Grafting

I decided to try my hand at grafting. It was a little late in the season, but I think it will still take. 🤞  Ideally you want to graft early spring, before leaves and buds open up.

  Why grafting?   I have a couple different types of apple trees, a couple different peaches, and a couple different stone frutis.  But they are all compatible, apples and apples, all the stone fruits, and all the pears.  I LOVE my granny smith apple tree, but my sister gets  AMAZING golden delicous apples from her tree.  I took a few of her branches and put them on my granny smith, then the granny smith went to the Honey Crips, and that went to the Crunch-a-Bunch.  Now, if one tree dies, I still have that kind of fruit on another tree.  If my apricot tree dies  I can still get apricotes from my nectarine tree.

Grafting is also great for those with limited space.  If you only have enough room for one peach, one pear, and one apple, you can graft a variety of fruits onto that tree.  Why settle for just golden delicious if you only have one tree, when you can also get granny smith, honey crisp, Johnathan apples, and any others you can find and grab a scion from.

Also, grafting is pretty much free.  Most people wont mind you taking a small branch or two, especially if they are pruning already anyway.
This kind of graft is called a wedge graft and it's my favorite because it's so simple.
Here's a step by step guide with pictures if you want to try it yourself.

Step #1 Find a good scion. The scion in the branch with traits you want, I picked this one because it has such yummy fruit!  You want your scion to be first year growth and about the thickness of a pencil.  Now you need to find a good rootstock branch.  The root stock is the tree you are grafting your new branch onto.  The branch needs to be first year, like your scion, and about the same size. If your root stock is bigger you can work with it.

Step #2 Trim your scion into a wedge. Use a clean, sharp knif to trim off the top and bottom of the scion.  Step #3 Cut a slit in the root stock. Step #2 and 3 are interchangeable.  You need one wedge and one slit.  It's easier, in my opinion to have the wedge be the scion, but I did both.

Step #4 put em together! Gently insert the wedge into the slit.  Make sure the cambium lines up the best you can.  The cambium in the thin green layer right underneath the bark.  This is why you want the branches to be about the same.  If your root stock is bigger, but a triangel out of the side to slip the wedge into or, you can stick your knif down right behind the bark of your root stock and creat a little pocket there.

Step #5 Tape it up.  The final step is to use some sort of plant tape that stretches to keep the two firmly togehter.  Grafting tape or garden tape will work great.  Now you just wait, and let God and nature do their thing.

Happy gardening and good luck!

I am so sorry it's been so long, I didn't realize I neglected an ENTIRE year!  I was in the garden last year an average of 8 hours, trying to get in all the rest of the guild plants I want.  Now that that is done I will proceed more slowly to fill in gaps and use my garden plan to make some vegetable patches and share with you what I learn along the way. Here is one hard lesson I have already learned. I have good news and bad news, and then more good news!  This year it finally clicked!  I was able to prune my grapes without the help of a step by step tutorial.  I pruned them WAY back, they were getting a bit out of control.  I'm really happy with the way they turned out...mostly.

  Unfortunately, I messed up, big time.  I noticed last year that one of the grapes didn't grow any new branches.  I knew it needed to be cut out when I pruned next so this Spring when I got down to pruning (a bit late I might add)  I cut it was back and then went for a saw to cut it out.  As I was sawing through it I noticed some green, it was till alive!  Thinking I must have picked the wrong trunk I went to the one next to it.  This time I checked to make sure it was dead.  I peeled back the bark to look for green, scraped it and didn't see any so I cut it out.  Turns out there was green and a lot of new growth attached to it. Now out favorite grapes is gone!😭
Here's what I learned.  Old canes look dead and they reach a point where they don't produce new growth, that's why we prune back so severely.  I didn't realize that I wasn't pruning back enough and the old, dead trunk, wasn't dead, it was relying on canes further up to produce new growth and it was so high it looked like there was no new growth.  So if you think you need to cut out a grape, start at the top and prune back first, you will probably find that it's still alive.
Once I saw my mistake I cut some canes to root and replant.  At least grapes root easily.

   On to more good news.  As I was pruning my black berries I noticed that they had grown TALL and flopped over to root themselves in new places.  Some I left there and some I moved out of the walk way to replant in the back yard.  I planted 6 in the back yard and have three new ones in the front yard.  If I had realized what they were doing I would not have stopped them last summer, I would have encouraged it.  I saw them flopping over and burrowing down in, but I kept pulling them up, thinking the difference in the look was because they were rotting in the ground, not rooting! Happy dance for more berry bushes!!!

I'd like to pretend that I've been flying under the radar while working quietly on a huge reveal or a big surprise, but the evidence speaks against me. 😅  The truth is that this summer was rough and I got very little done.

Once school started and we fell into our favorite rhythm of being home and doing school I found myself with more time and energy.  Homeschool is so restful for me, I love it so much.  I'm taking advantage of the fall to try and get in some last minute work.  During our Sabbath week I worked out in the garden almost 6 hours a day.  I pulled up all of my sunchokes and moved them, put up the frame for the girl's grape house, planted the last of the trees, we now have 25, and I'm only waiting for one more to come in the Spring.  Elizabeth helped me put in a flower bed I've been wanting for years and I finally finished my plan and got it all mapped out.  It's not exactly to scale, but it will give you an idea of what the finished product will look like.

