See you on March 3

In the meantime, expect no new posts. Snowed today, we're outta there.

Practicing Proper Propagation Procedures

We have an existing stand of red-osier dogwood, so we decided to do some propagation via hardwood cuttings. According to our book, this is the correct time of year to do it, and we even followed most of the other instructions. Unfortunately, we never got around to getting any growth hormone (even after Becki said for $15 she could get it over here), which would have greatly improved our chances for success.


We tried an alternate method using willow branches, which are supposedly naturally loaded with growth hormone. We scaped off the bark, chopped them into little pieces, and tossed them, along with the dogwood cuttings, into a bucket of water. We'll soak them overnight, then stick each dogwood cutting into a pot of compost. We'll cover the pots with hay and see what happens by spring. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

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Cover crop progess

Even though we planted late - and we are getting a good frost most every night now - our cover crops look happy and seem to be growing. Here's the clover:


And the annual mix:



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Save the Date!!

We placed our large plant order with Clallam County Conservation District and we would like to invite you to come to our Planting Party on March 3. I was just kidding about the "hardrock" thing, it will be fun, really.

We ordered 100 each of Tall Oregon Grape, Red Flowering Currant and Nootka Rose. Smaller orders are accepted in January and we plan to buy some salal, evergreen huckleberry, serviceberry, filbert, Indian plum, and twinberry. Plenty to keep everyone out of trouble for a few hours. Refreshments to follow.


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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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End of a hard day

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The frost is on the pumpkin

Well...we don't have any pumpkins, but it did frost last night, just a little. The good news is that it's supposed to be 68 degrees today, at least at sea level in town. We're at 1,700 feet and sometimes it's actually warmer up here because we're above the marine layer. This time of year, though, it's probably several degrees cooler.

We found MORE great compost, at a reasonable price on Craigslist. Here's half, about 5 yards, the rest will arrive next week. Leilani's truck wouldn't make it up the hill with a full load - it's pretty steep.


Turns out Leilani was a good find. She's an expert on gardening in general, greenhouse gardening in particular, and she is a regular speaker at Sunset's Northwest Flower and Garden Show in Seattle and at garden clubs, etc., etc. We may need her advice, as well as more of her compost, later.

Speaking of advice, thanks to regular reader Becki, a renowned expert in agricultural products and methodologies, for telling me where and how and why to get some of that rooting hormone stuff.

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Location:Garry Oak Dr,Sequim,United States

Cover cropping

I keep hearing about cover cropping, but I've never done it. Advocates say it:

- Keeps the weeds down
- Prevents erosion
- The leaf litter adds organic matter
- The roots loosen the soil, bring nutrients up, and add organic matter further down in the soil

Hey, we better do some cover cropping - with all those benefits, how can we not?

Turns out, there are dozens of choices of cover crops - some annual, some perennial, some nitrogen-fixing, some cool weather, some warm weather, some better than others at opening up compacted soil. So after much research, and in the end determined largely by what the local co-op was selling, we selected:

White Dutch Clover, a short (6-10 inch tall) perennial clover, for the hedgerow area and other areas where we will want to leave it in place. This may include overseeding on our "lawn" areas and on the soon-to-be formed pathways. When we plant the hedgerow seedlings in the spring, we will just open up a spot in the clover and pop them in.

Gardenway, an annual blend, for the areas where we plan to have smaller plants and/or vegetables. We will plant now, then hack it back and possibly lightly till it in, next spring - before it goes to seed (very important). This blend is 40% ryegrain, 25% Austrian winter pea, 20% triticale, 5% crimson clover, 5% common vetch, and 5% Gulf annual ryegrass.


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The Nursery

It would be VERY expensive to go to the local retail nursery to buy the 50 plants we will need to get the hedgerow started. Fortunately, we have some options. Both Kitsap Conservation District and Clallam County Conservation sell native plants that we can order in January, pick up in March. Their new plant lists aren't out yet, but last year, for example, you could buy 10 bareroot Snowberry plants (8"-12") for $11.00. Not bad.


