winter – Peacock Orchard

Life, as it has become

Staying home has been different. I have so much more time for projects and yet…not. Kids have a funny way of doing that.

I’m doing things I haven’t before as a mother. I’m not used to making their breakfasts or their lunches during the week. Of course I had enough requests for bacon and eggs today that sometimes they’re rather indistinguishable. Home made chicken and french fries is always a hit. Today it was picnic on the floor lunch. This always ends up torturing our giant dogs who sit a respectable distance and wait for the kids to abandon their plates. Oh how many tears have been shed over abandoned plates being consumed by ravenous canines.

I am often lost on how to occupy them as well. I’m anti-electronics, which limits my winter time options. Luckily we have an unfinished basement. Unluckily the spiders loved our unfinished basement. So we fumigated. It did a pretty decent job. Now I’ve simply had to clean up all of the stuff we’ve left down there. It appears that whenever we had something I didn’t know what to do with, I simply put it in the basement. Procrastination is my thing. Things are cleaning up nicely and the kids have all of the things they’d not normally be able to play with in the winter. We have bikes, scooters, roller skates and some large plastic tractors down there. We also moved 1/3 of their toys down there. It’s been a great place for us to go and work off some of this winter time energy.

I’m also trying out this whole kids crafts thing. They’ve finger painted (whole body painted is more accurate) on a tarp in the living room whilst I mudded the new drywall. We’ve done pipe cleaner building. Ok, ok, I’ve built things with pipe cleaners and the demands were pretty ridiculous. They each have their own boxes of personal supplies: pencils, glue, scissors, etc. Things are going pretty well.

Still, I’m struggling. They want TV. It’s blizzarding. I’m out of occupying ideas. I guess one show won’t kill them, or me.

Speaking of me, well I might just drive my poor husband batty. He came home one day to find our bedroom furniture in the burn pit. I did some re-arranging to say the least. Every day he comes home and something is different. Walls are missing, walls have appeared, stuff is in different places, I’ve got a new project. Building trains with the kids had me close to the windows and….

I think I have an idea about what to do with one really tall one. Now to get the right plants and some planters and and…..sigh. Help us!

2016 Winter planning and a year in review

Winter is a slow outdoor season for obvious reasons. I’ve had to do some pest proofing of various trees and bushes but for the most part we just wait for snow and then marvel at the resulting white. December I begin spring planning. Last years planning involved a lot of tree purchasing and mapping out of various earthworks. Dreams of our greenhouse, pergola and water harvesting mechanisms were also included.

We accomplished some of those tasks this year along with a lot of tasks that weren’t pre-planned. This year we managed the following:

The mini-Kraters were built and planted.
Water harvesting from our driveway was increased.
Experimental seeds were planted. (sainfoin and a lot of other cover crop seeds)
The sunken hugel was built and planted.
Kitchen gardens were expanded.
The yards were tilled and planted with low growing clover.
Cider orchard was built and planted
We got pigs
We had a ton of hatchlings
We lost a ton of hatchlings (all but 1 baby peacock died this year).
We did the back porch project that included re-flooring, painting and wiring the sun room for lights.

Gosh, I’m getting tired thinking about the things we did this year. Still a lot to accomplish though. The major projects I had wanted to get done this year were not done. Now that I am not working these will be at the top of my project list. The pergola, the greenhouse and starting all fruit trees from seed. Because of the loss of my income I’m going to make a real push at growing my own from seed and growing root stocks to graft from the successful experimental trees.

Also on the list is improved food production in the kitchen garden and we are planning to butcher the pigs at home . I am trying not to set us too many tasks as house maintenance often surprises us. I know we need to repaint the house and probably caulk the windows ASAP.

One major project I want to take on is building a natural swimming pond that is also going to collect roof water. I admit, that will probably be #1 on my list. Stay tuned for that. I have a habit of over doing ponds. Hopefully this one will be sealed better than the last one I dug.

Other than that I’m preparing the basement now for the kids and for seedling growing. I’m also managing our permaculture group. Whoo. I’m glad I quit my job now. I’m going to be BUSY!

It’s time to begin gardening inside again.

Sons dresser is in use again as plant habitat. I dug up 4 pepper plants that I’s started late in the season. Some of them were setting fruit but there was no way they were going to survive the dropping temperatures to ripen. Inside they came. Also inside now is the ginger plant and jasmine plant that had hung out on the back porch all summer. They really enjoyed the summer weather and have grown nicely. Do you like the giant web in that window? We have 2 such spiders in separate windows doing a good job of collecting pests for us. We haven’t bothered them. We like spiders.

Thai hot pepper anyone?

I am having an issue with the black peppercorn plant still. It has been infested with these little white eggs for some time. I never see a bug, just the eggs. I keep doing stuff to get rid of them but so far, no luck. No real ID on what it is either. I suspect spider mites but I’m not sure.

I am quitting my day job in December. I have plans to alter our unfinished basement to become my new plant nursery. So stay tuned for that!

