Summer solstice

Urban farm inspired

Greenhouse tomatoes and cucumbers

Flowering lilies

Currants ripening on the bush

Yellow pear tomatoes in development

Allowing wild flowers in my front yard to encourage insect life

Milkweed flowers and leaves provide food and nectar.

Cucumber

Blueberries on the bush

Maximizing space for the urban farmer

Red currants

Haskaps

Growing Orchard

Changing the pH of the soil is slow business, but the blueberries continue the fight. Enough flowers this spring to feed my hungry face with blueberries this summer! Maybe next year the soil+age of the plants will = surplus available for sale!

Grapes have been unimpressive in my poor soil, but this year their roots finally seem to have established some dominance against the stubborn grass. After two years, we see some top growth. (Grape plants have since been weeded)

The orchard will produce its first grapes!

The lonesome Kiwi survives. Two of her sisters and her mate have died. Without a male, these plants cannot produce fruit.

One of five blueberry varieties in the orchard.

There will be a huge amount of currants coming my way! I am excited to have a crop to harvest. Growing perennials is a game of patience, seeing results is a gift. One of 50+ currant bushes at the orchard...yum!

A few Haskap/honeyberries have already ripened. Unfortunately the 30 plants I planted last spring have produced collectively 8 berries. Here's hoping next spring will prove more rewarding. In the meantime, I have planted a further 25 haskap plants this spring and continue to propagate new plants from cuttings.

Saskatoons ripening in the sun. I purchased two varieties of Saskatoon. Lee 8 (pictured here) is producing fruit on every plant. The Martin variety has not produced a single berry.

Starting a Market Garden Shopping List

Propagation equipment

• Seeding cells
• Seeding trays
• Growing medium/potting soil mix
• Heating mats (ideally)
• Light (ideally)
• Seeds
• Labels
• Permanent marker
• Notebook for keeping notes and consulting crop plan

Fertility equipment (my soil is very coarse sand)

• Compost
• Horse Manure (lowest quality manure, but available for free)
• Soil
• Peat moss
• Pelletized chicken manure or blood meal (ideally)
• Truck (rent or borrow)

Season Extension equipment

• Floating rowcovers
• low tunnel/unheated greenhouse
• Transplants

Irrigation equipment

• 150 feet of hose
• Sprinkler
• Timer for watering 
• Drip irrigation for greenhouse crops

Harvest equipment

• Pulp berry baskets of varying sizes
• Stackable perforated harvest bins for picking and delivery to market
• Unperforated bins for washing root vegetables
• Elastic bands for Asparagus and other bunching vegetables
• Harvest cart
• Hose nozzle for cleaning
• Cold room (ideally)

Market supplies

• Signs
• Labels
• Tent shelter
• Folding table
• Table cloths
• Cashbox
• Cash & change

As I hinted to a few posts ago, I am starting my own market gardening business. My orchard will begin producing small quantities of fruit this year and I will grow annual vegetables. I have started selling houseplants in a local store already and preparing for a busy season as a market gardener. This is all made possible by maintaining a part time job 20 hours per week. Income from the first year can be disappointing as mistakes are made but these are how we learn.

The above is my shopping list for what I need to start my business. This list continues to grow as I remember other indispensable items (feel free to comment anything I have forgotten). I have already purchased many of these items, and am still looking/shopping around for others. Those with "ideally" in brackets are items which I might not get around to purchasing this year.

Risk is inevitable in business. Nothing comes for free, and making a living self-employed requires investment. The returns will hopefully exceed what you can expect as an employee but putting in a few years of hard work is as inevitable as spending some money.

Plants Have Problems Too

My gooseberries are having a rough time. The leaves began to show small black spots, then eventually they dropped off the plants. As of now they are all still alive, a couple new leaves are growing on each plant, but I doubt they have had enough of a chance to strengthen themselves in order to survive a Canadian winter.

What is happening? 