Another option is to set up our own nursery, and do our own starts from existing garden plants or from native plants on our property. Okay, let's try it. For his birthday this year, I bought Husband a book called, "Propogation of Pacific Northwest Native Plants." It says things like, "Strip the basal end leaves and treat the cutting with a medium-strength rooting hormone, stick into a perlite:vermiculite (1:1) mixture and set on a misting bench with light mist at 21 degrees Centigrade." So...we took cuttings off some stuff, dug up some other stuff, and stuck them all in pots of dirt. After all, Nature does this stuff on her own without a misting bench. Some of them will probably survive.





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The Hedgerow

What is a hedgerow, anyway? Hedgerows differ from typical hedges; they include a variety of plants, rather than a single species that is usually pruned into an unnatural shape. Although you might not see them on farms in your area, they have been used by farmers in Europe for 5,000 years (according to a quick Google search). Hedgerows can act as fences and windbreaks, provide wildlife habitat, attract beneficial insects, prevent erosion, reduce noise, help hold water, and provide edibles such as berries or nuts. Wow, we should plant one, right?

We're hoping ours will also be an effective deer deterrant, most likely aided at first by a hot wire.

The area we are preparing for a hedgerow is about 80 feet long and 8 feet wide. For two rows of plants, placed 2-3 feet apart, we will need at least 50 plants. Plus we'll fill in with some smaller herb-type plants to make a third row. That's a lot of plants! What kind? Fortunately, we have all winter to figure that out.

The hedgerow area now has a layer of topsoil on top of the compost. Some people might say that seems backwards. It might be; we make no claim to knowing what we're doing.


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Location:N 5th Ave,Sequim,United States

Sheet composting

What we are doing is called sheet composting, composting in place, or sheet mulching. According to The Book (again, Gaia's Garden) it's easier than regular composting because there is no need to babysit and turn the pile, and then when it's finished, haul it all back to the planting bed. So far, it does not seem particularly easy to me. Many wheelbarrow loads later, we have moved about half our mulch pile onto our future planting beds.

Let's review. In our hugelkultur areas, starting from the ground, we have logs, sticks & branches, leaves & brush, hay, purchased compost. On our planting beds by the house, we have paper & cardboard, lots of hay, manure from the neighbors, purchased compost. We are working on wetting it down (the rain is helping) and crossing our fingers that composting will begin.

Will it work? Well, it will almost certainly work - you couldn't stop the rotting process even if you wanted to. The question is how long it will take. Right now, it pretty much looks like a big mess, though less so now that the manure layer is covered up. Patience! Faith! A watched pile never rots - go south for the winter!




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Location:Cherry Ave NE,Bainbridge Island,United States

We're committed now, or should be

Prior to today, it was just elbow grease, no moolah. Today, we paid $700 for compost and topsoil, 15 yards of each. We're doin this.

Our guidebook, Gaia's Garden, says to start small, 50 square feet or so, next to the kitchen door. Where's the fun in that? Go Big or Go Home is our motto.












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More About Hugelkultur

A month or so ago, we had never heard of hugelkultur. Suddenly it's everywhere. We went to a free hugelkultur workshop last Sunday at a farm near Port Townsend (40 miles away) as part of the Jefferson County Farm Tour. Interestingly, the county is providing some funding to teach people hugelkultur - how to make use of their own yard debris, rather than sending it to a county-run, expensive-to-operate, composting facility.

Photos of us making a keyhole shaped planting bed at the Sunfield Farm Waldorf School:





















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Location:N 5th Ave,Sequim,United States

The Truth About Manure

The truth is that manure is poop. It may be necessary for making good dirt, but it smells bad and is gooey. It helps that we actually know neighbors Raleigh and DeeDee...at least it's not the poop of strangers.

Raleigh (horse) and DeeDee (damn donkey) gave us six pickup loads of poop mixed with bedding straw. Thanks a bunch!

We tossed all six loads on top of the hay in the front planting bed and in the future hedge row.













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Topsoil

Sustainable agriculture - I struggle with calling what we will be doing agriculture or even farming, it's just gardening really. So let me start again: to be sustainable, gardening should not require major inputs to be brought in each season. By inputs, I mean fertilizer, mulch, topsoil. herbicides, pesticides, etc. The goal is for the land to be healthy enough to take care of itself.

