Garden update

Kifah, my neighbor who knows how to garden, came over this morning.  We've started swapping help Sunday mornings and last week I got to help seed her straw bale garden and this week we worked on mine.  After looking everything over and talking about it with Kifah, I decided it was time to take photos and journal.

I wasn't sure which title fits best:
"I've got good news and bad news."
"The good, the bad, and the weedy"
Or "Failing successfully"

A number of things are failing completely.
And some things are succeeding enthusiastically.

Lettuce is my glowing success.

We've been eating lettuce 1-2 times/day for a month, sharing with neighbors and friends, and we've still got plenty.  We've got 6 heirloom lettuces-red, green, green with red speckles- very fun.  And we've got pak choy, and purslane plus some volunteer Lamb's Quarters.  This I consider a special boon because I had meant to plant lamb's quarters but ordered lamb's ears instead.  So finding volunteers makes me feel rich.

This is a very diligent pak choy plant.  I've been eating pak choy almost daily in my breakfast eggs.  I'm having fantasies about breakfasts of greens from my garden and eggs from my chickens.  This is heady stuff for a novice farmer.

Thanks to Kifah and Kari for saving my Jajarkot and Tomato Guild gardens.  They weeded for hours with me when the weeds were shoulder tall and coached me through my weed vs plant questions.  The garden sprang back into action and now Kifah is teaching me about mulching. 

Today we found bean plants going gangbusters with green beans and some very promising broccoli plants and turnips, too. 

I had planted these sprouts in a mulchy area and I am now a big fan of mulched sprouts.  These have grown substantially better, with less weed competition than their seed-started, unmulched peers.  Next year- more sprouts, more mulch.

Look at that lush growth!  That's the Jajarkot Garden in full swing.

 Underground secrets for fall. 

This is a volunteer potato plant from our compost pile which Kifah weeded, mounded, and mulched.  Behind is a portion of hugel where nothing I planted sprouted among all the weeds.  So Kifah, brave gardener, encouraged me to do succession planting for fall.  We put in lettuce, pak choy, purslane, parsnips, carrots, kale, collards, chard, and rutabagas hoping for a late fall crop. 

 Fall hopes in bare dirt

The Tomato Guild is a mixed bag.  The tomatoes and some peppers are doing well- green fruits waiting for some more sunny hot.  Basil and sage seem to be a complete loss.  You can see weeds from previous weeks on the driveway.  We're planning to take the fence down for the winter and when we put it back up in the spring, I'm going to put cardboard down from the edge of the driveway to the bottom of my plants so it's harder for weeds to spread.  Kifah's idea.

The downhill section of the Tomato Guild hugel is too steep.  It's been eroding and growing exclusively weeds.  The earliest hugels are taller and steeper while our later ones are shorter and wider.  Turns out that physical exhaustion and rushed days worked in our favor.  The short, wide ones are significantly more productive than the taller, more ambitious ones. 

So we're going to raise the dirt levels inside, possibly using logs to hold the dirt and create a weed barrier.  And until we have tons of acreage and machinery like Sepp Holzer, we'll be building shorter, wider hugels in the future.

We're considering options for the outside close to the driveway.  We might take some logs off the top or we might try to strategically place a board to hold deeper dirt or we might plant something with runners like strawberries.  Or I just thought we might put our burlap bag potatoes there inside the fence.  Maybe it'll self-correct once it's decayed a bit.  Not sure yet.  Something will come. 

The Three Sisters Garden is growing like gangbusters with comparatively few weeds.  Squash blossoms are everywhere, the corn is tall, and the beans are growing right up the stalks as advertised.
 

The raised beds constructed of logs with dirt and manure inside and thick mulch on top, which we call 'inverted hugels', have worked out really, really well.  It's easy to find my plants, easy to reach the weeds, easy to see progress.  This raised-bed-a-la-hugel style is one I'm hoping for a lot more of next year.

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All my Native American seeds are thriving.  Way to go you clever First Nations of the Upper Midwest!  I'm definitely interested in trying more Native American seeds and approaches next year. 

The Orchard Trees are doing well- 26 of 28 are thriving.  Some even have fruit.  Impressive.  Yeah, Tim! 

The Orchard Garden- the veggies rather than the trees- is a complete loss this year.  The ground which was bare this spring is growing every sun-loving, vigorous, hurried native plant which ever cast a patient seed in the forest praying for just such a tree-removing catastrophe as we provided.  


 Kifah and I found some spindly asparagus, a stunted rhubarb, some 4-inch tall kale, and popsicle sticks labeled 'onion' with no sign whatsoever of onions or any other annual or perennial of my choice.  Ok, maybe 2 others, but of the hundreds of seeds, sprouts, potato pieces, onion starts, etc. which we planted, this is very meager.  Very meager.

 Note Tim's cardboard weed suppression plan in action

The terrain is very difficult, erosion is a real danger especially when the ground's wet, and the tripping hazards are hidden under profuse growth.  Kifah and I got a path or two in and turned around because it was so treacherous and so little of what I planted could be found.  

It's possible that if we weeded, more would grow.  But given how much time the other gardens are taking, we're going to cut our losses now rather than risk losing everything else to weeds, too.

We're going to maintain the other gardens and take a more measured pace in The Orchard.  Tim's got a great plan for reclaiming one path's worth of hugels per year by using cardboard followed by clover for weed suppression, putting a second log next to a hugel, filling in the space between with dirt and manure and mulch, then planting perennials which we tend closely for a year until they are established.  Then the next year, we move on to the next path's hugels.  I'm hoping that in 5 year's time, I'll have the top four, easiest paths' hugels covered in nice perennial gardens of asparagus, rhubarb, perennial greens, walking onions, chives, mint, herbs, garlic, etc.  Given how much food production potential we're getting from the hugels and inverted hugels we have already, 4 more paths of production is a lot.

And given the tricky terrain and erosion issues of the lower hugels, we might just let it 'go native' except for weed suppression around the trees.  There are flowers for bee food and serious ground cover growing with no help from us.  That's good enough for now and we'll see about later.  Maybe we'll take goats for browsing walks down there someday. :)

 
This is my Survivor Garden all overgrown.  It has survived again with the possible exception of the sage which I can't find.  It is on some of the worst soil on our whole property.  Even the mint is struggling.  I'm going to either create a raised bed next to the rock here with some better soil or I'm going to move the whole thing to a better location or maybe a bit of both.  It's time to move these dear encouragements to a better place where they can thrive rather than survive.

The Berry Patch is doing well despite the press of weeds.  Tim's been patiently suppressing grass with dark tarps and anticipates moving them and seeding clover soon.  

He's also been adding pink tape around the top of the deer fencing and will be adding support wire soon.
 

 Grass is persistent.  But so far, his berry bushes and nurse plants are holding their own.

We planted some corn, squash, melons, zucchini, and other large space, sun-loving plants out here. It's hard to see in the photo above but there is corn growing.

 Some squash are flowering.  And I'm hoping a melon might make an appearance, too.

Finally, The Meadow Slope with sheet mulch by the 4H-ers and planting of native wildflowers for bees.  This started off slowly but has done well.
 

Interestingly, a number of the seeds we've planted are the same as the surrounding native plants.  From one perspective, this seems a little redundant.  But turned just slightly, this means we got the right seed mix from Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa.  Even if a number of the species are here already, chances are some of the 20+ native wildflowers and 20+ native grasses we planted will be new.

As our permaculture consultant Paula taught us, one of our most important jobs as permaculture farmers is to cultivate diversity.  Bees will preferentially spread their favorites, she said, and our job is to continue to spread and seed the others so a nice mix is maintained.

 We're on our way!