Less than 2 weeks till Halloween

The gardening season is almost over. Most mornings we wake up to frost -though we're also seeing glorious, sunny fall afternoons - and there's not much more we can do in the yard.

The hoses are drained, the nursery is covered with hay, the temporary fence is in place and electrified in the open areas, the cover crops have germinated, and the sheet compost is rotting. We even cleaned up the garage and garden shed.

To do:
1) Look for an ignition switch for that darn tractor - hoping we'll do better searching online than at the local parts stores.
2) Take some cuttings from our existing red-osier dogwood and salmonberry and plunk them in the nursery.
3) Pack up the van, man (don't forget seed catalogs).

Here's the tucked-in nursery (I added 16 pots of mint to it yesterday, and started a mint bed over by the cistern):


The Hugelkultur area has expanded quite a bit, and we are waiting for one last load of compost:


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Nootka Rose

Hardrock Ranch is recruiting

Needed: community member with mechanic skills. Do you love working on things that make noise? Are internal combustion engines your thing? Can you keep the chain saws running? Sharpen mower blades? Fix Fergy's hydraulics, figure out why the charging system doesn't work, do some welding on her bucket and oh yeah, the key broke off in her ignition yesterday and we can't get it out.


Other requirements: must be younger than us and have a strong back. Hound dog compatible. Ability to ignore bad words erupting from Husband when key breaks off and engines won't start.

Compensation: none, but we're pretty fun to hang out with and we'll feed you. There's plenty of room for your tent.


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Natural Landscaping

Although we'll wait until next fall to plant in the Hugelkultur area, several other areas will be ready in the spring:
- the hedgerow area is 8 x 80
- the bed south of the house is 8 x 45
- the bed next to the house on the south side is 2 x 25
- the bed east of the house is 8 x 20

That makes 1,200 square feet of intensely planted beds. You may be wondering what they are going to be intensely planted with, and we are wondering the same thing.

Help is at hand. A locally offered class called Natural Landscaping was called to our attention (by Deedee and Raleigh's human mother) in the nick of time. It is sponsored by the Clallam County Conservation District, the same folks who do the previously-mentioned annual native plant sale, and it consists of three evening sessions plus two field trips. All for $20 - these folks are here to help us, it's quite amazing. The first class was a couple days ago and the first field trip was today. While our planting plan hasn't emerged quite yet, Husband has the drawing out and is overlaying sheets of vellum as I write this.


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Fences

Hardrock Ranch's 20 acres are near Olympic National Park, two creeks, and just enough neighbors to keep the hunters away. Does that sound like wildlife heaven to you? We have often driven up our driveway to see two or three or seven deer munching or lounging around the house. To date, with very few exceptions, the deer seem to munch on whatever we brought home from the nursery, starting with the highest price item and working their way down.

What to do? Most of our neighbors, to the extent they attempt gardening at all, build tall stockades around each fruit tree, or group of fruit trees, or vegetable area. We're going to try something different. We're going to attempt to keep the deer out of our entire Zone 1 area. Zone 1, in permaculture design lingo, means the area closest to the house, the most intensely gardened. In our case, Zone 1 is fairly large and includes all of the planting areas we've prepared, the garden shed, the fire pit, and the Hugelkultur area. That sounds like a lot of fencing.





For now, we are stringing wire. Some of it will hopefully be temporary, and replaced with deer-resistant hedgerow over time. In some areas, we may need to put in more traditional fencing, and we will need to build several gates to allow human and mower access. We considered electrifying some of it, but that presents maintenance problems because the fencing east and north of the house will be back in the treeline in heavy brush. Details to be determined as we go - this is a design-on-the-fly operation.





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Stone masons we're not

Today, we gathered big rocks from around the property to make a border for the planting bed on the south side of the house. A few of them provided a major challenge even with the help of old, tired Fergy - but eventually we wrestled all of them into position. I believe we earned our dinner (dried lima beans cooked with home-grown tomatoes and kale) tonight.


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A brief history of Hardrock Ranch

Some years ago my parents were contemplating a move to the Olympic Peninsula. In the process of helping them find the right place to settle, we became enamored of the area ourselves. We ended up buying before they did, in late 1997, a property consisting of 20 clear-cut acres and a small-ish house. One of its most attractive features is its location: small creeks on the east and west boundaries provide green belts, and the Olympic National Park is our neighbor to the south. In 1997, we had a lovely, though distant, view of the Straits of Juan de Fuca; at night we could see the lights of Victoria, B.C. That vista is pretty much gone, but no matter, we'd rather have trees than view.

A few years later, Husband designed a barn and hired a local builder named Larry to help build it. The "barn" has been more for general storage than farm equipment, but it does house the old-but-reliable tractor ("Fergy") we bought to help us get the property under control. When loggers clearcut, they leave behind stumps and lots and lots and lots of slash. We borrowed huge backhoes, pulled stumps, picked up slash, had huge bonfires, borrowed other big equipment to build roads, remove rocks, dig a pond. Phew, those were the days.

This was a weekend place for us, a 90 minute drive from our primary residence. We didn't do any landscaping around the house because we never thought we'd live here full-time. In fact, last spring, we had a huge Barn Sale which attracted dozens and dozens (a couple hundred?) shoppers and now, every day, we wish we had that stuff back. I guess we changed our minds. Isn't that how it goes?




That brings you up-to-date. We want to live here and we want to have a yard with useful, pretty and edible things growing in it. We spread a bunch of sticks, hay, mulch and dirt around to try to make good topsoil over the winter. Oh, and I planted the cover crops yesterday. Now there is plenty of time to research hardy and deer-resistant plant varieties, string wire, order plants, and study seed catalogs before spring arrives. And more...we will need a greenhouse and a gray water system...lots of planning and designing to be done. Bring on the cold, wet, miserable weather.





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Hugelkultur beds are done for now

We had some good help this weekend so we made quick work of the mulch pile. There is now a lotta poopy mulch piled on top of the hay, on top of the sticks and logs. We also did the "hugelkultur dance" on top of each bed to pack it down as much as possible. Now I think we will let the fall/winter rains do their job and see how much the beds begin to break down and settle over the next couple months.


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Chainsaw construction

The garden begins to take shape.





The artists take a break.











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