Getting ready for planting day

We'll be picking up 370 plants from the two county conservation native plant sales this weekend. Oh boy, I hope we're ready.

First thing is working on "deer exclusion" (that's what the experts call it). Rather than fencing in a small garden area, we are attempting to keep the deer out of an acre or so around the house. About half of this fenceline is in the forest, with big and small trees and a fair amount of brush. In this area, Mark built an 8-wire fence, about 6 feet high. Deer can jump a 6-foot fence if it's out in the open, but we're hoping that heavy brush makes it impossible for them to get a run at it. We'll continue to add plantings along this fenceline, making it ever more difficult for them, we hope.

The other half of our fenceline is wide open, up nearer the house. This is where we've strung electric wire. We hope to someday replace most of the electric fence with our hedgerows: heavy plantings of mostly shrubs, forming an impenetrable barrier, we hope. In the meantime, we need zapping deterrent. We've tinkered with our electric fence this week and put fresh peanut butter bait on it. Look at these new posts - they are self-insulating, making those ugly yellow plastic insulators are unnecessary. Very nice, right? We may replace our .80 joule energizer for one with 5 joules - does anyone have thoughts on that? We want enough zap to make the deer remember.

The next thing is the weather. As you can see in the photos, it's not spring up here yet. Will we be able to get a shovel through the permafrost?

And then there's the question of soil. Did our sheet mulching turn into dirt? How's that hugelkultur doing?

Lots of questions. Few answers. Trial and error. Stay tuned.

Wire tape attached to the posts with a simple cotter pin:

Yum - peanut butter on foil strips duct-taped to the wire tape:

 

 

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