I've been stuck on guilds.  I'm not sure where to start or how to start.  My trees are all very small right now, so if I plant on the drip line then I will have to move things every few years and I don't want to do that, but I also don't want to plant things out in the space that will eventually be the drip line 6 feet away.  I went with a few friends to tour an established permacultures yard in the hopes of getting some tips.  I got TONS of tips and inspiration as well.  I decided to make my guilds themed because that will give me an idea of what to plant and also make it more fun when people come over. So far we have guild plans for a cut flower garden, a tea garden, a kitchen herb garden, a medicinal garden, a chicken garden, three sisters gardens, and a vegetable garden.  Does the pumpkin patch count as a guild?  Since many of the plants we want fit into more than one guild we will have a lot of repeats and I like that because if a plant, like rosemary, doesn't thrive in one spot, it is likely to thrive in another.   I think I'm the most excited for the chicken garden.  It will be filled with food for them to eat, and us of course, and herbs to help them stay healthy and mite free.  It will be back by the chicken run so that it will be easy to give them their food.

The grape house is the first thing we are building to add a bit of magic to the yard.  Elizabeth and Abigail really wanted a sunflower house, which didn't work last year, but we will try again.  The grape house is the compromise because I can't plant something soft and green under the grape harbor.  There will be a small creek that runs through the grapes soon and they won't be able to lay under there and read.  So we put up the grape house, marked our favorite red table grapes and this year when I prune I will propagate the red grapes and plant them around their grape house.  We will put a bench in there and plant something soft and green, like microclover that they can lay on to read in the shade. There is even a space for a window.  They also want to line the path with flowers.

I Still have so much to do, but I feel like I am close.  Now that I have all of the trees in and the paths marked out I can start laying down plans for planting.  I am going to plant some of the flowers and herbs in the fall, they know when it is the right time to grow, I don't know why I wait until I think it's the right time.  The wild sunflowers were a foot tall before it was the "right time" according to the package.  I am really looking forward to starting the guilds, now that I have a plan for them, and I am also very excited that I will have a vegetable garden with fresh tomatoes and carrots, green beans, and kale.  Here's to hoping we have another fantastic, wet winter, and hoping the time passes quickly so I can get out there and plant!

Rough summer

I realize it hasn't been that long since my last update, but it feels so long ago.  This has been a really rough summer and I have spent most of it sick.  I have a chronic illness and it's been kicking my butt.  Yesterday I was full of energy and I did great and then in the evening it hit me and I needed help to bed.  Today I have had to spend most of the day resting.  It's all so frustrating, I have so many plans and things I want to do and I find myself unable to do most of it.  The weeds in the back yard are totally out of control.  We were going to hire someone, but I decided not to because I'd rather save that money to buy more food to plant.  I bought 4 dwarf trees, two apples that are supposed to be really great for storage and two donut peaches because they just looked so fun!  It's gotten too hot and dry to plant anything without worrying it will die so I am saving my plant budget to spend all at once in October when it cools down and I'll be able to keep things alive.  I've also decided that fall is the best time to plant so the seeds have all winter to soften and begin to pen.  They will grow when they are ready and do better than the ones I plant later in the year.  A prime example is the sunflowers.  On the seed packet it says not to plant until the threat of frost is past, for us, that's May 15 so I kept telling my girls not to plant.  It was silly, though, because the sunflowers the birds planted had already come up and they were fine.  Now my girls' sunflowers are almost knee high while the self seeded sunflowers are 8 feet tall!

 

Let me tell you about some other really fun things going on in my yard.  My elderberry bush exploded with growth this year!  It's probably twice the size it was in the Spring and the flowers are HUGE!  They are stunning, don't you think?  I planted a second one, since elderberries need two for pollination, and I'm excited to watch the new tiny one grow.  It might be 2-3 years before I get elderberries, but that's ok.  Gardening is teaching me to be patient.    

My Globe willow is looking a bit like a bush, it has put on so much new growth this year.  I will need to prune it, but I'll wait until fall so that it can get the maximum amount of energy from all those leaves.  Can you see how big the sunflowers behind it are?  Those are over my head!  They were all either self seeded or helped out by the birds.  They are shading the honey berry and forsythia bushes I planted in May and they are very happy about the shade.  One little honey berry is without shade and it's kind of struggling and needs a little more TLC.

I found a cicada!  I've heard them across the street, but this one sounded closer and sure enough, here he is!

My grapes are also putting on a show.  We are going to have a massive amount of grapes this year!  Only half of the tunnel is full, but I planted the last few vines to fill it in and it should be completely filled in my next year.  My girls really want me to plant something soft and green for them to lay on, I'm thinking micro clover. Of course, that means I have to figure out how to reroute the stream we were going to have run under the grape arch starting next year.  Clover doesn't always handle foot traffic well though and we walk under the arch a lot, so they may be better off with soft green things under a shade tree or in their sunflower house.  I am determined that one will work.  If we had planted the seeds last year and they were 8 feet tall now they would be in heaven.

At this point I'm back in the planning stage.  Since it's too hot to plant I'm just dreaming.   We have decided where to put the last 4 fruit trees we want.  We want two more cherry, an apricot and a plum.  That will put the total number of trees on our little quarter acre food forest at 21...if the fig survives.  If not I'll buy another tree to put there.  Abigail wants a cut flower garden so that she can make bouquets all year long, Glen wants a tea garden so he can make his own herbal tea mixtures, John wants more berry bushes back by the sunchockes, and I want more asparagus.  I also want a specific area for tomatoes and green beans because I want to plant a bunch of those next year in a vegetable garden.  Some things I can just put wherever there is space, like pumpkins and corn, but for anything that needs to be harvested frequently, like green beans, tomatoes, or zucchini, I want it close.