Black spots on the leaves are usually the sign of a fungus. This fungus comes from leaves that fell last year; the spores flew up to the new foliage in the spring. What annoys me is that this makes no sense; I planted all of these plants this spring before they had any foliage and there were no gooseberries in my field previously. There is no cure or remedial action to be taken. The recommendation is to plant gooseberry varieties which are resistant to this disease/fungus/mystery death. This means I spent $400 on plants that were doomed to die because of their genetics. Fantastic.

My currants are looking a bit yellow as we approach fall. I wonder if their feet are too wet, or if there is a lack of nitrogen in the soil. They have grown about 8 times the size that they were in the spring when I planted them, so they seemed happy enough until a couple weeks ago. I did add manure to the plants a month or so after they were planted. I wasn't overly generous as I worried applying manure when plants were so young could burn the immature root tips. In the fall and spring I will apply more generous amounts in order to increase the nutrients in the soil, and continue with regular applications of manure every year.

Yesterday the blueberries received their aluminum sulphate, which should work to reduce the soil pH. I also applied some peat moss below the bushes which increases soil organic matter and acidity too. I picked the last of the blueberries yesterday, as well as eating a couple plums and chums. I wasn't supposed to let them produce fruit until year 4 (this is year 2) but I wanted to sample the fruit to know which trees are worth ordering more of.

That's the update from the wee orchard!

Blueberries turning red in August

There's a lot to be said about doing your homework and learning from the experience of others, rather than reinventing the wheel. In many areas of my life I do learn in that way, but sometimes you have to learn by making your own mistakes.

Intellectually I knew my soil was far too alkaline for blueberries, and while I made some small effort to mulch with pine needles I did not think that the effects of a high pH would affect my blueberries this early on. I was under the impression it would reduce the amount of berries the plants produced years in the future. I have been growing uneasy throughout the summer as my blueberry leaves have been turning gradually redder and now I am forced to admit I should have taken action months ago. 

The pH of a soil will not kill your plants, what happens is that the acidity of the soil affects the plant's ability to take up certain nutrients. Nutrient deficiency leads to weak plants, and eventually death. Since blueberries evolved in areas where soil acidity was higher, they are adapted to take up nutrients in a pH of around 4 or 5. Most other plants seem to like a slightly acidic soil of 6.5. 

My blueberry plants are now bright red and waiting to be rescued. I was able to buy a tiny amount of aluminum sulphate which lowers pH, and I sprinkled it around all of my plants. There was nowhere near enough in the tiny box which was likely for people who own 4 rhododendrons. I ordered 25kg of ammonia sulphate which will be more than enough for my 60 blueberry plants. I read online that coconut coir can also help blueberries in neutral soils, though it didn't seem clear to me why this should be. I happened to have kept half a dozen old bags of coconut coir that were used to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse; I mulched the blueberries with this yesterday. It is my hope that this will help them struggle through this period until I can give them their "medication". 

There you have it, I knew what I needed to do to have happy blueberry plants and yet I needed to see the effect of not doing it before I bothered taking action. This is not a good trait to have, but learning first hand helps the information stay in my brain permanently. 

A small harvest

Have a lovely week,

Eden

Why Does my Tree Only Bear Fruit Every Other Year?

Last summer someone wondered aloud to me that there were not many wild flowers. This year, walking through the forest and wild meadow on the way to the orchard flowers are exploding from the ground, trumpeting life and the air buzzes with insects. I knew that 2016’s drought was a heavy one for our area, but the stark contrast with 2017’s wet spring is shocking.

My fruit trees are growing like fireworks, currant bushes I planted as twigs in May have quadrupled in size. The blueberries I planted this spring have already outgrown the ones that struggled to survive the dry summer. The grass last July was brown and flattened against the earth, now it makes a solid green curtain reaching my navel. It has turned the orchard into a maze where I have to guess the general direction of my Honeyberries to find them. The grass is taller than most of my berry bushes, but they don’t seem to mind. They all have a small radius where I have weeded and mulched the 'root zone'. After all the rain we’ve been having and my application of manure last week the orchard is singing. A monarch butterfly flutters past, floating above the tall grasses and flowering milkweed.

