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?