Cross your fingers that I can get everything planted this year so we can do our grey water system next year.

It's done! Sort of. 😅

As I sit here typing I am listening to the sound of thunder and rain, and the slow breathing of a sick little girl.  There is so much peace in that.  I need to remember to slow down more often and feel the peace I find in the life I chose.  I let myself get too busy doing all the things that I lose sight of what I really want, to be with my kids and my plants.  

This update was supposed to come weeks ago, but the planting party I planned was rained out and some health challenges have forced me to slow down.  I've finally finished the front yard though!  Sort of.  I have the frame work down and while I will be adding more it will be more slowly.  I do want to add more flowers, of course.  As the tree guilds grow I will add plants as needed.

My bottom berm has garlic, raspberries, and black berries.  I want to add some flowers to it. In the back is a fruit tree with flowers planted underneath.

Here we have two more fruit trees and between them a willow tree.  Under the fruit trees I have flowers, mint, and horehound planted.  The horehound isn't happy, but I'm hoping it will pull through.  I have tried twice to seed clover, but the birds keep eating the seeds.  I'll have to start a bunch inside and then move it outside.

My top berm has a profusion of sunflowers re-seeded, with the help of birds, from last years sunflowers.  I also planted 4 honey berry bushes, and two forsythia bushes.  I would like to add some herbs and low growing flowers in between the bushes.  You can't see it, but my rose bush is very happy.  I have some rose buds getting ready to bloom.  Under the rose bush I have creeping mint, lupine, nasturtium, and strawberry mint. Along the wall of the house I have a sage bush, three lilacs, one full sized and two dwarf boomerangs, and two mountain bluebeard bushes.

As you can tell, there is still a lot of open space that I need to plant, but a lot of that will be taken up as the trees grow because the guilds will grow with them.  I'll add a little more here and there, but for now It's time to move to the back and get started there.  I have four more dwarf fruit trees on the way and I'm going to the nursery this week to buy four semi dwarf.  Our goal is to plant every available space with food and flowers.

I'm back!

     It's finally Spring in Utah!  This has been a crazy winter and a crazy Spring.  We got so much snow over the winter that some areas are flooding.  Reservoirs are filling up quickly though and that's very good news.  We are also having a very wet Spring with a lot of rain.  I have not had to water anything more than 2-3 times, even direct sow seeds that need to stay moist. 
     The wood chips are doing their duty!  As you can see they are not completely keeping out the weeds, especially where we forgot to overlap, like this nice line here.  You can see how the carboard and wood chips have helped immensely though, otherwise my whole property would look like that line. Yikes!  In addition to discouraging weeds the wood chips are also holding in the moisture and have already begun to make a difference in the soil.  It's darker and breaks apart easier than ever!  I have pulled up mallow and dandelion and gotten all of the roots. The wood chips are fantastic! 
     We have finally finished planning our plan.  Maybe it was crazy to start without a plan, but it was starting that allowed us to create a plan.  The way I figure it, we are in year three of five in our permaculture plan. 

     Year one was digging swales and creating berms.  If I could go back the only thing I would change about that year is wedding and planting those berms ASAP.  They haven't eroded, but the ones I DID plant don't have nearly as many weeds as the ones that were left bare for two years.  That being said, I'm not sure I understood enough about guilds and what I wanted to be able to plant them well yet.
     Year two was laying down cardboard and woodchips.  We got two pallets of cardboard at the local super market.  By pallet I mean hundreds of pounds of boxes bound together with metal ties.  They had to lift it onto our trailer with a forklift.  It was a gamble because many of the boxes weren't the best and some were tiny candy bar boxes good for very little, but it gave us enough to finish  almost our entire yard.  The cardboard has helped immediately to keep down the weeds.  I know it isn't a perfect solution, nor is it permanent, but I think it will do until things are growing well.
     So here we are in year three.  This is the fun year.  The year I get to go hog wild and buy more plants than I ever thought I would and then plant them!  This is the year of designing and planting.  Just today I went out and bought enough plants to almost entirely finish all of the guilds, berms, and planting beds in the front yard.  I wanted to start there because it's smaller than the back and so that people driving by can stop asking what the crazy wood chip people are doing.  We bought a trailer full of good soil that we are putting right on top of the wood chips in a thick layer to create planting beds and provide good soil for what we plant.  That way the cardboard will still help to keep down the weeds and the wood chips will help to provide water as they soak it up, kind of like a hügelkultur.  As they break down they will help create great soil underneath as well.  In each guild and bed I am making sure to have a nitrogen fixer, a ground cover, a smelly herb to keep away bugs, a miner to bring up nutrients from deep below, and a Spring, Summer, and Fall bloomer for the bees.  I'm not super creative with designing so I've enlisted the help of some fellow plant addicts to help design and pick plants.  I want to make plant markers for everything so that when I give people tours and walk throughs they can identify plants, like you would at a botanical garden.  I always love those little signs.
     Year four is going to be our water year.  We will be setting up our grey water system, planting a marshy area to help filter the water, digging a creek, two ponds, and creating a small waterfall.  I am very excited for that next year, but there are still some problems we need to figure out.  I am just so stinking excited for the marsh, creek, waterfall and ponds!  I am going to need a couple of tiny bridges and I want a bench right by the waterfall.  That waterfall will be tiny, but if I can make it happen it will also be a bit of magic in my little corner of heaven.
     Year five will be watching everything grow, filling in gaps or fixing problems, paving paths with stones and groundcover, and making signs, painted rocks, and other little touches to make our garden magical.  I might make a few signs for the front yard this year.  I really want to make it look nice.  
     Tuesday I am having some fellow permies over to help plant the front yard, so stay tuned for an update!