All over our planet, topsoil is being depleted (used up, washed away, blown away, buried under asphalt) far faster than it is being created. I'll find the horrifying statistics for a future post, but believe me, we need to care about this. You know we depend on topsoil for our food, right? It doesn't work that well for me to buy topsoil from the store, because that topsoil was taken away from somewhere else. Instead, we need to MAKE topsoil, using our own fallen leaves, cow poop, branch trimmings, rotten tomatoes, apple cores, etc. For Hardrock Ranch, that is the goal, but it's not going to happen right away.

So, we got some inputs coming. Boy, did we. 110 bales of hay arrived on site last night, and we have 15 yards of compost and 15 yards of topsoil coming sometime within the next week. We're going to add that to our hugelkultur piles, or just pile it on top of the ground in some areas, and hopefully start to make some really good dirt. Also, we ran into our neighbors this morning, and they said they would just love to give us some "compost" created by their resident horse and donkey. Now we're talking.

Photos below of the hugelkultur area partially covered with hay (still more to do), and an area heading south from the house, where we want to get a deer-resistant hedge started ASAP. Hey, Ruth Stout says 12 inches of hay will kill the grass and the weeds and turn into beautiful dirt by spring. Hey hay.

Hugelkultur

The commune activities began last weekend. I would like to thank Cousin David for giving his blessing to the project (I believe his exact words were, "you must be crazy") and for helping kick it off. The essential problem, in addition to the elevation, short growing season, devastating winds, and north-facing slope, is that there is very little topsoil. This land was clearcut in the 30's and again in the mid-90's, shortly before we bought it in 1997. The result is...there is not much topsoil.

In 1997, this was a stump farm. Today, as a result of forester re-planting (Douglas fir), nature working on her own, and our efforts at planting and thinning, we have LOTS of trees. To create a sunny spot to grow food plants, we selected a spot not too far from the house, which is next to the driveway and hopefully a "sun trap." Then the chain saws came out and we cut down a dozen or so trees, mostly alder and bitter cherry but also a couple fir, a hemlock and a willow.

Now what about the topsoil problem? We are experimenting with a technique called Hugelkultur, in which brush, branches and logs are buried beneath compost and topsoil. That seems to make sense for us because we have a nearly endless supply of brush and logs. In fact, as luck would have it, we have a dozen or so felled trees, right at this spot. If we can get the wood to start rotting fairly quickly, the idea is that the decaying wood holds in moisture and provides a long-lasting, rich soil.

We separated the brush and branches from the logs, put the brush on the bottom, then the logs on top. Whew, it was a lot of work to make this relatively small area; I think we can let the gym membership go. What did we make? In front is a 6x30 raised bed, two or three feet deep, for berries. We feel confident we can grow berries since there are lots of native species on the property doing just fine. Behind the berries we made six widely-spaced raised planting sites for fruit trees by mounding up the wood. We'll begin researching hardy varieties.

We still need to buy compost and topsoil to put on top of the wood and are hoping to find spoiled hay and manure locally for a cheap price. We'll get that done this fall and be ready for planting next spring or fall.

Our thanks to Cousin for suggesting Hugelkultur is withheld pending positive results.

What is Hardrock Ranch?

For a couple years now, I have been talking about starting a commune. By "commune" I do not mean: 1) shared finances, 2) free love, and 3) no toilet paper. What I do mean is: 1) living more cheaply by sharing the lawnmower and rototiller, 2) building a community of similarly-minded friends, 3) having enough land to grow food and enough people to share goat-milking duty, 4) sharing the work, with everyone chipping in their expertise, 5) eating some meals together, 6) living more simply and leaving a lighter footprint on the planet.

Lots of people, certainly not everyone, but lots of people, agree with this in theory and several have told me, "count me in." However, it is difficult to actually make it happen. Twenty good acres for 5 couples seems like it could work. A big vegetable garden, a few fruit trees, some chickens and ducks, a nice communal kitchen/dining room, and five reasonably-sized cottages. So what's the problem? Lots of them; namely, zoning, money, timing, and ALL the details including the fact that we probably don't know four other couples we want to be partners with.

So, here we are, with twenty not-so-good acres which however do have some things going for them. Primarily, we own them. But also, they are not in Death Valley or on Alaska's north slope. Where they ARE, is 1700 feet above sea level on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula (80 miles and a ferry ride northwest of Seattle). Can a mini-commune work here? Let's try it. For now, it will just be me, Husband and Dog. If you want to join us, let me know.