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.

Deadlines

There are deadlines in all lines of work. In agriculture deadlines come in the form of weather forecasts, lambing season, ripeness of fruit, moisture content of crops, inspector visits, customer orders, and availability of labour.

One thing I have learned about myself in the year and a half since planting my orchard is that I am fundamentally a lazy person. If I don't have to do it this week, I put it off until next week. I have a huge to do list and more often than not when I cross something off it is usually because I have finally admitted to myself that particular item was simultaneously ambitious and completely pointless. 

This is surprising to me since every time I work for someone else, I give my all. Yet when left to my own devices I struggle to move on things. My to do list could be completely crossed off in two full days of work, but I procrastinate and procrastinate.

Except when there is a deadline. 

In the winter I plan my tree order for the spring and when the trees arrive it is a race to get them in the ground. Now, in the fall, I received two hundred flower bulbs (I want to experiment with bulb propagation) and as the weather forecast promised a week full of rain I spent a couple hours of my Saturday preparing beds, amending the terribly sandy soil I have at my home, and planting my bulbs in tidy rows. 

My to do list still has many items on it, with deadlines as far away as next spring. Some items, like protecting my tree trunks with wire cages, have more urgent deadlines. Realistically, having now begun to understand my relationship with my own self motivation, I now know I will likely get the cages onto the trees a few days before the first snowfall is forecast. 

Why should I be so surprised? This is how we were trained! Study the night before a test, do your homework the day before it's due. Deadlines got me this far, soon an orchard full of different fruits with different fertility, pruning, and harvesting deadlines will be managing my life and keeping me moving. For now, let's just do what needs to be done today.

Benjamin Franklin — 'Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today.'

Eden Valadez — 'For now, let's just do what needs to be done today.'

Minimalism Inside and Out

Last year I got very excited about decorating Eden's Rise with upcycled objects, and wrote a post about it (link here). I have since adopted minimalism, or simplicity, as a lifestyle. At its most basic, living simply means living with what you need, what you use regularly, and removing the excess. 

When I look at decorations in people's gardens, and my own attempts at adding decorative flourishes to Eden's Rise, I am embarrassed by the enthusiasm I had in this regard last year. Man-made objects deteriorate rapidly when exposed to the elements. My neighbour on one side has a crumbling concrete bench, another has a rusting statue of a knight in armour, another has a peeling lawn gnome. My decorations are no different. The post I wrote about upcycling was called "Paradise or Junkyard: The Fine Line". What keeps objects on one side of the line is regular maintenance. 

Part of the philosophy of minimalism and simplicity is that even though you are not aware of the 'stuff' in your house taking up your time, they do require maintenance. Whether literally, in tidying up, or in a larger mortgage to afford the space to store all those useless (to you) objects. I was blind to the fact that my orchard decorations would become a drain on my time-- I prefer to spend my time working with the plants, not repainting decorative gates or repairing raised beds. 

Here is a quote from Francine Jay to start your week:

"Strive not to get more done, but to have less to do."

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.

Wet Noodles in the Garden

Weeding my asparagus patch this weekend was a joy. Weed a foot, celebrate with a spear, weed another foot, munch some more. Have you ever had asparagus fresh from the ground; raw, crunchy, juicy, and sweet? It was a discovery for me that asparagus could be so delicious. It was more reminiscent of fresh ‘mange-tout’ sweet peas than it was of the steamed spears traditionally laid out sparingly and artistically next to a fancy piece of animal flesh. I ate a dozen out there in the field, slowly burning the skin on the back of my neck.

Once these weeds are out of the way, this asparagus spear is my reward!

As I pulled the weeds up through the mulch I was surprised at the number of earthworms at work in there. When I was digging the holes for my new plants this spring I saw very few earthworms, yet here beneath an inch of grass they were having a huge party on the surface of the earth.

Everyone knows worms are meant to be a sign of a healthy soil. I wanted to take a moment of your time to talk about what it is these fleshy noodles actually do.

Worms live in the ground, of course. Like rodents, they like to keep a door to the outside world in their domicile. From this hole they reach out and grab at decaying organic matter. You can see evidence of this in fields where debris is left in the fall. It looks like many consecutive circles, each circle being the territory around a worm’s hole.

They eat this organic matter and defecate in their hole, deeper in the soil. This way nutrients are spread throughout the soil profile. This organic matter, now worm casts, contains nutrients that are more easily available to the plants thanks to Mr. Worm’s digestion.

The tunnels created by the worms also have positive effects. They aerate the soil, and create conditions for better drainage and water infiltration.  The channels also provide an easy avenue in which plant roots can travel deeper in the soil to find further sources of water. Even their wee, noble bodies decompose and provide nitrogen for the plants. A healthy population of earthworms can actually build topsoil, by how much seems to vary from one study to another. This is excellent news for me on my site, where the topsoil is a mere foot before reaching pure bedrock.