Autumn is here

    Autumn is here in full force.  We actually got our first snow a week ago, just a few days after that adorable picture of the kids playing in the park.  That's how Utah is.  That day was nice, then snow, and now it's nice again.  The snow made the the netting roof of the chicken run collapse, but they hated the snow and didn't try to escape.  Now that it's nice they are hopping the fence to eat everything.  It guess it's ok though, all the plants are done for the year and will come back in the Spring.  The only bad thing about it is that our new puppy who is four months old likes to chase and chew on our while leghorn, Angel.  So far she hasn't been hurt, so I think he is just trying to play.  Still, we can't have a chicken eater so he needs to learn not to chew on the chickens.

        I don't plan to write again for awhile. Winter is for garden dreams, not garden work.  My girls and I are planning a sunflower house they can use for their secret hideout with friends.  They helped me harvest sunflower seeds.  I don't know why, but most of the seeds from our mammoth sunflower were empty, no seed in the shell!  It could have been drought, poor pollination, or poor nitrogen in the soil.  It put a wrench in my daughters plans to make millions selling sunflower seeds at the local market. :'D

        I love autumn.  The harvest.  Winding down for the season, like the Earth needs a rest as much as I do.  Preserving the harvest, mine and what others give me, knowing I'll use it.  This week my kids and I spent all day Thursday bottling apple sauce.  We got 17 bottles of applesauce, plus two bottles of grape juice, 4 bottles of peppers pickled and one bottle of beets pickled.  I'm disappointed I didn't get any peaches this year.  I just can't wait until my peach trees are big enough to give me a good harvest to preserve.  I can never get enough peaches!

        I hope you have a lovely winter. I'll see you in the Spring!

Finished!

We are finished wood chipping!  Oh my gosh!  I thought we would never finish.  I guess it's a good thing my husband is out of a job because he suddenly had tons of free time to dedicate to yard work.  I wanted it all done by the end of August so that I could start formal lessons with my kids the first week of September without having the stress of trying to fit in yard work as well.  We ate pizza on paper plates more often the last two weeks of August than we normally do in two months and house work went virtually undone while we spent 4-6 hours working on the yard each day, but we finished!

    I've noted a few things you might be interested in.  

    First, while the cardboard boxes and wood chips to cut down on weeds they DO NOT fully prevent them.  Grass will be killed, most weeds were killed, but nothing kills bind weed. It's like the cockroach of the plant world, it could survive a nuclear blast.  BUT, it does get the weeds to a manageable level.  

    Second, it's HOT.  Is it hot where you live?  We should be cooling own to the 80s here in Utah, but instead we are experiencing a heat wave with temps near 100.  The lack of greenery in my yard is making it hotter.  I know it sounds crazy, but did you know that having plants growing can drop the temperature?  In fact, if you have a bit of water and plants you can drop the temperature in your yard by 10 degrees!  Shade from trees is cooler that shade from a building because the tree holds water.  I didn't think the weeds would make that big of a difference, but it's enough to feel it.  I need to get some plants in ASAP.

 Ok, so what's next?  Like I said, I need to get plants in as soon as possible.  As you can see in the picture with the wheel barrow I also need to finish a few berms that I have been hiding from.  They kind of intimidate me.  They should have been planted first thing to avoid erosion, but I wasn't sure what to plant and I'm always worried I'll mess up.  I have asparagus and strawberries in two berms, I might just do more of that, or maybe raspberries. I'm still not sure.  The front two will be flowers, I've already decided that.  Anyway, I'm going to get a trailer full of nutrimulch from the turkey farm and when I want to plant something I'll just put a pile of dirt and start a guild.  I've definitely got to make sure to have nitrogen fixers because as the wood chips break down they will cause a nitrogen deficiency.  I also want to cover the paths in a walkable ground cover.  Near the house I plan to use walkable mint and thyme as it should help discourage wasps.  Under the grape arbor and the rest of the paths I'm thinking microclover. I also want to plant microclover under my globe willow when it gets a little bigger so I have a nice soft spot to sit in the shade on a hot summer day.

I've got to be honest with you, so far the prep work has been torture.  I hate yard work.  I love gardening, but I hate yard work.  Especially when it's hours every day in the hot sun.  Last summer and this summer it was hours and hours of hard labor getting in the framework, but now comes the fun part.  Now I get to design fun garden beds and guilds, plant beautiful flowers and all our favorite foods.  I can put in the final trees and bushes, and a plethora of perennials.  Now I get to beautify our space.  The little pond and creek we have planned is an extra, there isn't a big rush.  The grey water system can come later as well, but I NEED plants.  I was going to wait until Spring, but why wait?  If I leave now I can still make it to the garden store before it closes.  :D  

The "back garden"
you can see the boxes that didn't
get completely covered and my sun chokes
getting nice and tall.

First harvest!!!

