David and Kristen's Garden

Mini-Update

2011-03-27T16:35:00.006-04:00

Spring is here, so it's time for a little update on what's going on at the farm. We've been a little busy lately. Kristen gave birth to our son, Theodorus Evander, on December 23rd. He's already helped Kristen out in the hazelnut field.

Above is our first egg. Yes, it's blue. So far, only one of our hens (out of about 20) is laying. Most likely she's just early. But it's also true that our chicken setup needs a lot of work. For inspiration, we decided to visit Appalachian State's research farm in Valle Crucis. We want to transition into a pastured-poultry system this spring, and definitely needed some ideas for coop construction. Many thanks to Dr. Fanatico of ASU for a tour of their poultry operation and lots of great advice.

This rooster was enormous. The chicken yard was much better kept than ours as far as bedding goes -- keeping a good layer of straw on the ground helps prevent the spread of disease.

Here's one of the mobile coops they have. A roosting and nesting area is to the right, with easy-access to nest boxes. The design looks very sturdy and waterproof.

What we want to do is incorporate chickens into the rotational grazing system we have with the sheep. We think this will add to the fertility of the soil, keep the pest load down for the sheep (and possibly the hazelnut trees), and keep the grass under control.

To do this, we have to build mobile chicken coops similar to the manufactured one above. Kristen's been working on the design, and we hope to start construction in the next week or so.

Speaking of sheep...

Notice the difference here grazed pasture (bottom) and ungrazed (top). You'd think it would be the other way around, but in addition to the sheep manure, grazing actually stimulates root growth in the ground cover. (The white tubes, by the way, are young hazelnut trees).

Here's another view of a different part of the field. This was the corner of one of the temporary pastures. I almost wish we'd taken more pictures of the pasture when we first moved here; the recovery it's made has been incredible.

Finally, a new post...

2010-10-23T12:55:00.012-04:00

Well, we've been a little busy in 2010. As most of you know, Kristen and I were married in May and we're expecting a baby in January. This doesn't mean that farm and garden stuff has stopped, however, but the blog posts sort of have. Anyway, here is a rapid update!

The first new thing we did this year was raise chickens. We decided to pick them out ourselves from a big batch of day-old chicks a friend of ours received in the mail. It's very difficult to tell the difference between roosters and hens at that age, so we thought we were smart by picking out the most active, healthiest-looking chicks in the bunch.

Which turned out to be all roosters. All 13 of them.

Anyway, we raised them over the spring and slaughtered them in the summer. Slaughtering and cleaning birds is a lot of work, but now we have a freezer full of chicken.

Our second batch of chickens came in late summer. We bought these from a hatchery, and 25 out of 26 of them appear to be hens. Half of them are Ameraucanas, and the other half are Rhode Island Reds. We should be getting plenty of eggs this spring.

The second big project for this year was getting sheep. We wanted some kind of grazing animal in order to keep the grass down in our pastures, which we'll be converting into a hazelnut orchard. But we also wanted something that would be easy to care for and move around.

We settled on Katahdin sheep. This is a breed of "hair sheep," which means they shed their winter coats and don't need to be sheared. They're also mostly raised for meat, so lambs are affordable. Katahdins also have a reputation for disease resistance and being able to do well on rough pasture. So we figured this would be a good breed to start out with for people who haven't raised livestock before.

As you can see, there's a lot of variation in color. This is probably due to different strains in the Katahdin mix. The brown-and-white sheep in the back is named Jersey, who might have some Desert Paint in her. The one in the middle, Jackie, shows most of the markings of a Barbados Blackbelly. Annie, in the foreground, might have more St. Croix in her than the others.

We started with 2 ewes and 1 lamb, but returned 1 ewe because she learned to jump the fence. Then we got 3 new lambs, one of which died from barber pole worm (or its side-effects). So now we have 1 ewe and 3 lambs, and we'll probably pick up a few more sheep next spring.

Pictured above is the electronet enclosure we use to rotate pastures. This is basically a portable electric fence made of nylon, steel thread, and plastic support stakes. The energizer is solar-powered, portable, and about the size of a small suitcase.

