Category: agriculture

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.

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.