It’s shaping up to be a good year in the orchard. I rarely post about growing plants because it’s all Nicole these days. I’ll have to try to do justice to everything she put in the ground this year, let’s just say the garden more than tripled in size.
I asked a neighbor if they were doing anything with manure from their horses. turned out they had a ton extra and were cool with giving it away. It also turned out it was all piled up nicely already, and was pretty much already compost. I left things very tidy and we gave them some soaps Nicole made, what an absolute score.
6 loads without a dump truck
I added the 2 buckets of ash we keep for icy weather. We’ll have time to rebuild our stock come Fall. We’re mixing in wood chips and grass clipping. Pretty much anything green we can get our hand on. It will be a serious pile of serious compost soon.
3 year update after planting 3 little Chestnuts, piggybacking off a New York guy’s effort to reintroduce Chestnuts to American forests: they all look wonderful.
The stronger growth comes from the one that’s in the shade, go figure.
We got a few more this year since they’re doing so well and promise to deliver a bounty in a few decades.
We’ll find them a spot in due time.
Between the housing market, the empty nurseries, and how hard it’s been getting compost; all signs point to the pressure Vermont is receiving from pandemic migrants.
Finally though, after months and many phone calls, we were able to score a truck load of compost, from a super cool local farm at that!
Every year in January, we spend one evening dreaming of greenery and raiding nursery websites. Then we forget all about it and random trees & shrub show up in the mail through April and May.
7 plum trees, 2 apricots and a few more shrubs not pictured here
We are starting to have a lot of fruit trees around. We try to pick a good spot for them all, but some just don’t make it. Since we put an emphasis on variety, we couldn’t possibly know and cater to all the optimal conditions needed by all. So our strategy is more on the carpet bombing side, imprecision and loss are part of the equation.
I rarely post about the garden as it has mostly become Nicole’s project, but it’s starting to be seriously amazing. I’ll have to post more pictures of it this growing season.
It’s a pretty bad apple year and it’s likely we won’t be making cider. However it is a mast year for acorns, filling up a bag is as easy a taking a walk in the woods. In the spirit of going along with what nature decides, we’re trying acorn flour this year.
In the newly reinstalled greenhouse
Acorns are drying
We have no idea what to expect from this.
The one serving as lunch for parasitic wasps which are more than welcome in the garden. We discovered a new technique for finding hornworms: go in at dusk with a UV light, it’s so much easier to home in on them.
Year 4 of the blueberry orchard, the plants finally look like more than a twig in the ground. The first year going from 1 branch to 2 isn’t particularly exiting even though the plant doubles in mass, this year on the other hand was remarkable in the growth they took. We pick up a large bowl every day, we eat berries copiously and have some left. Next year we’ll have enough for this and canning.
Adding a few every year, I didn’t see it coming. But it turns out we planted our 100th blueberry plant this year for a grand total of 107. They’re all still fairly small but they’re growing exponentially and it’s clear that we’ll have an overabundance in a year or 2.
We just received a massive pile of compost, behind this is a massive pile of wood chips. Both of which are gold for growers, and so we get to be generous with our plants.
We ordered 18 yards of compost, I learned another completely insane measure: the yard. The amount of hand waving I see when talking about yards is peculiar. Trying to make sense of it online yields the same written hand waving. A cubic yard is a cubic yard, let’s consider ourselves lucky it’s cubic and not using the 11th dimension.
Here’s one thing I love about the U.S. system of measures, it encourages generosity. Because no one has but a vague idea what a cord, a bushel, or a yard is, we over-give to make sure we gave enough.
We received the plants we ordered this year. As always we’ll grow our operation a little. They’ll go in the ground as soon as tomorrow. 7 more fruit trees and a bunch more berries.
I built more proper shelves in the green house, Nicole is growing the garden significantly. Everything is about to explode in growth.
I finally got the tractor to where it could work on the monstrous wood chip pile, so much fun!
One of the things trees give us: quick composting organic matter from deep bellow.
We didn’t count the bulbs we put in the ground this year. You could say we’re getting into the rhythm of things and not really worrying about bean counting.
“I’m gonna have me some of these”
After the keets were taken out by a racoon, we bought a trap. We left store bought corn in there for weeks, but the racoon has standards and prefers local organic stuff. So instead it destroyed some of our corn plants not 10 feet away from the trap. As with the keets, leaving 80% the food untouched. Their modus operandi: destroying everything and taking a couple of bites is extremely enraging.
The day I found our half eaten corn cobs on the ground, I decided it was time for the big guns. I opened a can of super fancy French canned fish we reserve for special occasions.
I reluctantly shared a tiny bit of it with the trap, and special occasioned the rest myself.
It had been many nights of failure, but this stuff is potent, and so the very same night, the racoon was trapped. Proving once again that French food is to die for.
Notice how it pulled inside 30′ of the string I had attached to the trap’s handle and proceeded to gnaw and pee on it. It’s only fair that it would spend all night being a jerk under the circumstances.
I had setup the trail cam next to the trap,
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and now I know there’s 2… So far though, second one seems to have wisened up to what the trap means, or maybe the stench of pee and fear hormones isn’t an enticing accompaniment to a fancy diner.