The electronet enables us to rotate the sheep around our land. More importantly, it will let us pasture the sheep between the rows of young hazelnut trees in a way that will prevent them from eating the leaves or stripping the bark.

If I had to do it over again, I probably would have just used electric tape rather than electronet. The netting gets caught on things very easily, and it's not very well-suited to hilly areas (changes in elevation cause it to lose tension). On the other hand, the net is probably better for keeping out predators, so I'm glad we have it.

It's hard to see, but the little dots at the center of this picture are me and Kevin putting up a perimeter fence along the front of the land. After moving the sheep around a few times, I realized that it would be a good idea to have a "backup" fence in the event they got out. Our property had a barbed-wire fence around it, but sheep slip through those very easily.

For the interior fence-line that separates the pasture/hazelnut field from everything else, I decided to add electric strands to the existing barbed wire, since these would be much cheaper than fencing the entire thing. The nylon-electric strands are very easy to work with. I'm pretty happy with it so far, although it hasn't been fully sheep-tested.

These are peaches from our trees. We canned some of them. We also tried to make peach wine, which might end up being canning vinegar.

We also had a lot of apples this year. It's a little hard to see in this picture, but that is a tree loaded with apples. The variety of different types of apples on our land is hard to keep track of. I can honestly say that some of them have been among the tastiest apples I've ever had, and the pies/crisps/apple sauce/cider we've made from them so far have been much more flavorful then anything I've had store-bought.

Some people say that apples are difficult to deal with because they get a lot of diseases. This is true. But it's also important to understand that there is the picture-perfect, blemish-free apple you get in the grocery store, and then there's what you have on your overgrown apple trees. The first category of apple is indeed hard to get. But the second category isn't. Our trees have been unpruned and unfertilized for years, and they produced many more apples than we had the time or resources to make use of.

Picking apples is only half the battle. Apple-sorting can be difficult work. Above, the Bell family debates the aesthetic, structural, and nutritional merits of each fruit before deciding its fate: pie? Storage? Apple sauce?

Above is a little bit of fall color from the back of our land.

We did a lot of new stuff this year. The garden took a back seat to a lot of the establishment projects we had on the land. We still managed to produce a good number of tomatoes, potatoes, beans, and other vegetables, but we probably wouldn't have had anything without help. My father and sister helped us plant tomatoes, basil, and other vegetables, and Hollis and Jay Wild were once again very generous in keeping our little vegetable starts alive in their greenhouse for many weeks after we should have planted them out.

Greenhouse!

2010-04-25T20:21:00.010-04:00

Well, we've been a little busy here, but we've been meaning to get a post up about our beautiful new greenhouse.

Last year we applied for a grant for a greenhouse. Unfortunately, we did not get it -- or so we thought. When my Aunt Kathy heard that we didn't get it, she generously offered to fund our greenhouse project, and asked only that we name the greenhouse "Anna-Mae" -- my grandmother's nickname.

Sadly, my grandmother passed away earlier this spring, the same week the greenhouse went up. My grandma wrote in beautiful calligraphy, which was the inspiration for the style of the sign painted by Kristen. My grandmother was a very patient, caring woman, and I like to be reminded of those qualities when working on our delicate little plants and young trees.

But we had a bit of work to do before we could get it up. Here's me digging the foundation for the greenhouse. Our land isn't exactly level, and we're too stubborn to hire anyone or rent machinery, so there I am. My arms hurt just looking at that pile of dirt. There were some big rocks in there, too.

Here's Chief Engineer Kristen working on one of our piers. The greenhouse is anchored into the ground with six concrete piers going about 2' into the ground, with steel stakes running through the middle of them and going down an additional 1' or so. On the sides are rot-resistant recycled plastic lumber for the sill plates. The "Anna-Mae" isn't going anywhere!

We dug trenches in the bottom for drainage, put in gravel, bolted the sills down onto the piers, and Kristen put together a very pretty brick walkway through the center. You can see from this angle why we needed to dig down a bit to make it level.

