Spring

I've read lots of books about designing a food forest and its all well and good when it's a diagram, but it doesn't work the way it's written down.

You can plant rye and vetch and clover everywhere in the yard but whether or not it grows where you plant it is a different story. Nature does what it's going to do. We don't control it.

Nature does everything on her own schedule. I've waited so long for seeds to germinate I forgot that I ever planted them in the first place. Nature knew to wait, I didn't.

No food forest is man-made. Nature does all the work plus another million things we can't even imagine. We're only designers and although we be feeble designers at that, it doesn't matter, not when we have the powerful ally of nature.

"If you do something right, it will do a lot more right itself." - Bill Mollison

I read a long time ago that frogs spend the winter on the bottom of ponds. I never thought there was any truth to that but that's exactly where I see them at all the time since I cleaned the pond. There are four or five that hang out there that the dog chases around, even diving in for them sometimes.

Comfrey has erupted from out of nowhere already. It's like it's not there one day and fully grown the next. Plants grow a lot at night.

Nectarine

The peach trees had LOTS of blossoms on them and fruit is starting to set. The asian pear tree bloomed, plum, cherry, apricot, nectarine but I don't know if they have set any fruit or not. Last year all of the cherries shriveled up and died. The birds got all of the peaches. We got one apricot out of two that grew.

There are tons of blueberry blooms. We had a decent amount last year and they grow throughout the year.

Asian pear

There were three grapevines that we put in last year that have made it through the winter. One made it to the top of the fence vertically but didn't get anywhere horizontally before winter. Hopefully, I can get it trained along the top of the fence this year and maybe get some fruit.

I also overwintered four more grapevines in the house that just got planted on the other side of the fence. They are muscadines.

We've had good luck with raspberries so we put in about ten more varieties. We've not had good luck with blackberries however. There are some wild ones in the zone 5 area but they haven't ever produced.

We've had elderberry for several years and it's grown well but never bloomed yet. Most of our gooseberries died from the heat I think. This year I sourced some closer to home that might do much better.