We are bad chicken owners! Our hens have grown enough that they can fly over their protective fence, so they wind up free-ranging during the day. We talked about clipping their wings, but then they wouldn’t be as able to get away from predators.
Turns out they still aren’t able to get away from most predators. Chickens are food for almost everything.
We’ve had a stead stream of melons this season. Amber picked up several cantaloupes tonight. (don’t pay attention to the weeds and dead strawberries in the background!)
We harvested our first melon today. It tasted great. We have been harvesting a lot of cucumbers and tomatoes.
My new swale did a good job slowing down water runoff and promoting water insoak, but it needed to be tweaked a little to transform it from just a ditch to a gentle slope that we can take care of with the riding mower. I used a box blade on the tractor to even everything out. We also buried a 4-inch drain pipe and covered it with crushed rock. I’ll encourage grass to grow on top of the rock. All the trees I’ve transplanted seem to be doing great.
This is year number 2 for the hugelkulture bed experiment. It still needs soil added to some areas where wood is sticking out. I have a lot of beans and melons planted. Most excited to see how the melons do!
I planted 2 bare-rooted persimmon trees that I bought from Trees of Antiquity in California. One of the trees is Hachiya, which someone said was their favorite flavor, and the other is a Honan Red. I put them in the same swale where I have my fig trees on the east side of the house. See the interactive map for the location.
The new swale was holding back a lot of water when I checked it this morning after a 2-inch rain. It looks like it worked exactly as designed– it slowed down the water runoff, and let the water sit long enough to allow insoak. The fig trees I just planted on the high end will have access to huge amounts of water stored in the soil for weeks to come. The standing water should disappear in a few days, so the risk of mosquitoes laying viable eggs is small.
With the help of Aiden and Amber, we added a lot of cantaloupe and watermelon in the huglekulture bed, along with a lot of cowpeas and beans. We also planted a few okra and cucumber in the front raised beds. Several of my tomato and pepper plants were injured/killed in the late April freeze we had last week.
I created a swale (AKA ditch-on-contour) to catch the runoff water that flows behind and around our house. I transplanted the 11 fig trees I started from cuttings last year on the high side of the swale. The idea is to slow down the water and let it soak into the soil. After a big rain, this area might look like a pond for several days. All that water eventually moves down into the soil where plants can use it for weeks or months after, reducing the need to use extra water.