I was about to give up on my tiny tomato plants until I saw my first tomato! It's so tiny and funny looking. When I showed my husband he recoiled and asked if it was a mutation due to the weather. 🤣 I thought it was my cosmic black, but after tasting it I think it's a green zebra or something like that. No, that one was all green, I think... I marked them all, but the marker is missing. It was light and tart, reminiscent of citrus or kiwi. It might not have been ripe, but I don't know because I've never tried one before. 🤦‍♀️🤣

I guess where I'm going with this is, don't give up! Life will find a way. Plants want to live. If I'd given up I would have missed tasting this kind of tomato for the first time. And the look of revulsion on my husband's face. 🤣

Take a wander with me

I hurt my foot pretty bad and couldn't get out to do much in the garden for a couple of weeks.  I've had a hard time getting back to work.  It's not my foot.  I'm weary.  I'm tired of working outside for hours a day.  I realized today that it's because I'm not actually gardening, or doing the things I enjoy in the garden.  All I'm doing is laying down carboard and wood chips.  For hours.  Every day.  This morning I decided to do what I love best and take a slow wander through my garden, just enjoying the green life.  Come with me on my walk and I'll show you a few of my favorite spots.

Potatoes growing quickly

I planted three patches of potatoes this year, but this one is my favorite!  It's round, surrounded by an interesting wood border and interspersed among the potato plants is scarlet clover.  It's my favorite because it is the biggest and most lush, even though it was planted the latest of all three.  Last Spring I had a black tarp layed down to put soil on as I built grow boxes and it sat there for a year.  When I pulled the tarp back this Spring the soil was moist, dark brown and rich, full of mycelium and just crumbled in my hand.  It was amazing soil and the potatoes are enjoying it so much!

This is one of my yarrow patches, it grows along the bottom edge of my strawberry and asparagus guild berm.  I love the soft, feathery leaves and the tiny white flowers.  It makes me happy every time I walk past.  There is another patch around my apple tree, and another near the potatoes I just showed you.  

Yarrow

I have another favorite spot, two actually, wait...who can pick a favorite?  I love my patch of sunchokes growing.  I feel so pleased every time I see them, knowing they will help feed my family. I've never had them before so I am also feeling excited to try a new food.

I love my two strawberry and asparagus guilds.   I can't wait for fresh strawberries next spring.  Everyone in my family loves asparagus so I hope they, too, will take off like wildfire.  One of my few surviving rhubarb plants also lives in the guild.  Have you ever sautéed rhubarb?  It adds a lovely tart flavor to a savory dish.  You should try it.

Ok, now for my very favorite, my grape tunnel.  It's full of grapes, and even though it's only on it's second  year the grapes have really taken off.  I have tons of grapes growing this year and half of the tunnel is completely covered!  I'll plant some more this fall, some nice big, purple ones my neighbor has.  Next spring we also want to plant grass underneath so we can lay in the green tunnel on the cool grass.  Can you imagine how wonderful it will be?  I think this is my favorite place to walk because I feel completely surrounding by wonderful growing plants.

Morning sunlight filtering through my grape tunnel

Some of my other favorite are the sound of my chickens clucking along, eating grubs and bugs and making fresh food for us.  I love my catnip and watching my fat black cat lounge next to it, so self satisfied, as if he owns the whole world.  I love t
he morning sun touching my trees for the first time.  I can almost feel everything waking up and stretching to reach for the first rays, it's magical.  What are your favorite spots in your garden?

Neat and orderly...or not

Amongst the natural look I'm going for I also want a few neat and orderly areas. Areas where the lettuce grows in rows (because I forget what I plant) and the flowers are in a flower bed. I dreamed of creating this flower bed here for years, and I finally just got started on it. I've been putting it off because I am feeling a bit overwhelmed. You know the feeling when you've got a huge project that you need to do and you just don't know where to start? I'm feeling that a lot. Sometimes it's easy to look at a spot and I just see what it needs to be, I see the guild that I need to create, or I have ideas of what I want, but other times I look at this huge space that I'm trying to create in and I am finding it quite overwhelming. I just don't know where to start.

To help myself figure out what I need to do I sat down and I brainstormed with my husband. We talked about how last year we were really putting in the foundation of the permaculture by digging the swales and building the berms. We spent the entire summer doing that and we just barely finished before it started to rain and snow in the fall and then we moved into winter. This year I thought would be the year for planting, but I forgot what a pain the weeds are. So the more we talked about it the more we decided that the berms and the swales were the foundation of our permaculture garden, but the next step really needed to be to just lay down cardboard and wood chip over everything to cut back on the weeds. The two little guilds that I created a couple of weeks ago are so overrun with weeds already that I can hardly tell what I planted there, and I've weeded twice! So our new plan is to just lay down cardboard and wood chip over everything, and then next year after the wood chips have had a little bit of time to start breaking down and biodegrading and creating some soil that is when I will begin to build guilds and garden beds.

My plan there is to put the chickens in a spot as early as possible and have them get all of the weeds and the weed seeds and all of the bugs and everything that they can and then I will put down a big pile of healthy soil over the top of the wood chips and then I will plant in that. Honestly at this point I don't know if it's going to work. I feel like every time I've got a plan it doesn't go according to plan. If gardening is an experiment, permaculture is an even bigger experiment. I really want this to work though, I am determined to learn what I need to and get it figured out so that it does work. I just might have to change my plans every couple of months.

Flowers!

Scarlet clover

I love flowers!  They fill me with joy and bring sunshine to my soul.  There are few things I love more than watching bees on flowers.  If I could, I would fill my whole yard with flowers, but they produce very little food and as much as I love beauty, I am painfully practical.  It's a good thing that flowers are both beautiful and practical.  Since flowers attract pollinators and pollinators help food to grow it's a fantastic idea to have flowers growing all over your yard and even amongst your food crops.  Whether you are a traditional gardener, or have a food forest or permaculture, flowers will help increase your food production and beautify your yard.