Here's Kristen and friend & mentor Jay Wild working on the base. Jay was a big help getting the greenhouse up. Since our seedlings were taking up space in his greenhouse at the time, I can't blame him!

The walls are made of 8 and 10mm twinwall polycarbonate -- very heavy-duty stuff that will hopefully last a long time in addition to providing premium insulation. Early on we decided that temperature control and durability were the main features we wanted.

Here I am puttering around with some of our hazelnut trees. My grandma really liked red geraniums, so we put some pots of those to either side of the door.

The greenhouse will allow us to germinate, graft, and chip-bud hazels under controlled conditions, and it also has shelving that will allow us to start vegetable seedlings without using much space. And because it's small, we probably won't use a lot of energy heating it. It's really the perfect greenhouse for what we want to do.

Wood Stove!

2010-01-30T02:02:00.013-05:00

It's been an unusually cold winter in the high country, with two major snows and two ice storms. The largest ice storm came on Christmas Eve and left large parts of Ashe and Watauga Counties without electricity, in many cases for days. Below are our willow trees, which were hit particularly hard by the ice.

Anyway, it's the sort of weather that makes you appreciate a good heat source. So we worked very hard in December and early January to get a second woodstove in the house. Below: stripped molding, cement board, and some plastic storage containers used as a mock-up of the stove. Makes you feel warm just looking at it, right? We sited the stove near an interior wall, close to the center of our living room-dining room-kitchen, and pretty close to the stairs... we're hoping it can heat the living spaces and the bedrooms upstairs.

We have wood floors, so we had to build a hearth. The cement board is mostly used to stabilize the hearth tiles and provide a good adhesive surface for the mortar and cement. It also probably prevents the wood floor underneath from getting hot. We used HardieBacker(tm) -- the best cement board money can buy.

In the end we decided to go with slate tile, which has a more natural look than most of the manufactured tiling we could find. The disadvantage to slate is a lack of uniformity. Tile thickness and size varied considerably. Fortunately, such differences disappear quickly under the expert guidance of tiling veteran Ed Perzell (below, with Kristen) who helped us a lot through this project.

Below: grouting. As you can see, grouting leaves a beautiful white coating over the tile, which gets into every crack and crevice and can only be removed by tootbrush. My knees hurt just thinking about it.

The almost-final step was the border. We found a stone tile border that matches the slate. The diagonal pattern of the border also complements the diagonal arrangement of the tile. The border comes in strips backed by a kind of plastic webbing -- this makes it much easier to install.

Below is the finished product. All it's missing is a stove and some kind of molding around the hearth border.

Installation day was a lot of fun. It was one of the warmest days of the winter. We bought and had our stove installed by Mountain Home and Hearth in Boone, who were great from start to finish. The sales manager provided us with a lot of advice, calculations, and re-calculations while we were figuring things out, and when we were finally ready, the installers were great.

Below is the first fire in the new stove. It is not like the old stove, which is in our basement. It heats a larger area with less wood, is easier to light and keep lit, burns cleaner, burns for longer periods of time (up to 18 hrs according to the manual), and is much nicer to look at.

It's a Harman Oakwood. Modern woodstoves are very different from the behemoth we have in the basement (or any old woodstove). For one thing, they either have catalytic converters or some other design mechanism that allows for complete combustion of the wood. If you burn wood below a certain temperature, a lot of the volatile gases simply leave through your chimney as pollution. New EPA-rated woodstoves have what amounts to an "afterburner" which allows these gases to ignite at low temperatures, which translates to less pollution and more heat.

Brief Update & Looking Back

2009-11-12T00:37:00.007-05:00

Sorry we haven't updated in a while. Kristen and I are very busy with some less blogworthy (but not less interesting!) home projects at our new place. This includes cleaning and repairing the chicken shed, installing a new chimney and woodstove, and of course putting up the greenhouse. So far those are all still works-in-progress, but we did manage to fix the barn roof. Big thanks to mom and Michael for helping us out with that (and a half-dozen other home projects).

