Living in the Wyoming countryside
Yes, another picture post of our snow harvesting.
The snow was deep. About 8 inches. The kids really loved it. Mostly
I was totally impressed with my snow collection though.
That’s a 3 foot deep krater filled to the top.
And the swales are even with the berms. So about 3 feet of snow collection there as well.
Earthworks are a total success!
The commercially farming neighbor isn’t keeping any of this moisture.
Most moisture that arrives to us arrives in the form of snow. It also arrives at about 60 m.p.h. Blowing snow is what I set out to catch and the swales/berms and kraters have proven they are capable of catching it. The best part of that is that they then keep the snow melt in place as they were made for water harvesting.
The snow we had over Thanksgiving was not blowing. In fact it was a beautiful snow, soft, powdery and almost straight down. While our earthworks naturally filled with snow it was not anything that flat land couldn’t have done. So, what surprised me about this snow harvest is that the clover caught it. Acres of tall sweet clover that annoyed us all summer has done wonders at collecting snow.
Mowed contour with clover on both sides
We decided to experiment with this clover, which we did not plant but have in abundance. Husband mowed decently on contour. At least he was able to do some experimental lines, N, S, E, W and an X patter before a loose fence wire got caught in the mower. Then it snowed and everything was a mess. So some mowing was accomplished but not as much as we would have liked. We thought where he mowed would collect blown snow and the remaining, tall clover would assist in keeping it from blowing it away. We may still be right about that but what it did was show us how much tall plant matter can collect and keep at it’s base.
This clover has been interesting to us. It arrived gradually and now we have roughly 35 acres of it. It grows extremely tall. So tall in fact that our ducks often get lost in it. While hunting them down one day in the car we disturbed two deer, which we wouldn’t have seen if they hadn’t started jumping, as the clover was taller than they. This clover is a food for so many animals, our own included. I just hate how tall it is, how smothering it is to the plants I want and how it destroys our mower when we do mow it. Also, it hides those pesky rabbits from predator view.
We caught way more snow than the wheat field behind us.
Still, if it gathers a lot of snow and keeps it on our property I suppose this clover invasion is a blessing, though a mixed one.
This majestic and unintelligent dog certainly loves the snow.
I loved how the different outdoor elements were iced over. This is a clump of grass.
I thought the garden gate I made from a crib mattress looked beautiful all iced up.
I am happy to announce that our cider orchard is almost done. Ok, let’s just say it’s officially started. We took a portion of the backyard and fenced it off. We tilled and planted clover and wildflowers as mentioned in this post. The clover and such are filling in nicely, so are the weeds.
We have a lovely cattle panel arch leading into the cider orchard. I have a kiwi planted near it but that kiwi has been hit and miss for some time so I don’t know that it will recover. If it doesn’t I’ll eventually move some grape cuttings into the area.
We have the swales running in a circle around the orchard. They have proven that they can collect water already, though it was more of an aesthetic and ease of watering thing for me.
The trees are newly grafted heirloom varieties. It took us quite some time to get the infrastructure of the orchard up and thus the trees were in tree pots for some time. These tree pots. They didn’t do all that well in them. It was really hot but I did water them daily. Even still it is my guess that they cooked in the pots. The ones on the outside of did poorly. Some died but the rootstock of some lived. I’m going to let it grow and re-graft later on.
Not all the plants in the cider orchard are cider apples. I have hidden rose apples planted in there because I want to have them close to the house for my personal enjoyment. I also have a black currant bush in there that can be used as a mix in for cider or just for personal enjoyment. Eventually I’ll have a few specialty plums thrown in as well.
The wild flowers and vetch seeds were thrown onto the berm of the swale and into the back of the cider orchard where it is too shady to grow trees and also already has established willow trees.
Where the barn is it is very shady a lot of the time. Thus I am planting a shade garden. I have some hostas, a golden bell flower and a few other things thrown in. The wildflower seeds are doing best in this area.
Eventually I hope to have a lovely table and chairs and picnic amidst the flowers and trees. I think it will be a lovely retreat for us!
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.