This week I’d like to address a question sent by a reader asking why their apple tree did not flower this year. I commonly get asked about this sort of fruit tree behaviour. The alternate version of the same question is: Why does my fruit tree only bear fruit every other year?

Trees run on a two year cycle when it comes to flowering. Trees want to produce fruit and seeds in order to create offspring. Imagine this year your tree is not producing any fruit. It is going to put a lot of energy into creating flower buds which will be able to produce fruit next year. Fast forward to next year, the tree is loaded with pollinated flowers and it is using all of its energy to ripen its immense load of fruit. This means that during this second year the tree has not been able to invest energy into next year’s flower buds. Year three we are back to a tree with no fruit.

In commercial orchards farmers control the fruit set by spraying the trees (in both conventional and organic agriculture this is a permitted practice, though the chemicals and techniques differ) in order to make them drop two thirds of the potential fruit load. This means the apples, or peaches, or plums that are left on the tree will ripen bigger and more flavourful.  At the home scale you can thin fruit by hand and ladder. My second year working in agriculture I spent a few days in spring thinning fruitlets on peach trees in a greenhouse in northern Ontario.  It is a slow process, but it improves fruit quality and ensures a harvest for next year.

Once trees have gotten used to biennial bearing, it is very difficult to restore them to annual bearing. As far as I am aware it is not impossible, but the ease at which you can bring those trees back is largely affected by how long they have been allowed to bear fruit in this way.

Your berries won't need thinning, they are pretty good at self-regulating. You should thin your grapes to improve flavour. The amount of grapes you leave on depends on the vineyard, the use for the grapes (wine or fresh eating), and the climate. Go with your gut, trust your instinct. Often when it comes to plants the power of observation will lead you to the right place.

Hoping you enjoyed a lovely summer solstice, have a lovely week.

-E.V.

Seven

Fall is a time to take stock. I tried a few things this year and learned a few lessons that will allow me to move forward into more focused plantings.

1.     Asparagus loves my site/soil/climate. Now I am trying to decide how much more to plant next year,  whether I should invest in roots or start plants from seed, and how to prepare the soil in advance for a massive planting.

Asparagus in July. Next spring it will be possible to harvest two spears per plant.

Dwarf cherry, the leaves slowly died
 back until there was only this little
 tuft left. It lives, for now.

2.       Cherries and miniature kiwis are not suited to my site. While the plants still cling to life, the amount of trouble they are having surviving does not bode well. In the spring I will replant these plants in a different area and plant more worthwhile plants in their place. There is no point leaving the prime top-of-the-hill real estate to a group of plants that won’t bear fruit. Better to fill the space with fruit trees that have been doing well.

3.       Plums and apricots are fantastic. More of these will be planted. I love them- they are tough and not many local producers have these crops which means should I ever take them to the farmer’s market I won’t have competition.

4.       Strawberries are delicious, and I am still harvesting in October. There are a lot of strawberry producers in the area, though, so I will keep my production for personal consumption only.

5.       Praying mantises live in Canada! They, along with snakes, love my bit of land and I expect this has to do with leaving tall grasses. I will keep the areas directly below my trees tidy in the future, but will leave wild areas for biodiversity. This will also help wild pollinator species as I want to introduce more species of flowers to those areas.

This red currant produced
DELICIOUS and sweet berries!

6.       Some red currant varieties are delicious and sweet. They bear fruit the second year. I will plant more. Saskatoons taste good and bear the first year, but the skin breaks upon picking. This destroys their potential for even short term storage.

7.       Since the field has no irrigation, there is no point in preparing a vegetable garden with non-drought tolerant crops. Most of my vegetables did not grow. 

I love my project. I love that I can make mistakes and learn and always keep dreaming of potential futures the project could have. I was afraid of taking this risk, but it is the most worthwhile risk I have ever taken.

Have a lovely week.

Apricots have beautiful red tinted foliage all summer long.

Munching on grape leaves, this is one fat caterpillar.