I'm already looking forward to next year's garden. We definitely learned a lot last season. Some things I've been thinking about:

Bed Width. We did double-wide beds in our garden last season, mostly because we had our beds shaped by a tractor. This seemed to work well for strawberries and beans, but for potatoes, cabbages, broccoli, and a lot of other things, I think it simply left too much room for weeds to grow up in the middle.

Blight. Like a lot of growers, our experience with early blight last year was probably worse than usual, but I still think we're definitely going to experiment with some organic fungicides next year.

Materials. Every year I garden I look back and think about how much easier it would have been if I had collected the right materials beforehand. When I was living in New Jersey I had a community garden plot with access to an almost unlimited supply of compost and wood chips. You don't realize how valuable this stuff is until you buy it and truck it in yourself, or until you spend your weekend afternoons shoveling a free pile into the back of a pickup truck. I'm still not sure how we're going to source all the materials we'll need next year, since late winter and early spring will mostly be devoted to digging tree holes.

More Squash Earlier. I'm always disappointed by transplant shock in squash, and always impressed by the damage done by squash vine borer. Next year I'd like to direct-seed more squash (if we have the space) and be better about controlling the borer (which wasn't too bad this year).

As we look forward to getting chickens, I'm always thinking of ways they might be used in the garden. Chickens aren't stupid and will eat anything that tastes good. They'll peck at melons, tomatoes, and they'll wreak havoc in mulched beds in search of insects. But I've always wanted to release chickens into a garden after the harvest to control overwintering insects like vine borer pupae or Colorado potato beetles. I think it might be worth a try.

Late-Summer Update

2009-09-09T00:33:00.014-04:00

We haven't been able to update lately, mostly because we've been busy moving into our new house. At the end of August, we moved to West Jefferson with the help of many of our Ashe County friends. We have a lot of plans for the new place -- a greenhouse, a new garden, chickens, and of course more hazelnuts.

Meanwhile, we've been harvesting from our garden in Glendale Springs and going to the farmers' market when we have time. Below is one of Kristen's beautiful displays of fingerling potatoes at the market, which is the main thing we've sold this year.

Many of our potatoes were hit very hard by the blight. But some varieties that were hit the hardest still yielded well. Among the best producers this year was the "Red Thumb" -- those are the bright pink ones in that basket -- which were very colorful, high-yielding, and had great flavor and consistency. The "Banana" and "La Ratte" varieties also did well.

Above is a basket of "Rose Crescent" fingerlings, tomatoes, basil, flowers, and broccoli from the garden. Our house is a kind of bottomless pit for tomato sauce and it is impossible for us to can enough, with or without late blight, which finally took our tomato plants last week after creeping up on us all season.

Occasional garden-helpers (and badminton pros) Mitch and Josh demonstrate the great variety in potato sizes. The Guinness Book of World Records does not have an entry for world's smallest potato... yet.

This picture gives you a better idea of some of the color varieties of our fingerlings. The red ones are "Red Thumbs", the yellow ones are most likely "Bananas", and the black ones are "Peruvian Purples". Although they add a lot of color, the purples were among the least productive we had this year.

Experiments at the Bell household show that fresh fingerling potatoes go very well with wine-poached scallops. We'll have to reproduce our findings several times to be sure!

We've also had a good yield of Delicata squash, which are so sweet and buttery when baked that they hardly need any sugar or butter. It's difficult to get enough of them.

Green beans have been a huge success - pest-free and producing all season long. The winner for taste, tenderness, and productivity is definitely "Rattlesnake," green with purple streaking. We've been getting watermelons and muskmelons, but it's hard for us to tell when these are ripe.

Anyway, that's the news from Glendale Springs.

Garden Update

2009-07-03T19:46:00.013-04:00

By now, of course, the garden is a huge, weedy jungle! But here are some catch-up photos... The garden on June 6th: strawberries, newly-transplanted tomatoes, brassicas, potatoes, beans.

The potatoes are all taking the pest problems differently. Some varieties have been hit very hard, while others seem almost untouched.

That's our broccoli up there in the blue, with onions behind it.

We were lucky enough to get an afternoon's help from twin garden elves! Thanks, Josh and Mitch! Come back soon!

With their help we planted winter and summer squash, melons, and cukes.