Yarrow

Bees come out when the air temperature starts to hit about 50.  They are one of the first insects I see every year in my yard and they are on the look out for two things, food and water.  We have a little dish full of rocks (so they don't drown) and water that we set out for the bees as soon as we see the first one.  It's common for us to go outside on a Spring afternoon to find a dozen bees drinking from our little bee dish.  I wish I could give them food as easily as I give them water.  My permaculture yard is still just a baby, we are only in our 2nd year.  I have started to plant flowers, but I don't have nearly as many as I, or the bees, would like. I am working on it.

I have two focuses for my flowers, everything else is a bonus.  I want flowers to be blooming in Spring, Summer, and Fall so there is a food source for the bees all the time.  I also want to have all of my flowers be perennial or reliable self seeders so I don't have to replant them every year.  Last fall I planted scarlet clover as a nitrogen fixer and the bees just loved them in the Spring!  They also made great jelly...and then I killed them.  Don't worry, I will replant and this time they will survive because I learned my lesson.  I haven't noticed that the bees particularly like the yarrow that grows voluntarily in my yard, but I love it.  I do have heavenly smelling roses and I planted two salvia bushes last fall, as well as a triple blooming lilac bush.  The salvia are fall blooming only so I decided to buy a couple more that are summer blooming.  I have them by my grapes to try and entice more pollinators, although they seemed to do a pretty good job this year.  Black-eyed Susan's are growing in pots to plant strategically so I can take advantage of their long roots to help prevent erosion on my berms.

Wild sunflower

For now though it is too hot to plant anything outside.  It would take so much water to keep seeds moist long enough to sprout and get big enough to survive a hot day and it's nearing 100 around here with little shade to help with the harsh weather.   I am starting flowers in pots and moving them outside when they are big enough to handle the heat.  But don't be surprised if you see me outside every day this fall planting bulbs and flowers to feed the bees next year.

Propagating and sharing cuttings

Gardening can get expensive, am I right?  Think of the average garden plot and multiply that by...you know what?  Too much math.  Lets just say my garden in nearly .25 acre.  I needed to learn to propagate by myself instead of buying everything from the local nursery, even if it is my happy place.  So I set out to figure it out.  I started with grapes.  I had no idea what I was doing, but as my good friend told me "Plants want to grow. They will, if you give them a chance."  I planted 10 grape cuttings, two survived.  Just two.  Like I said, I had no idea what I was doing.  The next time I tired it, I planted three and all three survived!  I was like a kid on Christmas morning, seeing those new leaves open up.  Next, I learned how to take one large comfrey plant and break its giant root into 5 pieces so I could have more than one plant.  When my raspberries had been in the ground for a couple of years I dug up a few canes and moved them to make new raspberry beds.  The first time I planted 6 canes and only one survived.  The second time, after I had learned, I planted five and three survived. When a branch from my favorite rose bush was broken off with a new bud I thought I would try rooting it.  I succeeded!
 Learning to propagate and graft is a really great skill to help you with permaculturing.  If you have been following along you know how much I LOVE comfrey!  The kind I have will grow big and bushy, but it won't spread unless you disturb it's roots.  They are easy to propagate because you can dig it up, break of a root chunk with a leaf or two and grow an entire plant.  

Don't think this hasn't come with failures.  Of the five rhubarb plants I planted only one has survived.  Two were from the store, and three from friends who shared.  I learned that rhubarb really likes shade and planting thee in the sun was a BAD idea.  The other one was devoured by the dreaded earwig.

My next goal is to learn to graft.  I have a cherry tree, an apricot, two plum, three peach of different varieties, two apple of different varieties, and two pairs that have 5 varieties grafted in.  Those pears got me to thinking that if all my trees were grafted with different varieties then I could have more peaches, on less trees.  Here's another way you can save some money.  My neighbor has a different variety of cherry then I do, if I asked for one of her branches I could graft in onto my cherry tree and have two kind of cherries.  It's also a great way to extend the harvest since different varieties mature at different times.

So, before you start to feel overwhelmed with the cost of gardening, look around you. Can you find a wild rose growing in the woods that you can dig up and take home?  Does your friend have a comfrey plant you can share?  Does your neighbor have grapes?

A return to nature's balance

 

Meet Sobbie, Fire Cluck, and Goldilocks, three of our nine chickens.  They are happily feasting on the earwig nests we uncovered while weeding to prepare an area this morning.  I didn't know when I started laying down wood chips en mass that they would provide the perfect environment for my worst enemy in the garden, earwigs.  Ok, that's the bad news, now are you ready for the good news?  Nature has a plan.  What I accidentally messed up, by adding tons of wood chips to my yard all at once, nature will balance out.  I know this for a fact because I have experienced it already, before permaculture was even a thought in my mind.

When we moved to a house of our own five years ago I knew I did not want to spray for bugs.  Not only would killing the bad bugs kill the good ones, but I didn't want my family to ingest those chemicals or run around barefoot on them, even more frightening were the stories I had heard of pets and children dying from the improper application of pesticides.  It wasn't risk I wanted to take.  It took some convincing, but I talked my husband into no more spraying, for weeds or bugs.  The first year we had massive destruction by aphids, earwigs, and flea beetles.  I told myself it would take a few years to even out, it would get better.  I lost a couple potato plants, but I could deal with that.  My plum tree and rose bush were NOT happy with the aphids.  I tried "natural" alternatives like glue boards (killed a bird with that one) neem oil to make the leaves taste nasty (it made the aphids taste nasty and the lady bugs flew away in search of tastier meals) or diatomaceous Earth (it also killed the good guys)  It really seemed like the best option was to wait, so I did.  