Hidden gifts

The past few weeks have been wild, both for the garden and for myself. After days of pain I went to the hospital where they kept me for a week and eventually let me leave having confiscated my gallbladder. They said I'd be back at full activity within a week, but no digging or strenuous exercise for two weeks. 

My 300 flower bulbs arrived in the mail the day I went in to the hospital. Poor Eden's Rise, I thought, but lucky me to live in an age where such a surgery can occur so quickly and the wounds can heal and be forgotten almost immediately. It only took four days for walking to become natural again, and I went to see how Eden's Rise fared with my two week absence.

Interesting news: the deer have found the field! Ends of branches have been nibbled off, and entire branches were shaved clean of leaves. Oh what a pickle. 

Having gone through a near death (and if not 'near death', then 'near to wishing for death') experience calms and places things in proportion. 

"The deer had a little to eat, okay, but this year was all about promoting root growth anyway. All those leaves that were eaten weren't important," I tell myself and hope that it is true. "If anything this will be good for the plants as it will encourage them to grow taller branches next year to get out of reach of the deer."

This positive thinking is no reason for inaction, however. I returned home, washed my hair (and let's face it, with my gut still covered in bandages and changing clothes being challenging, washing my hair was somewhat overdue anyway), and then I cut my hair. I placed the cut hair into a bag. Then I brushed my cat's long luxurious coat and collected her fur too. Then I was tired so I had a nap.

Fast forward a bit, now all the trees that had been nibbled in Eden's Rise have a few strands of hair hanging from each branch. 

I am not a hippy!

The smell of soap is a known deer deterrent, as is the smell of humans. I am not sure my cat's fur will deter deer, but who knows, maybe the mice will think twice about gnawing at the bark. 

My two weeks mandatory digging-free rest were over on Saturday, and I planted two thirds of my flower bulbs. On Sunday we had a gentle rain. 

What a glorious time to be alive and healthy. I wish the same to all of you. 

The Farm vs. The Garden

What is a farm and what is a garden?

A farm should be profitable, first of all, and efficient. Straight rows, evenly spaced, soil tilled into a perfect seed bed in order to produce a uniform crop. Orchards are made up of trees in straight lines and the width between the rows reflects tractor size and manoeuvrability as much as it reflects plant requirements. Animals are fed a standard diet and more or less confined to a designated area. There is nothing growing on a farm that does not serve a purpose.

That, at least, is my impression of farms. I love them, and always have. I've worked on loads of farms and dearly wish I had found a nice farm lad to be my husband so that I could live and work on my own farm. 

Don't get the impression that I don't think I am capable of starting and running my own farm without a man involved. Of course I could, and if that's your dream (irregardless of gender or marital status) I encourage you to jump in. 

What is holding me back is that I do not like to limit myself to the analytical thinking required to make a farm efficient and profitable. When I'm at work I'm a huge fan of the "work smarter, not harder" approach, but when it comes to my dreams I want to create a place where food is plentiful, nature is welcome, and puttering is encouraged.

Eden's Rise is a productive garden. Fruit, flowers that are known to be good for wild bees, herbs, and some annual vegetables will all grow here. This year so far I've accomplished three of those four goals, though on a tiny scale. Next year Eden's Rise will be unrecognisable as the little fallow field it once was. 

This fall I am planting 155 more fruiting shrubs and ~200 mixed flower bulbs. In the spring will come ~40 more fruit trees, and possibly some nuts as well. Then, I have a plan for companion planting vegetables, flowers, and herbs below the fruit trees using the permaculture principles of plant guilds. I have begun digging swales and seeding the lower portion in clover to increase soil nitrogen and hopefully the deep roots will break up some of the bedrock. I also need to set about establishing some more permanent raised beds for vegetable and herb production. The raised bed designated for wild flowers will be reseeded again in the spring and hopefully next year a three month long drought will not once again kill all the newly sprouted plants. And all this while trying to plant in a way that is visually appealing. 

Eden's Rise aims to blur the lines between utility and beauty. 

