April 27, 2015

Wow, the weather warms up and it gets so busy.  The potatoes and onions we planted in March are up.  

I absolutely love the Irises that have bloomed.    We are almost finished with our woodland trail. In the wisdom of permaculture, we are making a trail into the "wild" portion of our yard and a small gazebo "observatory" to view nature and learn from it.
Eventually, I would like to have a moongate entrance. We are working on the trail to the greenhouse. Another permaculture principal is to have a frog pond near the gardens to lure in the frogs to help with the insects. We have just finished the infrastructure to our 3 ft. deep frog pond. It currently is holding water pretty well without a liner. A rainstorm filled it up. We plan to put some liriope around it, add some plants, tadpoles and maybe a couple of mosquito fish. We also are hoping for a Japanese pedestal lantern and a stone bench made from a stone we dug up in the basement excavation. Of course, it will also be nice if the grass grows around it. Once the water clears up, we will put in the pump to recirculate the water.
We were able to plant our tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, basil and carrots during our brief window of dry garden, before it starting raining so much, we had to quit so we wouldn't compact the soil between the rows. We also were able to put up the permanent cedar trellis poles for our blackberries, grapevines, and raspberries. We had a great crop of lettuce come up as volunteers from last year and we neatly transplanted them to a freshly tilled row right before it rained. Don't forget to view the updates on "What's Growing Seasonally", "Planting Time", and "Timeline" on the tabs at the top of the page.

April 16, 2015

Well, spring has sprung and it is great to have such nice warm weather to work in!  The frog pond is now finished being dug.  I must confess that I dug out half of it by hand, then thought of my neighbor with the bucket on his skidloader, so I got him to finish it for me.  It is now about 3 feet deep all around with two plant shelves.  The last rain storm filled it completely, and it seems to be holding water (no liner).  Of course, I won't know for sure until we have a long, dry spell.  My husband is a science teacher, and his school was having a plant sale so we were able to buy a Brown turkey fig tree for $12 which we planted in the southwest.  This is to provide some shade for the pond to keep algae out of the water and I also intend to have a Japanese pedestal lantern beside it, along with a stone bench made with a flat stone dug out during our basement excavation.  I contemplated surrounding it with rock, but I think I have decided on liriope instead, as the rocks were sharp and I am hoping the liriope will filter out some of the water before it gets to the pond.  Right now, it is a little too muddy to put in my pump.  The pond was put in for a permaculture principle of attracting frogs to our gardens.  While I didn't want any fish, we are contemplating a couple of mosquito fish to keep the mosquito larvae down.  At this time in the garden, we are harvesting asparagus, lettuce, and onions.  We have six rows of potatoes planted and the strawberries are starting to have small strawberries on them.  We are working on the trellising of our raspberries, blackberries, and grape vines using cedar poles.