Predators are always slower to appear then pests, but they will come if there is food for them.  I watched with joy as I found more and more lady bugs, even lady bug eggs, I saw countless prey mantises, centipedes, spiders (I think they were the first to appear)  It was lovely to watch my yard come alive and become a refuge for all sorts of bugs.  I still lose a plant here and there, but for the most part the predators come in to take care of the pest problems.  

I have two tips, first of all CHICKENS!  I cannot say enough about chickens.  They will eat pretty much every pest around, they gobble them up like candy. Chickens can break a pest cycle in a matter of days.  They also eat weeds and seeds.  Be careful because they will also eat the plants you want, I am using a chicken tractor to move them around, but also keep them away from my baby plants.  Seriously though, chickens are super heroes in the garden.  They take weeds and pests and turn them into eggs and fertilizer.

My other tip is that if you choose to remove pests leave some to attract the predators.  Early in the spring I used a hose to spray aphids off of my two trees and rose bush. That got rid of a bunch to help the plant, but left some too.  As soon as I saw the first lady bug I left them to do their work.  I have seen very few aphids since the lady bugs moved into the neighborhood.  If you have a caterpillar problem, pick some off, but leave some for the birds.  They WILL come.  Nature is all about balance, you just have to be patient.  Sorry about that bit.

Guilds

 

My brand new baby guild.

Guilds are my focus right now.  This is a baby guild, it will look vastly different in a year or so.  A guild is a group of plants that all work together to create a healthy, natural environment.  Remember that with permaculture we are trying to mimic nature and create an environment that is as self sustaining as possible.

Ok, so if we are mimicking nature there are some things we need to keep in mind.   The forest doesn't have a single tree, then 20 feet away another tree with nothing in between.  We need a ground cover on the bottom.  Just like wood chips, a ground cover helps to protect and enhance the soil, providing shade and keeping it cool so the soil stays moist longer.  Some ground covers pull double duty by protecting the soil, but also helping deter pests (creeping thyme) or by adding nitrogen (micro clover).  These suppressor plants also discourage weeds from growing. In a guild, and in permaculture really you want to pick plants that fill more than one function, at least 2, but hopefully 3 or more.  At the end I'll list some of my favorite plants to use.

More mature guild.

So, the first function is the ground cover, the second function is nitrogen fixing plants, these can be trees, bushes, small plants, flowers, or ground cover.  The purpose, of course, it to help your plants and soil be healthy, they act like living fertilizer.  Here's a pro tip, if you plant pretty scarlet clover, don't mow it down to the ground to get another crop of flowers, you will just kill it.  Ask me how I know.  Just dead head the flowers to encourage more blooms, drop it at the base of the plant and it will add nitrogen as it decomposes.  Whatever you choose to plant, it will only add to the healthy of your soil and plants if you cot off bit and drop them, that way the dropped bits are decomposing and adding nitrogen, but the roots underneath that die off also add nitrogen.

Now for one of my favorite functions, attractors.  These are flowering plants that attracts pollinators like bees and butterflies.  They add to the beauty of your garden and many also deter unwanted pests, or add nitrogen to the soil. More bees visiting flowers means more bees pollinating your fruit blossoms and that means more fruit.  Make sure to plant a few different kinds so there is always something in bloom.  You don't need something in bloom all the time around ALL of your trees but a smattering all over the yard will make sure there is always a food source and the bees will love it.

Now that we have talked about attracting friends, how do we deter...not friends?  That's where deterrent plants come in.  They smell strong and confuse or bother pesty bugs.  Think marigold in the garden, but all over.  Herbs are great for this because the strong smell can cover up the smell of your yummy fruit tree and confuse icky pests like coddle moths and aphids.

Mulchers are next.  These are plants that grow profusely and you can chop off parts to use as mulch without killing the plant.  Comfrey is probably my favorite because of it's cell regenerative properties.  The kind I have grows quickly and large, it's tripled in size in the last month, but isn't spreading.  It gets big without taking over.  Mulchers, because they often have large leaves also help shade the soil and add another drip line.

Last but not least, accumulators.  I call them miners because they pull nutrients up from deep in the soil and when they die or leaves fall off those nutrients go back into the top layer for all of the other plants.  The big deep roots also help to aerate the soil, break up compacted soil, and make title tunnels for water to travel down.  

Here is a chart I found immensely helpful, along with a link to the site I found it on.  I love the easy to read chart.  I have used this chart as a reference in the four guilds I have already made and in planning the next ones.

Real quick, here is a list of my favorite guild plants and why I love them:

• Creeping thyme-I love the smell and the flowers are so pretty.  It also spreads fast so it covers up that soil in no time.  I also would like to add creeping mint, but I haven't tested it.  I want to put it near my house where the smell will chase away hornets since I'm afraid of hornets.  Jerks!
• Hairy vetch- it grows crazy fast which is great because I just want to cut it down to add nitrogen to the soil.  It grows fast and i love the little purple flowers.
• Comfrey-as I said, it grows fast so you can chop and drop the leaves, but the cell regeneration is UNREAL.  We used it twice, once for stitches and once when my husband sliced the tip of his finger off with a mandolin slicer. ><  I feel like they both healed twice as fast using a comfrey leaf poultice.  I'll never be without it again!
• Black Eyed Susan's-this pretty flower has DEEP roots.  I love them because my berms have steep sides, I'm not entirely sure I made them right and I need something to help prevent erosion. These are the flowers for that.

