orchard – Page 6 – Peacock Orchard

My current plant and tree sources

I have bought many, many plants for our property from many different sources. I thought I would recommend a few here.

This is where I bought my very first fruit and nut trees. I ordered in July, and had them sent to me immediately; all of my trees arrived well packaged, alive and grew amazingly well. I am very satisfied with all of my interactions with this company and have spent far too much money buying all of the amazing trees they advertise. Every time I go to their site I’m like a kid in a candy store. Someone, please, help!

This year’s order was extremely large and I had some mild complaints. It was nothing they could control, the weather was freaky bad and many people had nursery plants struggling. Stark took some of the plants I had ordered off as they were not up to standards. I hated that but I understood the reasoning.

Arberfoyle.org

I bought my first 10 grape vines from this amazing website. I bought 5 Frontenac and 5 Valiant. The grapes arrived in perfect condition and even held over while I wasted time preparing the ground for them. These grapes did not survive though. I do believe that is more of my user error than the grapes themselves. I had a huge problem with mold and fungus and I don’t believe I was watering enough. Then I transplanted them and yeah, bad.

Oikostreecrops.com

This was recommended by someone on Permies.com, so I clicked over and began perusing the various offerings. The trees are sent much smaller than those bought on Starkbros but they are also much cheaper with a different selection. I bought an apricot, some persimmons and various nut trees from this site. They all arrived in great condition and have been doing very well outside.

Cold Stream Farm

I loved this nursery for bulk orders. I ordered a bunch of hazelnut, black locust, oak, mulberry and maple from them. I also ordered a witch hazel which is beautiful. I have to get more!

Gurneys.com

I bought 10 Reliance grapes from Gurneys. They arrived and I planted immediately. They are coming out of dormancy now and all appear alive. I was very pleased about the size of the roots on these.

Greencoverseed.com

This is where I bought a variety of cover crop seeds. I loved their selection. It was kind of addicting looking at the selections. I did have problems ordering but again, it was me, not them. Shipping is expensive but it is everywhere. I had some pretty big orders and they all arrived well packaged and labeled. The seeds are coming up and I’m very pleased with them.

Circle S Seeds

This company sent us our Delaney Sainfoin. We planted it and it sprouted and is coming up all over in a week’s timeframe. In fact, if you heard how we planted it you’d be shaking your head. We simply took the grader-scraper to the soil and then broadcast seeded. I’m really happy with these seeds!

Johnny’s Selected Seeds

I bought a fair amount of kitchen garden seeds from them. Time will tell how they do but I think they were pretty great.

Ebay

I did a lot of shopping on Ebay. What can’t you find on Ebay? I bought bamboo, Russian almond, pomegranate, mulberries, grape cuttings, pineberry seeds, grape seeds, kiwi plants and on and on. I made sure to check the sellers rating before buying but I am really happy with how it all turned out. You can see a lot of those plants in my “Gardening in Winter” post.

NONE of these are affiliate links of any sort. This is simply my experience stated for your benefit.

The Unintentional Pond

This was not supposed to happen. This was supposed to be another Krater. This is awful!

We were supposed to have 8 Kraters. We only have 6. This unintentional pond is the reason why. It was dug just like the rest of the Kraters. The front loader scooped out about 2′ of soil. Then it began raining. It rained, and rained, and rained. The Kraters all had water in them but this one, this was something else. We found things digging that we hadn’t expected. We knew our soil was clay. What we didn’t know is that sand and rock was not that far under the clay. It’s about 2-3′ under, in some places. Not 30′ away from this “pond” is a Krater with a rock bottom.

This Krater has black clay. Lots and lots of it. This black clay has proven to be amazing at holding water. So here we sat, with a 2′ deep pond we didn’t want to have. There was much debate about what to do with it. I bounced from keeping to annihilating this thing. I want ponds. Lots of them. What I don’t want is a pond in this location and I want a 2′ deep pond even less. What on earth would I do with a shallow pond?

So while I was out on the excavator I began scooping the clay from this pond. My hope was that I would breach the clay lining and the pond would drain. It turns out I did remove the lining in some spots. It’s hard to tell what you are doing when you are digging in muddy water. However, the pond has been draining, slowly, very slowly. This brings me relief as so far Son has lost a shoe and a dump truck in it.

We stopped digging Kraters because of the rain and because the last Krater is set to be next to this one. I don’t know what we’ll find. Will it be black clay? Will it be rock? I don’t know and I’m not sure I really want to find out.