Below is a row of squash mounds. For these we pile up a lot of brush, water it down, and make pockets of compost in it. The baby squash are transplanted into the pockets and and climb down the hills as they grow.

Planting & Pests

2009-06-05T17:03:00.018-04:00

Potato bed (and blooming rhododendrons) on May 21st, 11 days after planting. We planted 12 varieties of potato, most of them fingerlings - about 350 plants total. Well, David loves potatoes. Also, we're planning on selling them at the market.

Snazzy paint job on the garden gate, Mom!

I don't think we've talked about garden fertilizer yet. With the help of a free soil test from the NC Dept of Ag and recommendations from our very knowledgeable extension agent Richard Boylan, we decided to add calcitic lime to increase the pH, and (pictured above, L to R) greensand (a potassium-rich ancient seabed deposit mined in NJ), bonemeal (high in phosporus), and humic acid (a stable form of carbon - this mix we bought from Seven Springs Farm in Floyd, VA). We applied about 700 pounds of lime, 100 lb each of bonemeal and humic acid, and 200 lb of greensand to our 100 x 60 ft garden.

Beans on May 26th, 6 days after planting. We planted 14 varieties - most of these are tasty and beautiful as dried beans, and we're planning to sell these at the farmer's market too.

Potatoes on May 31st! They look nice, but what you can't see is the war we've been waging with the Colorado potato beetle.

These beautiful beetles emerge from underground in mid-spring, mate, and lay lots of orange eggs on the bottoms of potato leaves. Unfortunately, it's us (and our potatoes) or them - so we do thorough searches every couple of days and squish every beetle and egg cluster we can find. Mulching the potatoes should also help, according to ATTRA, while also increasing potato yields.

The other pests we've had some problems with so far are flea beetles and slugs. Here is a pac choi plant showing damage from both. The flea beetles leave tiny holes in the leaves of brassicas and potatoes (just cosmetic damage so far), and the slugs have been eating large holes in the lower leaves of the brassicas, where they touch the mulch. Since the greens are just for us to eat, we're not going to worry about flea beetles. A floating row cover would be a good protection against flea beetles if we wanted beautiful greens. For the slugs, we put out small cat-food tins full of cheap beer - the slugs are attracted to the yeast and happily drown in it.

"Ruby perfection" cabbage.

First harvest - easter egg radishes!

Turnips and peas. I read somewhere that if you plant peas close together in a big patch, they will grow up supporting each other (instead of needing a fence) - we'll see!

Onions like it sunny and weed-free.

Little trip up north...

2009-05-24T10:11:00.003-04:00

We just returned from a brief road trip to New Jersey and New York, where we caught up with friends and family. Along the way we visited our friends at Regeneration CSA in High Falls, NY. Regeneration is located right next to the Mohonk Preserve where I used to go hiking and fishing with my dad. It's a beautiful area.

Regeneration is a CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture. That's a system where members of the local community buy shares in a farm at the start of the season to pay for the farm's expenses. In exchange they get a weekly share of the produce throughout the growing season. In addition to being a good economic model, CSAs are also a great way for people to participate in the growing of their food. Many CSAs -- including Regeneration -- hold regular tours, workshops, potlucks, and many other events that educate people about farming and help build relationships between people and their food.

Here's me with Sarah and Kevin, who started Regeneration in 2007. Before that they were working on the farm where Kristen and I met (well, actually, they set us up -- but that's another story). Regeneration uses permaculture growing techniques. Permaculture is (among other things) a theory of designing gardens, farms, and landscapes that mimic relationships found in nature. The idea is that ordinary problems like pest control, irrigation, fertilization, and many others can be solved in more ecologically sustainable ways by recreating structures found in the natural environments around us. In a lot of ways it takes the ideas of organic farming to the next level.