Fall planting plans

Last week was unseasonably cold. I was becoming concerned we were going to have a freeze before my garden was done. Thankfully we did not. It did have us thinking about our fall planting plans though. So much to do before winter and I keep adding seeds to the mix. Here is a short list of what we are going to plant:

Egyptian Walking Onions

I purchased the bulbs off of Etsy and I’m hoping the reviews were correct and they work wonders for me. We have issues growing onion and I’m not quite sure why. They never get particularly large, if they grow at all. I’m hoping this variety changes that!

Garlic

These little bulbs are the result of letting your garlic scrapes grow and go to seed. Purchased from the same Etsy seller as the onions I realize I’ll be waiting 2 years to get the benefit of this planting. Still, the quantity is enough that when I get a harvest it will be huge.

Winter Barley

https://greencoverseed.com/species/1054

We bought an acres worth of winter barley. It is an experiment for us. I am hoping to get some for eating, some for animal forage and my husband wants some for beer.

Nitro Radish

https://greencoverseed.com/species/1060

I bought nitro radish as an experiment in loosening our farm compacted land. I’m interested to see what it does for our soil quality and if it distracts the ground animals from my trees, all the better.

Dryland pasture seed

I bought this seed last year and threw out 2 acres this spring. I still have 2 acres of seed sitting in my garage. I’m going to spread it around the parts of our land that are not growing much of anything. I’m interested to see how successful winter sowing pasture is here.

Alfalfa

Alfalfa is another seed I bought quite a few acres of an simply didn’t plant all of in this spring. I’m going to be seeding it in areas I think can use the nitrogen (like our tree line) and areas that simply need something more than dirt growing. So that is all we have going on for winter sowing. We have about acres worth of seed. Should be an interesting experiment

No Freeze, No Fuss, Automatic Poultry Waterer

As most animal owners know, water is the biggest issue in winter. I bought this Awesome Waterer after spending several winters miserably hauling water out to the barn in milk jugs. My problem is that I have ducks and chickens together. So, as soon as I bring out water the ducks dive in and splash it all out of the dish.

I bought the waterer and tested it through the summer. I wanted to see if it could handle the duck stress. It did so admirably. So the next step was winterizing it. To do that I needed to buy a very short hose. I tried to find one at a local box store but I waited too late into fall and could find none. So I ended up buying this 4′ Utility Hose. I then had to buy some heat tape to keep it all from freezing. This proved difficult again as I wanted an odd size of tape. I ended up purchasing this heat tape. It was just long enough. Home Depot does carry this brand of heat tape but I could only find 6′ and 12′ in my store. I needed enough to go over our spigot and run around the water dish. 9′ was just barely long enough. I then bought some pipe insulation and set it all up. I used electrical tape to tape it all together.

Here is my lovely finished product. I have always used 1/2 a dog kennel for summer watering so I put the dish inside it and filled around it with sand to keep down on the mess. I need to buy more sand to perfect it.

I did end up adding more tape to the section of hose that you can see in this picture.

My welshies hang about the water area. I just empty it out once a day. When it is really cold (in the single digits) I do have to go break the ice off the very top of it in the mornings. Otherwise it is doing really well. It has only frozen once, and then because someone unplugged the heat tape. I don’t want to point fingers but I have noticed a particular chicken that thinks it needs to perch on the extension cord.

This post contains affiliate links. I bought those exact products from Amazon and attest to their greatness.

Gardening in winter- Outdoors

It may seem like there is not much to do in winter. That you can sit back and relax until it is time to get busy planting in spring. The opposite is actually true. I feel like winter is the busiest time for me, but perhaps that is because it is unpleasant work most of the time. When you do not have a high cold tolerance going out in freezing weather just sucks. You might be wondering what I could possibly have to do. Other than the animals, which require more intensive and hands on care when it is cold, plants need winter love too.

This winter has been rather stressful for me actually. This is the first winter with the orchard trees and a bad one as far as temp, wind and lack of moisture go. Our windbreak/tree line is in bad shape. I’ve been watching conifers die all over the place but I was hoping mine were established enough to persevere. They aren’t.

Dying pine

The tree line did help keep snow. That makes me happy!

We went out on March 1 to see how things were surviving. I think it is safe to say none of the black walnuts have made it. Between my lack of attention and rabbits, they all died. The fruit trees are looking very good though. The swales have done a very good job of collecting what snow we get. I bent a branch back on every tree just as a bit of a test and all but 1 appear to be healthy. The bubblegum plum that struggled last year does not appear to have made it through the winter. I suppose I won’t know for sure until spring.

The grapes, who knows. I made a lot of mistakes with the grapes. I planted them wrong, they caught every disease they could and then I pruned them badly and transplanted them worse. I have more grapes coming this year and I am going to do a lot better by them, I hope.

Helpers

Bend test

This tree….the wind just keep blowing it over.

The blackberries I’m unsure on. They did really great last year but they are looking a bit rough now. I’ve fenced them but the wind and rabbits keep getting through anyway. I can tell they’ve been really chewed up. I’m interested to see how they spring back.

I enjoyed seeing snow collecting not on our entire driveway but just in the swales we put in last year. Very refreshing! My little helpers enjoyed this trek outdoors as well.