I will end on a darker note. The earthworm is not native to Canada. It appears its presence

is having a drastic impact on the ecology of our old growth forests. National parks advise people to avoid dumping left over earthworms from fishing trips in the forest. Take them home, feed them to your dog, just don’t empty that container (even if it is just dirt, they might have laid eggs in there!) in our forests.

Flowering Chum!

Have a lovely week, I wish you good health and happiness!

Spring Begins-- Eden's Rise Year 2

After a week dashing off to my orchard every day after work to plant until sundown, Eden’s Rise is now 160 bushes richer. Currants, blueberries, haskaps, and gooseberries were the primary focus of this planting.

Astonishing numbers of flowers are appearing on last year’s Saskatoon bushes and the asparagus shoots are purple undead fingers pushing out from the earth. Rebirth, baby. Along the pathway in the middle of the orchard Crocus flowers bloomed, then delicate blue Muscaris followed.

The thick layer of coconut coir and dried grass mulch that surrounded every tree and bush has now completely disappeared. This could either be due to a natural process called ‘decomposition’, or, equally likely, garden gnomes stealing it as kindling to light their winter fires. Live and let live, but I will need more mulch if I am to combat weeds and weather. Far from last year’s drought, we began this spring with an unprecedented amount of water, with part of Ottawa heavily affected by floods. Who knows what this summer might bring, but mulch is that magical ingredient that promises to save you from everything. I hope.

It is a comfort, as I begin the long and frankly dull process of gathering and spreading mulch, that last year’s mulch is by now incorporated into the soil around my trees. Some of that mulch is now ‘organic matter’, which is extremely beneficial in the soil. Because the particles are tiny, they wildly increase the water holding capacity of your soil. Organic matter releases nutrients to plants over time and improves the structure of your soil. Even if the gnomes steal 90% of my mulch, at least some of it will have some lasting benefits after disappearing from the surface.

A large pile of horse manure waits to be distributed among the plants this spring. Since this will be applied beneath a layer of mulch (to avoid runoff at the next rainfall) I have my work cut out for me getting all of the trees ready. Once the trees are larger, the mulch will not be necessary. While the trees are young and the roots still finding their way it is important to reduce the amount of weed competition. If you think spreading mulch is boring, I dare you to try to pull grass out of an untilled clay field. I can tell you it is no picnic.

Catnip, onions, and strawberries all survived the winter and have already grown a surprising amount. I am pleased the catnip turns out to be a perennial (I did not do my research before planting; beware, it can become as invasive as mint). I planted catnip because not only does it attracts cats (and who doesn’t want an orchard full of cats?), it is said to repel mosquitoes. Maybe this is just another trick from the Catnip Marketing Board but I think it’s worth trying anything that makes such claims.

These are the first stirrings of life after a long winter!

See you soon!

Restoration Agriculture

When I started planning my orchard, I had never heard of Restoration Agriculture, or Mark Shepard.  During the course of the summer when I worked as an organic farm inspector, the words Restoration Agriculture and Mark Shepard kept popping up at the most interesting farms I visited. My personal interests make this a biased ‘most interesting farms’. I love perennial crops. Fruit trees, asparagus, perennial herbs, nuts, and perennial veggies. You get the picture.

What is Restoration Agriculture?

Restoration Agriculture is a way of farming that has the ability to produce many human staple food crops on fields that are unusable to, or have been depleted by annual crop production. It is a way of farming that aims to restore or improve the health of soils, microbiology, wildlife habitats, and waterways that are connected to the production site. How? It relies heavily on imitating the natural ecosystems that were in place before modern man changed the face of the planet. By imitating the indigenous ecosystem of a region, the hope is that we can choose crops that function well in a climate without needing constant attention and coddling.

How do you imitate the natural ecosystem to create a farm? Mark Shepard mainly focuses on the oak savannah at his own farm. To oversimplify things, he has rows of perennial crops with space for cattle to graze beneath. He can grow oak, apple, currants, raspberries, pears, grapes, hazelnuts, and animal flesh and eggs on a hill that if it was under conventional management would be useless for growing corn and could only support a handful of grazing animals. He argues that despite the individual crop yield being lower per acre than a conventional farm, the overall yield if you add the crops together will bring a higher caloric yield than a field equivalent in size that grows corn or soy.

All the while, this system uses no sprays. Animals graze down the grass that competes with the trees and pests are controlled by tree frogs, bats, and ‘good’ insects. Pruning trees is performed by cattle and wild deer. The apples do not all end up looking like the ones in the pyramid display at your local supermarket. The best ones are sold for fresh eating, the rest can be juiced to make delicious cider.

