Leaves

Winter’s late, this has a silver lining in that we have extra time to wrap up the previous season. It’s a lot of work going from Fall to Winter. I finished building both additions, roofing took far longer than expected, it was really 3 small roofs with many angles, and I used the nice weather to go through a backlog of fascia & soffit detail work. The angles on the bay window were very hard to make work. I didn’t do a great job at making things look perfect, but I know they’re solid and weather tight so I don’t feel too bad.

I love being up there

Nicole dug up the potatoes, the onions, a little more of everything every year. Garlic was planted, all routine like construction now.

No apples this year either, the wild trees seem to produce a decent crop only every other year. I scored several dump trailer loads of horse manure from the horse property next door. They don’t want it and I help them with backhoe projects in exchange, total win-win. With the mountain of wood chips we got last Winter, we’re feeling wealthy with resources. We go fetch leaves from the forest to add green matter to the manure.

Esther’s surprisingly efficient bunny hop technique

It all gets added and mixed into the manure, along with some ash, and some chips why not?

Robin’s building another treehouse, they get a little better every time. I let him use screws for this one. I hope I’ll have time enough to build a real nice one with him before he looses that little boy energy. I unfortunately cannot do all the things I want to do.

All routine, all perfect, may they never grow up, and may we never grow old.

Failed Fencelessness

With plants more established, and no clear effect, I decided to relax counter measures a bit this year and see if maybe the orchard, fruit trees, and garden could do with less fencing. The sentence was immediate, we didn’t get as many berries, trees got damaged, and hard work was voided. It is now clear that while various measures aren’t 100% effective, they definitely help. With this confirmed, they’ll get implemented with more vehemence next year.

It’s a lot less work and it looks better without fences. What a shame.

Irrigation

It’s not much but for us it’s huge, we finally have enough water and ways to move it that we can give the gardens a good soak. For the past 9 years we’ve been reliant on the weather, which usually does its job in Vermont. Although when it didn’t, we’d be reactive and move a lot of water by hand only to keep plants alive. Now we’re able to soak several hundred square feet of soil whenever they could use it, and it’s less manual labor. Double win!

We want to build a rain capture system to diversify strategies, but that’s dependent on other projects. We’ll get there.