I could go on, really.  Ask anyone in my family, I am pretty obsessed with plants.  What's not to love!?

Wood chips

 

        I wanted to talk about woodchips.  You might have noticed that we have a lot of woodchips going down in our yard.  My neighbor pointed out that it won't stop the weeds, how right he was, but that wasn't our intent.  Woodchips help discourage weed seeds from germinating, but they definitely don't stop weeds, for that you need a layer of cardboard underneath.  So why the woodchips?  Wood chips help to protect the soil.  Soil that is exposed to the sun dies, all the tiny microbes that help soil to be healthy get killed off by the radiation from the sun, that's one reason plants are so eager to grow and cover the soil, they want to protect it.  Wood chips shade the soil and protect it from the sun and also help stop erosion from water because they force the water to move more slowly across the surface of the ground.  Wood chips also help to moderate the temperature of the soil, cooling it in summer and warming it in winter.  As the wood chips break down they add nutrients to the soil and help it hold water better.  As you can see, wood chips have a lot of benefits, but I wanted to talk about my favorite one, water conservation!

        I live in a desert, not only that, but my yard has basically no shade.  I do have a few small trees in the back, but they aren't big enough to really shade anything.  My front yard faces full west and in the summer it get HOT!  It gets so hot, I thought growing anything in the front would be nearly impossible.  It turns out I was right.  It's so hot that plants wilt and die very quickly.  If I want them to stay alive I have to water pretty much every day, not ideal for a desert state in the middle of pretty severe drought.  When I noticed that my beds with a thick wood chip mulching only needed to be watered once a week I added wood chips to the top of my front garden beds.  I was skeptical that it would help that much in the front, but I figured it would help at least a little.  Monday I watered nice and deep, did a quick weeding job with my kids and we piled on the wood chips.  Here we are at Friday and I pulled back the wood chips to see...the top of the soil was still wet.  I was pleasantly surprised.  To illustrate the difference, this is the bed that I had to water every day and it was still dry an inch down!

        So what are the draw backs to wood chips?  First of all, as they break down they pull nitrogen from the soil, that's not good for plants.  However, there's an easy fix.  If you look at this picture just above us there are potatoes and clover side by side in that bed.  The clover helps to add nitrogen back into the soil as it grows, it's one of the nitrogen fixing plants.  A few other options are peas, beans, vetch, soy beans, or lupine.  I know there are more, those are just the ones I am using right now.  One way to add nitrogen is to plant a fall cover crop of soy beans, they can help protect the soil as they add nitrogen.  I like soy beans because if I plant them in the fall they don't have a chance to grow all the way before they are killed off by frost and then I use a pitch fork to turn over the soil and the plant decomposes all winter long.

        The only other draw back to wood chips that I can see is that they might make it harder for plants to self seed.  I am testing that right now and will add a post when it figure it out.  They also require you to water more deeply to reach the soil, but that is helped by leaving a little gap around each plant and, honestly, considering that I water just once a week instead of every day I'm still saving time, water, and money. SO worth it!

What is with this yard?!

 

I borrowed this picture to help illustrate some of the differences between traditional gardening techniques and permaculture, but first, what is permaculture?!  It would take an entire book to explain well, I'll just be scratching the surface.

Permaculture is a term coined by an Australian man in 1978 defined permaculture as  “The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems."  Basically, planting your garden to mimic nature.

There are a lot of benefits of permaculture.  I'll go over a few really quick and then tell you about what's going on.  Because permaculture mimics nature the garden is more self sustaining, had more diversity and is less at risk of being destroyed by pests.  Because I am helping nature along instead of working against nature it is also less back breaking working in the garden.

Ok, now on to the question I know all my neighbors want the answer to.  What the heck is with this yard?! I know, it's not pretty, not yet.  I always tell people that my yard is in it's awkward teenage stage. It's unsightly and useless, but give it a few years and it will be beautiful and useful.  The first step in our yard was also one of the most important parts of permaculture.  We needed to catch the water and keep it.  Nope, not rain barrels. Those mounds that look like raised beds are berms, behind them are swales that are filled in with straw and wood chips.  The swales catch all the water we get, rain, melting snow, sprinklers, all of it, and they hold it in the soil, at the same time raising the water table.  It's water storage system that also helps plants grow better.  As you can see from the picture above the swale catches the water as it travels downhill and traps it in the ditch so that it was soak into the soil and be stored underground.  Swales and berms took us an entire summer, but even though it's only been one year I can already tell the difference.  My yard is on a fairly steep slope and dries out very early in the year, around mid April, but with the swales catching the snow melt and rain we have found that our soil is hydrated even in June!

Two more key points  We also needed shade in our very hot, dry yard, especially in the west facing front yard.  To shade the soil we put wood chips over the top of everything.  They don't stop the weeds, but they keep the soil protected, shaded, and hydrated, and they also build the soil.  We also planted a lovely globe willow that will grow nice and big and provide a lot of shade.  After the shade our next priority, and what I have been really working hard and focusing on this year, is perennials.  I am planting as many perennial foods as I can.  My goal is to feed my family and I love not having to worry about finding seeds.  Perennials also usually come up sooner than seeds.

This was just a quick overview.  Stay tuned and I promise to keep you posted as we transform our garden and yard into a permaculture food forest.