Maybe you’ve started to notice similarities between me and Mark Shepard? Mmm, cider.

Corn needs to be planted, sprayed, weeded, and stalks plowed under every year (despite no-till getting more and more interest). Vegetable crops need to be covered by row covers, hand weeded, or chemically sprayed, protected from insect, frost, wind, and rain damage.  Agriculture is an awful lot of WORK and the returns are not often what anyone would call ‘profitable’. There is one chapter in his book that Mark Shepard begins with the sentence “On the whole, unless someone has special circumstances, nobody is really making any money in agriculture”. He has a few examples of farmers operating at huge losses until they go out of business.  

I don’t want to use sprays on Eden’s Rise, or get too obsessed about things being perfect. I do want it to be an Eden for humans and animals alike. The most exciting moments this summer were when I either got to eat a berry or discovered an amazing new bug or animal in the field.

During the course of my farm inspections I visited a few blueberry farms. One had netting over their entire crop. The farmer explained to me how they had just come up with a new way to set up the netting that took half the time (still several days of labour for the whole team, and that doesn’t include taking it down again), and also complained about being organic because they had to spend 30 hours squishing caterpillars that were ravaging the crop. By contrast, another blueberry farm I visited had no nets, and apparently no pest problems. The farmer said he couldn’t be bothered with the nets, his harvest was able to pay all the bills, and his personal thoughts were that birds prefer protein over sugar. The birds were probably eating as many bugs out of the blueberry plants as they were eating blueberries. When labour is a huge cost in your business, cutting out a useless practice like this could save you a lot of money. Sure, you probably will get a smaller harvest. But a smaller harvest with fewer expenses might actually lead to greater profits.

Mark Shepard also talks about a process of selection whereby he plants a lot of seedling trees and lets the ones who want to die, die, and the resulting trees are strong and capable of surviving his unique environment. Eden’s Rise is only one acre, and I don’t have the capital to get crazy planting thousands of trees and hoping 5 of them will be incredible performers. What I did was similar, albeit I let other people do the work of selecting varieties for me. I planted a wide range of different fruits, and different varieties of the same fruits in order to discover who does well on a shallow, heavy site. I will see what survived the first year and be able to start a second shopping list of the crops and varieties that I will be planting more of in 2018.

If you have any intersecting interest between agriculture and conservation, or an interest in permaculture, I would recommend watching a couple Mark Shepard talks on YouTube. He can be pretty condescending, self-aggrandising, and evasive on the certain subjects, but what I enjoy the most about him is that is stirs in you a new permission to dream up your own way of solving the ‘problems’ of your site without relying on the usual Big Ag expensive ways of ‘fixing’ what doesn’t work for a specific crop.

Have a lovely week!

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.

Welcome Mantis, bring your friends

I kept my word and have been watering my plants every evening, when possible. I had to miss a night here and there due to either social events or back pain, but overall my plants have been spoiled these past two weeks and they love it!

I see lots of new wood, new leaves, and the largest surprise of all- a few days after I started regular watering, the insects that were eating the leaves nearly all disappeared. One exception is one apple tree was attacked by several hundred miniature caterpillars, but after a bit of squishing they seem to have disappeared too.

Best of all- it finally rained yesterday. A welcome relief during our summer or drought.

There haven't been many pictures lately of Eden's Rise and that is because of how brown, crispy, and dead the field looks. The only colour comes from my trees and the particularly drought resistant golden rod that has taken possession of the bottom of the field. 

And yet life carries on. I don't know anything about snake life cycles but there are some miniature snakes hanging out near my asparagus and I assume they must be some recent hatchlings. I love snakes, and I am happy that having left the grass long means that they feel comfortable having a habitat in my garden. 

There are also voles, or some kind of fluffy round ball animals. They make holes and run away in a flash of dark fur when I approach them. They don't seem particularly destructive, but I don't appreciate when they make their holes right through the roots of my newly planted trees. They likely don't appreciate me planting trees right through their newly dug holes.

Today I made a new friend: a praying mantis! 

At first I was horrified, all my knowledge about praying mantises came from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Xander was nearly eaten by a large Praying Mantis Demon Lady. Still, I had an idea that it was probably not eating my plants and likely even a welcome visitor for my garden. A quick google search when I got home confirmed it. It seems they have enormous appetites for aphids, mosquitoes, caterpillars, and a bunch of other bugs I have no immediate love for. Suddenly I love my new freaky insect friend, and I hope she invites all her friends over for a party! 

Have a lovely week, and take some time to look at nursery catalogues. If you want to start your own orchard or want to plant flower bulbs, then fall is a great time to plant. 

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!