It's been a while since I made a proper update. I've gotten away from the daily posting and the frequent updates.
I picked up materials yesterday for the coop security project. I've got a few ideas for it that I'm excited to try. One is to make a small covered area under the coop as a day shelter for the chooks. I've got some corrugated metal to use as the roof, and I'll ground it to the ground rod on the fence. That'll help increase the effectiveness of the fence by making a solid metal connection for the predator to get zapped with.
Our three sisters garden is doing wildly well. Well, the squash is anyways. This is the North Georgia Candy Roaster from seeds that I bought from @bpangie. Those leaves are over a foot wide! The squash they make can grow 10-250 pounds each, so I'd say we'll be eating good this fall. This is a keeper for sure, and a prolific seeder.
The corn is Golden Bantam 12 from Baker Creek and the beans are anaskazi pole lima beans, also from @bpangie.
I've let some of our green beans go too long so I can get some seeds for them. I also let our line surviving lettuce plant flower so that I can have some seed later.
Next year I think I'll try and keep things a bit more organized so they're easier to keep up with. Nothing super organized, but just enough to make harvest easier.
Borage is also doing exceedingly well! I eat flowers from it daily as a little sweet treat. They've got an awesome sweetness and freshness to them.
Melissa and I are talking a lot about the garden, food forest, chickens and my dreams of farming. I'm slowing down with things so she and I can work on getting on the same page. I'm going to work on developing the layers in the forest rather than growing it. My herbaceous and vine layers need a lot of work, and I've got five fig cuttings turning to trees as well as a bunch of elderberry trees I'm going to harvest and plant. That'll bring us into the realm of excessive planting. Right where I want to be.
To top it off, I found out that the small trees I discovered a year ago up in the top of the south project are black walnut trees! So I'm planning a few guilds there. Cherries and goji do well with them when planted with mulberries which will negate the toxins excreted by the walnut roots. Of course with comfrey and daffodils. I counted fifteen young trees in that corner of about a hundred and fifty square feet, so that'll be a small bit of income for us next year when I sell a handful of them.
So, while we're missing the liveliness of the chickens, things are really going well. The new flock will be starting back up in July after a family vacation with Melissa's family. I don't like that timeline, but that's okay. It'll give me time to build up some time off to take a couple days off work and observe a couple nights out there. One of our neighbors posted in our neighborhood facebook that they caught a video of a raccoon dragging off their 5 gallon bucket of cat food. Bet that's a big enough coon to kill thirteen chickens... And to trip a live trap and be big enough that it won't close on him.
And here's Farmer Sam and his cucumbers, special for @goldenoakfarm. :)
Most things in the North hugel aren't doing super well. The cucumbers though, they're going nuts! There's also various grain crops that got planted there because I used the soil from the chicken run. I wish I'd planned that, but it wasn't my idea. It came in from scratch grains that I gave the chickens in the right months of their work on that batch. Probably accounts for the two tomato plants growing over there too... There's wheat and a few other things there that I'm saving seeds from in hopes of building to a good sustainable chicken scratch garden.
Progress progress progress! Lots going on here at the little aspiring homestead in Texas.
Thanks for sticking around to read all that! What's going on at your place?
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Yay! A Farmer Sam photo!
Any ideas why North hugel isn't doing well?
That's cool the mulberries,e tc neutralize the black walnut exudation.
With the Lyme cognitive issues, that's why my gardens are SO organized. It's just too hard for me to function in them if they are disorderly. No memory of what's where, etc...
Loved the update!
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Sam has been working hard on learning how to get around out there. Especially in the food forest, it's strange because anywhere you step could be something that doesn't need stepped on.
I think I don't have enough soil on the north hugel. It covered well at first, but there's a lot of air pockets now that it's settled. I'll add more soil after harvest though, and it's to be expected that the first year in this kind of system is the least productive.
I'm thinking now, and I've got seven or eight distinct spaces within the forest that could be used for specific plantings. Using what I've learned this year, I'll utilize those spaces better next year. I like this three sisters setup, and I think I'll do similar things next year. Maybe an okra/cucumber bed and a corn, Malabar spinach, and potato bed or something along those lines. The coplanting model really makes sense in this small of an area. I'll need to look and see how the harvest times will stack too. It'll be a fun project, as always. :)
But what I'm trying to avoid is the "where the heck did I plant that thing" effect that I've got now. And the "woah, I didn't know I put that there" effect. It makes things hard to harvest and keep an eye on. Our green beans are my prime example. A lot went to "waste" (no such thing as waste as that's all seeds to plant, but we didn't get to eat them) because of how broadly I planted them. Learning a lot this year. Learning a lot.
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Sounds like the food forest is on a roll. Loving all the combination planting. I didn't know black walnut roots exuded toxins. Does the standard walnut too?
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Oh yeah, all walnuts and a lot of related plants too! But Midwest permaculture has a short ebook about plantings, and I think Toby Hemenway explained it in Gaia's Garden about the way they developed a really rocking guild to go with the toxicity.
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