What is a farm and what is a garden? Both are amazing proofs of humanity's ability to influence and change our landscapes and environment. But can a farm be productive and efficient while being beautiful? Can a garden be beautiful while still being efficient and productive? 

Have a lovely week.

Lessons

Things have been a bit bleak lately. My plums are being massacred by insects, my strawberries are being ripped up by neighbouring horses, my blueberries look like they're burning from the leaf edges, my grapes are stunted. 

It's all my fault.

I frequently visit other people's orchards. Usually they are an abandoned side project and I've been proud to see that for the most part my trees look like those in orchards that were planted several years ago. My bubble burst when I visited my best friends who planted their orchard at the same time as I planted mine. Their trees have at least twice as much new wood, three times more leaves, and no apparent evidence of insect damage. 

I hated them.

Only briefly. (C'mon, a little jealousy keeps you human!)

Their orchard is very near their house, which allows them to water it daily. They need to. Their soil is sandy and has trouble holding water. Daily water and the endless heat and sunshine that we've had this summer are the perfect recipe for plant growth. 

I've started a new job this summer and with the busy whirl of finding my feet in a job that has me travelling around the province I've been neglectful of my orchard. I've only been watering Eden's Rise once a week, sometimes even less. No wonder my trees are being ravaged by insects, curling their leaves up, turning yellow, and my two weakest plants (weak since being planted too early and getting a hard knock by the frost) have finally died. 

I realised that far from being on par with those older orchards, I was on the road to having my orchard stunted and looking much as it does now even 4 years from now when ideally I should be in full production. Tough love is not what these young trees need.

Like a procrastinator who has realised the deadline is now only 2 days away I've been pushed into action by panic. I have been watering my orchard every day for 4 days now. To see change overnight seemed too good to be true and yet change is here!

My elderberry plants have added an inch of new wood in 3 days, my plum which had lost 60% of its leaves to insect damaged has now sneezed out a huge tuft of new leaves which totally hides the half eaten massacre within. The blueberries with crusty leaf edges are pushing out some fresh green leaves and the grapes which have been lacking in action nearly all summer have finally sent enough tentacles to reach the first wire of my trellis (about 4 feet) (not all of them, some varieties seem to be struggling more than the rest). 

Seeing an immediate result to my extra work is exactly what I needed for morale. I should have known thirsty plants don't have the energy to fight off predators, etc.

Things will be back on track now at Eden's Rise. It may take 2 hours a night to water my orchard, but let's face it. What else would I be doing?

Have a lovely week!

-Eden

Cider

Of course when you are planning an orchard, there's a bit of you that thinks "wouldn't it be cool to make my own cider?"

At least that is my thought process.

Rather than wait until my own trees are producing enough to make a batch of alcoholic cider, I decided I should practice on cheap store bought juice first. Just to iron out the kinks in my knowledge of brewing.

First fermentation went well with a lot of gurgling, and the secondary fermentation was very quiet. The cider at this point tasted alcoholic but nearly unpalatable due to the lack of sugar. I decided to put some honey in the bottom of my bottles which I knew was likely to trigger a third fermentation which would make my cider bubbly. I also knew there was a risk that this third fermentation could be too violent and my bottles might explode.

When I went home this morning four of the corks had popped out. Cider all over the bathroom floor. Not a problem, I'm pretty sure cooling the cider down should halt fermentation. So I put as many as I could in a bucket with cold water, selecting particularly the bottles whose corks had already been coming out a little. 

This is clearly not a permanent solution during a hot summer. I happen to know, however, that there is a lot of unused fridge space at my mother's house. So I load the cider into my car and start driving very slowly towards her place with my AC blasted as high as it will go. Not high enough, incidentally. 

Shaking bottles that are full of pressure is not very good if you want to actually drink the cider someday. One cork pops, I wince, and the whole car smells of cider. I've gone too far now, I have to keep going.