They start vegetable seedlings in a salvaged kit greenhouse that they modified to be solar heated. The walls are made of double-walled polycarbonate glazing ("twinwall"), which keeps the heat in. A home-made solar collector heats water and circulates it into the greenhouse. A pile of decomposing compost in the back also gives off some heat. Kevin is kind of a genius when it comes to improvising things like this -- the water is moved by a solar-powered pump he threw together and it's heated in black plastic tubes normally used to warm up swimming pools. The greenhouse doesn't stay as warm as an electric- or propane-heated greenhouse, but it uses minimal fossil fuel inputs, and gives seedlings a good head-start on the growing season.

The seedlings then graduate to this coldframe (above), which is kind of a miniature version of a hoop-house -- what a lot of farmers use to extend their seasons in cold climates. It takes the edge off the cold nights and lets the plants warm up during the day.

Beautiful herb and flower seedlings for sale. (Seedlings for planting are still in soil blocks.)

This is one of many types of no-till beds found at Regeneration. This means that they generally don't plow up the ground when they plant. Instead, they cover over the previous year's bed (or over a mowed field or lawn) with paper, compost, and mulch. All the weeds and dead roots from the previous year decompose. The idea is that by leaving the soil alone and simply adding on top of it, you improve soil structure, organic matter content, and the diversity of organisms living in the bed. All of these things make the plants healthier, improves drought and disease resistance, and makes soil nutrients more available -- which is very important when you don't use chemical fertilizers.

Here are some more no-till beds. All that hay is used to keep the weeds down and to keep moisture in. Vegetable starts are planted into pockets of compost.

Being at a farm like this makes our garden look like a little patch of barren dirt! It takes a lot of hard work and careful growing decisions to build up the soil, and we're definitely going to experiment with no-till next season.

Spring update

2009-05-05T21:49:00.010-04:00

So much has happened in the past 2.5 weeks! Look at the leaves on our hazels!

The different varieties are leafing out at different times, but the good news is that so far none have died on us. Tonda di Giffoni (pictured above) is the earliest - she is our Italian principesa.

We have installed most of the irrigation system for the hazels: 1/2 inch plastic tubing with two 1-gallon/hour emitters per tree.

Kevin Burgess tilled our garden, and made beds 3-4 ft wide with a special home-made attachment on his tractor.

We put up a 4-ft high woven wire fence to keep out rabbits, neighborhood dogs, etc... David dug a trench all the way around to bury the bottom of the fence 3-4 inches.

Joanie's gate! She sure classed up the garden. Thanks, Mom!

These lush and verdant thickets are our soil block trays, 6 weeks after planting. Huge thanks to friends Hollis and Jay Wild, who watered them several times a day in their greenhouse!

We planted broccoli, brussels sprouts, red and green cabbage, and pak choi - just stuck their soil blocks into compost pockets in the bed - zero transplant shock. They're mostly planted at 12-inch spacing, to correspond to the slits in our drip tape. We're excited about drip irrigation, because it's the most water-efficient method out there. Seeds were also sown in the past week: peas, carrots, radishes, turnips, parsnips, rutabaga, beets. And we planted a pound of onion sets. Of course all of this should have happened three weeks ago.

And finally, the strawberries! David was skeptical, but I bought 200 bare-root plants from Fedco: Earliglow, Sparkle, Jewel, and Seascape. It's hard to kill strawberries. These were left in the box for a couple of weeks while we waited for tilling weather. Now look at them!

Hazels all planted

2009-04-22T21:11:00.003-04:00

On April 17 we finished planting all the hazels! The final two varieties to go in were Geneva and Santiam. This was also Joanie's birthday, so we celebrated both achievements with chocolate cake.

Planting Hazels!

2009-04-11T22:02:00.020-04:00

After many months of talking about and waiting for our hazelnut trees, we finally have most of them planted. All of this was preceded by several weeks of digging holes and making cages out of hardware cloth. We wanted to give our trees a good start, so we dug large holes - about 3 ft wide and 18 inches deep.

And then we added lots of compost to the soil to refill the hole. The compost will provide the trees with nutrients and will also help them retain water during the summer.

