Mini-Krater gardens first snow.

Harvesting Snow in a Krater Garden

I’ve been intensely interested in how much snow our Kraters may collect. They’ve done pretty well with rainwater collection and I assumed they’d fill with blowing snow, but wasn’t sure. The results are in after our first snow.

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Deepest Krater with pawpaw island. Had about a foot of snow all around.

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Largest Krater in circumference. Snow only collected on one side.

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Goji Krater, did the absolute best. For some reason this Krater is just in an ideal location. It always collects the most water, the plants here did the best and it collected the most snow. I’ll have to think and observe why this krater has done so well.

Just for fun here are a few more pics of our first snow collection and fun:

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This is our newly renovated driveway drainage ditch. Filled about 3 feet with snow.

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This is another driveway drainage earthwork and the path from the garage to the ditch filled pretty well with snow. Enough for the kids to enjoy fully!

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As you can see from this pic the snow blows and sometimes we will have 0 snow on large amounts of the property as there is nothing to catch and keep it. We experimented with our earthworks, which work well, and also selective mowing of our incredible sweet clover sections. Selective, on contour mowing harvested a ton of snow. It was far from the house, and the kids were happy where they were, so I didn’t get pics of this. I’ll try to later on.

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My kids are so adorable!

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I convinced them to go to the barn to feed the pigs and they did this while I was busy doing chores.

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Our akbash is such a weirdo. He doesn’t know what to do with the pigs. He just stood there wagging his tail and doing this high pitched whine that the pigs didn’t like at all.

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Such cute little piggies! Getting friendlier every day.

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Meanwhile, thanksgiving dinner keeps threatening me.

Water harvesting in mini Kraters

Our mini Kraters are doing well. In fact we haven’t had to water yet. The cover crop seeds are coming up. The bushes are flourishing. The trees are coming out of dormancy. It is an exciting time!

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Every single Krater had standing water in the bottom of it. This will dry up fairly quickly but it is an AMAZING water source!

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I did water the bushes after planting. They were leafed out on delivery and I didn’t bother to harden them off, thus they needed water.

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So much water in the kraters that you can see it from a distance.

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This is a plum tree that is doing amazingly well. Very happy with it! I did have a fair amount of death over the winter. I blame myself, I pretty much killed them all.

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The good news is the rootstocks are alive. So I’m letting the rootstocks grow to be re-grafted later.

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The unintentional pond was pumped dry but it has since refilled a bit.