I reach a stop sign and discover extensive road works are underway. There is nothing to do but sit in the baking sun with my own blood pressure rising as I know what the heat will do to the yeast having a party in my bottles. Two minutes pass, three minutes, four min- BANG! Cider sprayed all across the inside of my windshield, ceiling, dashboard and the cork whizzes past my ear. Right now I am really hoping I can make it to my mom's house without being stopped by a cop because I don't know how I'll be able to explain this. 

It is a happy ending, though. I made it home and I now have 20 bottles of cider in the fridge and the inside of my car drying in the sunshine. And I know for next time to STOP fermentation in the bottles after about a week if I want to avoid explosions and fountains of delicious cider. 

Have a lovely week, bottoms up!



Update: Having a glass of cider from one of the popped open bottles. It is sweet, fizzy, and definitely going straight to my head!

Why Garden?

It's a lot of work; so why garden?

It would be easier not to plant all these trees. In the supermarket we can buy local fruit and exotic fruit of all shapes and colours. But they have about 1/4 of the taste and texture compared to eating them ripe off the tree. That's one reason people garden. Taste. 

This is pretty much the entire harvest for 2016, so why bother?

You could spend Sunday mornings laying in bed until noon while watching a Netflix show and eating Nutella straight from the jar (tempting) instead of working 6 hours lugging water, raking, weeding, digging, and generally 'working'. This physical exertion gives you strength, a well earned hunger, and energy that can only come from regular exercise. You might garden for your health.

When you shop for seeds, bulbs, plants; fruit, vegetable, or floral- you have so many options to choose from. You can plant huge flowers of all colours, try 20 varieties of tomato, grow something you've never heard of for the chance to try an unknown berry in several years' time. You can garden for variety and discovery.


If you read this blog, you're likely a gardener yourself. What's your reason for gardening? Have you ever even stopped to wonder why you do it?


My reason is pure and simple: I enjoy it. 

I dig and sweat in the sun on a cool morning. I hear the birds sing. I look up to see a herd of wild turkeys watching me, or a weasel carrying a rodent half its size. I hear the wind and the hum of bees and forget about time, people, stress, traffic, internet, deadlines. I reconnect to the true meaning of life, to nature. 

It isn't work to me, I wouldn't want to be doing anything else. 

You can leave your comments below, I would love to hear about your own adventures into gardening! 

Have a lovely week.

Obsessed, mulch?

Strawberries plants are often mulched. Mulch keeps the berries clean (no direct contact with soil), it also acts as a temperature buffer and reduces moisture loss from the soil to the sun. Best of all for the farmer with a bad back; mulch suppresses weed growth!

Strawberry beds kept tidy with use of mulch

My little field has been fallow for at least seven years. That's seven years of grass growing and dying. Mulch can be expensive for the organic gardener, but for me it was only a matter of raking for 10 minutes to get enough old grass together to cover one bed. 40 minutes later all my strawberry beds were mulched!

Blueberries mulched with pine needles and grass

The result was so good (particularly on the weed side) that I figured I should do this for all the plants on Eden's rise! The blueberries have a mixed mulch of pine needles (to increase acidity) and grass. All trees, bushes, and vines have a small circle of coconut coir mulch from planting day that has now been covered by a larger circle of grass mulch. I am grateful that I began this little project after the first full week without rain. There has been very little rain so far this summer and the field is in the full sun all day when the temperature is frequently above 30 Celsius. The mulch keeps the weed competition away for the base of my plants so when I waddle over with water for each tree I know I am not wasting that water on weeds. Thanks to the layer of mulch the hot sun also loses much of its opportunity to steal the water and the soil does not bake. 

Those are the often praised advantages of mulch, but I enjoy mulch for another reason. Bare soil, as the soil would be if I managed to keep it weed free, is subject to erosion. Anyone who has ever had a passing interest in sustainable agriculture knows that loss of topsoil is a serious problem in areas that are routinely cultivated. Erosion from wind and rain can hit hard on fine soil particles (like my clay soil). Since the soil depth on my hill is only about 1.5 feet to bedrock, every bit of soil is precious. The mulch will eventually rot down and be incorporated into the topsoil with the positive effect that in this case agriculture adds to the topsoil rather than depleting it. 