We're planting 8 varieties of hazelnuts from two different nurseries. The first batch arrived on March 31: bare-root 2-yr-old layered clones of Tonda di Giffoni, Halle's Giant, Gamma, Delta, and Yamhill. It's very important that the bare roots don't dry out, so we dipped the roots in a gel that helps keep them wet. We then heeled them into our pile of finished compost. They stayed pretty happy there, which gave us a week to get them into the ground -- which we needed, since there were 38 to plant in the first batch!

We partially refilled each hole with a mixture of soil and compost, and we made sure that the collar of each tree was level with the ground. We spread out the roots, held the tree straight, and started filling the hole with compost and soil.

For protection from the vicious Glendale rabbits (who ate the tops off our first four hazels over the winter), we constructed 3-ft-high, 6-inch-diameter cages out of 1/2-inch hardware cloth. We buried the bottoms of the cages a couple of inches as we refilled the holes. Between those and the family of stray cats nearby, we're hoping our trees will be safe from rodents.

Hazelnut trees naturally grow with multiple trunks coming up from the base, which can make it difficult to walk through the orchard for harvesting and maintenance. Our tree cages will help us train them into single-trunked trees. Pruning some of the buds off will also help the trees put more of their energy to establishing a healthy root system.

According to our soil test, we have pretty poor soil to work with - low in organic matter, pH around 5, and low in nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, and potassium. Hazels like a rich soil (higher pH), so we added about 1/2 c of calcitic lime to each hole. (We will also top-dress with about 10 lbs of lime per tree.) We also added 1/2 c of rock phosphate to each hole, a slow-release phosphorus source to stimulate root growth.

Most of what we're adding is slow-release, and we hope that periodic top-dressing with compost and manure will help stabilize the pH and keep the levels of nutrients in the soil high. It will take time and lots of care to get there, though.

We also added two products from Oikos Tree Crops. The first is a root-zone "tea bag" made from fish, alfalfa and feather meal (yum) and potash inoculated with mycorrhizal fungus. The second is a slow-release macro-micronutrient tab which dissolves over the course of two years. We have no idea if they'll work, but we're hoping they'll help to make up for some of the initial nutrient deficiencies of our soil.

Finally, we gave each tree a good watering-in (Joanie at the hose, here). It's been a rainy spring so far, which helps the chances for our trees establishing themselves properly.

We're expecting to lose some trees, particularly the Yamhill and Halle's, which had very poorly-developed roots when they arrived. We've been watering them every day it doesn't rain, and soon we'll mulch them to protect them from grass. After that we'll install a drip irrigation system that will give the trees a steady supply of water over the summer.

Starting

2009-03-25T21:37:00.005-04:00

Spring is finally here after a long winter of getting settled in Glendale Springs, planning our garden, and ordering everything we'll need to get started.

For our first year we'll be planting 50 hazelnut trees, several rows of strawberries, and working on a small garden. We're going to be growing potatoes, squash, beans, and smaller amounts of other kitchen vegetables as well. We're hoping to sell some of our produce at the Ashe County farmer's market in West Jefferson.

One of the first things we wanted to do with our garden is improve the soil. Normally we would do this by collecting and composting material throughout the year and adding it to our growing space. Since we were new this year, we ended up buying a pile of finished compost, which will let us get off to a good start.

We also need compost for our trees. Planting our trees in pockets of compost will help them get access to nutrients, grow healthy roots, and will help the soil retain moisture. Soil with a healthy amount of organic matter will also help moderate the pH.

But we will also have to start making our own compost -- for next year and for later this season. Next to Kristen is a pile of goat bedding and manure, courtesy of Lon & Carol Coulter's goat dairy in Jefferson. We will bulk it up with leaves and turn it regularly so it breaks down evenly. Kristen is mixing a bucket of peat to make soil blocks for our vegetables.

Soil-blocking is a way of starting your vegetable garden without pots. A soil block recipe is very similar to a potting mix recipe, and we hear that they are sometimes interchangeable. The soil block mix is compressed into cubes using a metal tool called a soil blocker. We ordered ours (as well as most of our seeds) through Fedco. One of the nice things about soil blocks is that they can be planted directly into the ground without disturbing the roots of the young plant.

Here is a pair of pak choi starts emerging from a soil block. It looks like they're almost as eager to get started as we are.