hugel bed and corn planted in the bottom of crater gardens for wind protection. Which will do best? I suspect the wind protection will be a big boon to growing corn here, though the soil at the bottom of the craters is quite hard, so may not allow the corn to grow sufficient roots. We shall see.
Potatoes- I bought 4 different varieties of potatoes and I am going to plant them in 3 different ways to see what does the best. Some will be planted in our raised bed, some in the berms and some in a tire tower.
Bio char is going to be added to a wide variety of plantings to see if it helps.
We are going to be testing the viability of Sainfoin as a dry land forage/hay.
I am going to be setting up the silvapasture but have not decided what the best planting method will be yet. Do I plant in holes for water and wind protection, but risking animal legs, or do I do swales? I don’t know. See what we come up with and how it goes.
Ginseng experimentation. Can it grow here? What is the proper soil/sun conditions in our area. We will be spreading 250 ginseng seeds through various rows of trees in our tree line and seeing what does best.
Best earth work for our environment. Now, I enjoy our swales and berms and still believe in them. However, the bush experiment from last year has me thinking basins and mini craters are going to be the absolute best way to grow things here. This years earth works will be building basins and mini craters and testing them against last years systems.

It is an exciting time for us here on the farm. Establishment has been stressful, expensive and exciting. I can’t wait to see how our plants succeed here.

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!

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.