I’m struggling with what to do with this giant hole after the water drains from this “pond”. I hesitate to plant into it because of how well it holds water. I just can’t leave it though. We think we’ll harvest all the black clay we can for the pond we DO want. After that it’s anyone’s guess. I suppose it’ll sit around for awhile until we finally get annoyed enough to do something. Part of me thinks we should fill it in. The other part thinks we should just plant water loving species in it. Aspen, cottonwood, willow. That seems like the lazier option so it’s probably what will end up happening.

It gave us some very peaceful and pretty sunsets though.

Son will really miss it!

Mini Krater Construction and Planting

Thanks to my bush experiment last year I decided Kraters were the way to go. Lots and lots of Kraters. So the first thing I did was make sure I was legally allowed to dig them. I am, so long as they remain under a certain size.

So the work began. We dug the initial holes with the front bucket loader.

texting and driving — Don’t text and drive. Unless you’re in the middle of a field on an excavator that has a top speed of .95 mph

Look ma, no hands!

Then I went in with our new excavator and did some ground softening/terracing work.

Of course, life is not complete without back breaking physical labor. So I went to work with the hoe refining my terraces. Then I had to add the topsoil back into the holes and hoe the terraces again.

It’s kind of hard to tell. The one krater has a rather unique design though. You see, I originally thought I’d be able to deepend the Kraters a bit. However, the kraters were pre-dug 20′ in diameter. The excavator has a 7′ reach. I wasn’t able to get to the middle, no matter how I tried. So I didn’t try to deepen any other kraters but the one ended up with an island in the middle. I find it a perfect place to plant a paw paw.

After I put the topsoil back on I cover cropped the works.

Husband and I took a day off to plant them out.

We had just a little big to plant…………………………..

The aronia berries are holding up to our hot weather nicely. The cover crop seeds are also coming up!

Finito.

I’ll update pictures when we have notable growth. It’s exciting!

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.

Growing Medicinals- An Introduction to our First Year

Since having children I have become increasingly interested in natures medicine. Having sick children is simply miserable. They are too young to take any over the counter drugs and I don’t know that I would want to give them to them anyway. So on top of growing delicious food for us to eat and sell I am growing medicinals. This will be our first year of planting and I am starting with 20 simple varieties. I will simply add on each year.

I have two elderberry plants arriving with this years fruit tree orders. I also have a witch hazel plant arriving with a different tree order. Otherwise I’ve simply ordered a large variety of seeds. Here is a brief list of what we are adding this year.

Lemonbalm

Echinacea

FeverFew

German Chamomille

Plantain

Borage

Ginseng

Mullien

Peppermint

Spearmint

Calendula

Lavendar

Marshmallow

Ginger

Catnip

Safflower

Creeping Thyme

Valerian Root

St John’s Wort

I’ll keep you updated in future posts with what works and what doesn’t when I get the time to test it out!

New purchases and Updates on growth

We recently purchased some grape vines from a hobbyist in Colorado, 5 dormant frontenac grapes and 2 Tramenier grape vines . We also received our Gurney’s grape order of 5 Reliant grape vines. They arrived bare root and dormant and so I took the risk of putting them outdoors, heavily mulched.

Furry butt here is the reason the grapes are caged. Don’t want him getting bored and chewing them up.

The pistachio tree is doing quite well.

The apple seeds I’ve been growing are hit and miss, but mostly doing well.

The lone locust tree seedling I have is growing slowly, but growing.

My tomato seedlings look…unchanged. I’m doing something wrong, obviously, but I do not know what.

I’ve had bug issues. The bamboo brought them into the house. The grapes cuttings I’m trying to root were the worst hit. I’ve since put diatomaceous earth on all of my indoor plants. We shall see if what they say is true, and the bugs die.

Everything else is not noticeably different but doing well.

I have planted out the hill I built for the kids slide, mulched it and tried my best to keep the mulch in place. I’m hoping in a few weeks I will be able to remove the fencing.

The birds enjoyed making it into the yard, usually heavily guarded by dogs. The ducks took the most advantage, though a few chickens came in. We had to escort everyone out before dinner, so the dogs could go back out. This gave the kids an opportunity to pet a chicken.

Yesterday we also brought home a new peacock, to replace the one that was killed by the dogs. He’s an india blue black shoulder. He had some broken feathers in transit but is still looking mighty fine. The kids took the opportunity, while the pea decided whether to come out of the cage or not, to pet his long tail and peak in on him.

We hope he adjusts well and that we can open the door to the barn again soon. They’ll all be locked in there until we are sure the new pea won’t fly away.

Here are a few extra, gratuitous pictures.