Two rows of asparagus, mulched around the edges with plastic
 and mulched in between with grass

There is always work to be done on Eden's Rise, I will leave you at that! Have a lovely week.

The grass looking fairly well combed after a raking session to mulch the apple trees.

Paradise or Junkyard- the fine line

I don’t know if there’s a word for people like me. People who hate to see things wasted. People who recycle, upcycle, shop in charity shops, garage sales, flea markets, and who start and participate in clothing exchanges. People who unashamedly stop to pick up stuff from a stranger’s garbage that’s been put out to the curb.

Cheap?

Environmentally conscious?

Thrifty?

The word hoarder definitely does not apply to me as I love giving things away as much as I love collecting them. It is the knowledge that something that was destined for the trash has been rescued and given another life with someone who can appreciate the item’s worth that makes me happy.

What people who aren’t addicted to re-using don’t realise, is that it is actually quite a lot of hard work. You may call me ‘cheap’ because I was not willing to go out and spend $200 on a new computer chair, but you could also call me ‘patient’ for instead making do until one in my neighbourhood was put out for the trash. You may call me a ‘garbage picker’ for rescuing the shitty chair covered in chalk and paint, but you could also call me a ‘hard worker’ for spending over two hours cleaning it until it was a beautiful black computer chair. And you could call me ‘clever’ for then selling that chair many months later when I had to move.

Old tyres aren't widely recycled, but at Eden's Rise
they can live a second life as flower containers.

The problem with using the word cheap is that I am willing to spend large chunks of money on things I love. But when it comes to material goods, I know how much stuff is circulating in my rich country and how likely it is that what I want is sitting in someone’s basement somewhere waiting to be given a second life. Re-painting an old beige dresser, rescuing picture frames, getting a whole new wardrobe from the unloved clothes of a friend, these bring me so much joy and pride.

Eden’s Rise is an extension of this drive inside me. Raised beds made from old pallets, a flower bed made from old tyres, a rain barrel purchased second hand online, trellises made from the sides of an old crib found on the side of the road, mulch that was once a growing medium in a local greenhouse, and plastic mulch made from the growing bags. None of this is easier than just purchasing things new. Most worryingly, it is a fine line between a successful re-use and having the orchard look like a trash pile.

Old pallets used to make raised
beds for strawberries

Even the dead grass on Eden's Rise
gets a second life as 'straw'

The field itself is a prime example. Unused and vacant, now I am trying to give this little acre new life. Among my own trees and gardens are tall grasses, self-seeded trees, and weeds weeds weeds. Why don’t I just chop them all down? Good question. Partly because native wildlife depends on the little environment in the field, partly because I think if I removed all those distractions the wildlife would target my trees (which are still little more than twigs), and partly because I don’t think it’s necessary yet. I am looking for a second hand mower to keep the middle path trimmed down, but otherwise I keep a large enough circle of mulch around my trees and weed this diligently so that at least there is not competition for the water and nutrients at the base of my trees. I’ve also cut back the self-seeded tress that were shading my plants.

Asparagus hates competition-
here old grow bags are being
used as plastic mulch.

To come: the whole asparagus
patch will be framed with
recycled pallets. 

Ugly, or original beauty? Again comes the patience aspect of being a person like me. You don’t expect what you want to fall in your lap the second you conceive it. You wait. Now it looks like a disaster zone, but little by little I will transform it into a gem.

I want my orchard to be a beautiful paradise, fruit trees and bushes with an under story of wildflowers. 

Though for now it does look a bit like a hoarder’s back garden.

 Have a lovely week!

Eden's Rise- weedy mess or young paradise? Here are the edges of the crib I found in front of a neighbour's house, now painted white and added to the top of Eden's Rise to give the illusion of open gates welcoming you in. Hopefully we'll have some Nasturtiums climbing up these someday soon. Also in the picture is the second hand rain barrel that's often used for emergency watering needs.