Even though I’ve had terrible luck in the past with bugs in the spring attacking Brassica plants, I went ahead and planted 6 cauliflower transplants. The thought of fresh vegetables is too irresistible. I also put in 24 sugar snap pea seeds and 12 turnip seeds. It was good to see all the rich loose soil when I moved my leaf mulch back!
My order of bare root fruit trees came in today, and I immediately put them in the ground. I planted them in a pattern I learned about in a the film “The Permaculture Orchard“: 2 fruit trees, followed by a nitrogen fixing tree and prevent two fruit trees of the same type from being close to each other. The idea is the nitrogen fixing tree will provide for the fruit trees on each side of it, and if one tree gets attacked by pests or diseased, the problem doesn’t easily just jump next door and take out another tree. I planted at 12 foot intervals, and about half of the trees will be shaded for the first half of the day. The fruit trees and redbuds came from Womack Nursery in De Leon Texas and the 3 nitrogen fixer trees are on order from Cold Stream Farms in Freesoil, Michigan.
Key to above picture: Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I planted 16 blackberry plants along the west side of the shop building. I got these from a group buy from some members of the North Texas Vegetable Gardeners facebook group. I had to drive to Denton to pick them up, but they only cost me $3 each. I have 4 each of the following varieties:
I’ll plant fruit trees right next to them later this winter.
I put some onion transplants in the ground today, 1/6/2018.
We had almost 0.75″ of rain today.
We haven’t had much rain in the past 30 days.
We received 8 cu-yds of tree trimming waste from ArborDocs through the getchipdrop.com service. He dumped the material in our front yard. It was mostly finely ground limbs, branches, and leaves, with lots of larger material in it too, including logs. We used to the mulch to create walkways through the area where a future vegetable garden will be. We put down double layers of cardboard to help block weeds for the first year, and piled the mulch on thick (4-6 inches). In about 5 years, we should be able to rake the wood chips back and harvest compost, then apply more wood mulch.
Previous posts related to gardening and permaculture on my personal blog:
I collect tree leaves in bins made out of welded wire fencing. The bins of leaves will just sit for a few years and break down over time into nice compost. When I need to mulch the vegetable beds, I get leaves from the bins and create several inches of covering over the soil of the vegetable beds to keep the moisture and heat regulated. Here is a picture of the bins storing leaves.
I advertise on local social media that I’ll pick up bagged leaves: http://gallistead.com/free-leaf-pick-up-service-in-princeton-texas/
This is a good recycle / reuse program, since my city doesn’t pickup leaves. Citizens have to resort to burning them, hauling them to the dump themselves, or wait for every-other-month bulk pickup service, which just takes them to the dump.