Snow 2014!

It began snowing today around lunch time and came down steadily the rest of the afternoon. I estimate that about 2.5" fell here at the house.

The snow had been predicted for the last several days by all of the weather forecasters. Yet, true to form, the schools did not cancel classes for today. Instead they called school off at midday. This created a traffic jam of enormous proportion. People have been sitting in their cars for hours only to move a tenth of a mile.

A few weeks ago all of the school systems cancelled classes the night before when the temperature was predicted to go into single digits. There was zero chance precipitation! The next day was a sunny, clear, beautiful day, and no child went to school. With snow predicted three days in advance not one school system cancelled classes! Children were in school and then on the spur of the moment all of the school systems dumped them out without a moments notice. Way to go ATL!

As for me, I walked outside around 1 pm and it had been snowing for at least half an hour and it was beginning to stick. We don't get a chance to see snow very often so I walked out into the yard to take it in. Aggie, the dog, she's never seen snow. She was very frightened of it. I had to coax her out from under the deck. I believe that she thought that she had somehow caused it and was to blame. She didn't want to come to me. I think she thought I would punish her for it.

After a little while she finally trusted me enough to come out from under the deck and we went into the garage. I knew if I walked out underneath the eave she would most likely follow me out. She was pretty skittish to begin with but after a while she took to it.

She had a good time running around in the snow and eating it too. It dawned on me that people believe that dogs are color blind. Aggie isn't. She clearly saw all of that white powder all over the place and she did not know what to make of it. I think animals see colors just the same as we do. Why wouldn't they? They probably see it better than us.

SOHO

Last week it was six degrees. Today it was sixty degrees. Pretty extreme. Our weather depends on the star that we are electrically connected to. It's weather depends on the galaxy it is electrically connected to. The solar electrical input has been weakening for a while. It might get cold and stay that way for a long time. It's a cyclical process.

It's easy to track the weather on the sun these days. NASA has a website that does just that called SOHO. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. Click here to go there. Most of their conclusions are utter nonsense but the data is real as well as the viewing capability it provides.

It's virtually real-time observation of the sun. If you want to know whats happening on Earth you need to know whats happening on the sun.

Pond

It might be hard to tell but there is a flock of doves in the backyard especially around the pond. The pond has filled on it's own. Aquatic plants are on their way.

More landscaping around the pond is on tap. Trying to make it as natural as possible.

Stone Mountain

Stone Mountain is my new favorite place in the world. I'm only about 5 minutes away.

I love the serenity of it. There's lots of woods and water and of course that giant granite rock.

There are tons of places to explore and I've only just scratched the surface. There are a lot of great places to walk the dog in a natural environment and away from traffic.

An old grist mill that they moved to Stone Mountain from Athens in the 60's.

Covered bridge moved to Stone Mountain from North Georgia. The other side of the bridge is Indian Island. There are lots of picnic tables and you can walk dogs there.

Hugel beds and predators

No these aren't three graves they are hugelkultur beds sometimes known as woody beds. The concept was made famous by Sepp Holtzer in Austria.

Paul Wheaton of permies.com is a big proponent of hugelkultur. The essence of hugelkultur is this: Wood is stacked up into a pile. Traditionally the pile should be about six feet in height. The piled up wood can be logs, sticks, branches etc. The pile is then mulched over. This is then planted into with whatever you like. There is a ton of video and material on the internet about hugelkultur.

These beds are about knee high and around eight feet long. I arranged them where they are and like they are for a couple of reasons. First, they are in an area that receives an okay amount of sun. Going to the left of the photo it gets shadier. Secondly, this part of the yard contains the septic tank drain field and digging down to plant anything isn't something I want to do. So I needed to go up instead of down. They are situated pretty much on contour. The elevation being higher on the right of the photo sloping downward toward the upper left of the picture. The one on the far left is the lowest in the landscape.

Since this area is fairly shady during the summer months I've chosen to go with shade tolerant plants. There is elderberry, currant, gooseberry and a juneberry as well.

The premise of the system is that the woody material when stacked up and mulched forms a zone of moist decaying material that needs little to no water even during the hottest periods. The principle simulates a forest floor, where a tree falls and debris is blown and washed up against it. This becomes an area of high fertility. "A forest grows on a fallen forest" or so the saying goes.

These beds are roughly a year old. The leaf litter that just fell, mainly poplar and maple leaves and some pine straw, is really the first abundant matter that we've been able to mulch over them with. The fertility should really escalate come spring. Fungi has gotten a good toe-hold on the logs and the system seems to be beginning to really "turn on" so to speak.

Quite a lot of interesting things happened after we piled this wood up. When we bought this property it had been sitting unoccupied for about a year at least, I think. The yard became the default territory of chipmunks. They were here en mass.

They took up residence in the wood piles nearly as soon as we had them constructed. Something else showed up as well. This copperhead pit viper on the left was nearly under my bare foot one day this past summer. This is probably near the limit of how large they grow. He was at least two feet long. I've never seen one longer than a foot before.

I figure that if a snake has lived long enough to get this big then it's been around here for a while, I just never saw it before. They're there just the same. I've seen probably four more little copperheads since then. I just leave them alone. Between them and my cats the chipmunk population has decreased substantially.

They are actually really beautiful and perform a useful function. They decimate rodents. So if you've got them, you've probably got rodents. They are working for you. He stands out well against the green in the picture, however he is virtually the exact same color as the clay soil that the yard consists of.

Besides copperheads, I've also seen garter snakes in the yard. I don't know what they eat. Maybe insects. Another predator that preys on the chipmunks is the hawk. Around here they are Red Tail hawks and I've seen them take quite a number of chipmunks right out of the backyard. I've also seen them take squirrels.

It's odd to me that people are so fearful of snakes. I doubt 999 people out of one thousand know anyone who's ever been bitten by a poisonous snake and yet people tend to kill any snake they come across. I can't remember having ever killed one personally. I rather like them.

Winter

A panoramic view of the backyard food forest in the making. It's difficult to see but there is about 15 trees in the foreground, but it's winter and they are dormant now. The contour swale is visible in the foreground. This is the primary swale and is highest up in the landscape. The yard slopes down toward the right. On the far right, three hugel beds are visible. They aren't a meter high, they are more like knee high. That is as much material as we could gather up out of the yard.

In the middle the arbor is visible. Kiwi vines are growing here, though their leaves have fallen since it is December. To the right of that is the pond. It is a kidney shaped pond that holds about 500 gallons.

New Year, New Style

Last May we moved to a new house. Vardaman still has his gardens but they are in a new location and new conditions. At the old place we pretty much just did container gardening on the porch because most of the yard was in full shade.

Here at the new location we are doing things in a much different manner. We began studying permaculture around the time that we moved and we are now using those principles to not garden but to create a food forest.

So far we've changed the landscape around here quite a bit and it continues to evolve.