Nurseries

It seems like every spring and fall all of the big box stores have lots of ornamental and fruit trees for sale that they've marked way up. A lot of times if you buy these trees you will find that they are root bound when you get them home or that they have some sort of disease or they're just poor quality to start with. I've had all of the above happen to me. That's why I stopped getting trees from those places. It's better to order trees from a reputable nursery or go there yourself if it's close enough.

The trees from a nursery will usually be bare root trees. The price will be much cheaper and the quality will be much better. There will also be many more varieties.

Fruit

Raintree Nursery OR

One Green World OR

Hidden Springs Nursery TN

Ison's GA

Blueberries

Finch NC

Apples

Kuffel Creek CA

Tom Brown  NC - Tom Brown seeks out lost varieties of apples in the South and saves them. There are literally thousands!

Bulk Tree Seeds

Lovelace

Root Stock

Forrest Keeling

Lawyer Nursery

Flowers

Eden Brothers

Bulk Fungi

Fungi Perfecti

Comfrey

Coe's Comfrey

Olives

Georgia Olive Farms

Huge List

Persimmons - There's a few more cultivars of American persimmons than I realized!

Persimmonpudding

Treco

Fedco

Berm seeding

On the left is how it looked earlier in the week. A little snow fell. I guess everyone stayed at home.

before

It was nice weather today, so I took the opportunity to seed my swale berms, even though I'm rolling the dice a little.

There is rain in the forecast and I need to get the berms mulched over to prevent the compost from washing away.
A big bag of white clover just arrived this week so I made a mixture for the berm from the seeds I have on hand.



The mix contained white clover, two varieties of mustard, millet, parsnip, echinacea, chamomile, dill and cilantro.

after

After I seeded the berm I covered it with wheat straw which holds moisture very well. It is suppose to rain tonight and warm up a lot next week, into the sixties. I'm taking a risk seeding the berm now and having everything germinate and then lose it later with another bout of cold weather. However I've noticed that when I've sowed seeds at the wrong time they've just sat there and eventually germinated when the conditions were right.

The berms are mostly clay. I've tried planting them before but nothing has gotten very much traction, especially when they dry out. Hopefully the top dressing of mulch will get the process going this year.

I also put in around 30 or so comfrey cuttings that I received this week from Coe's comfrey. So I've probably got around a dozen put into the berm.

Compost

The county composts some of the solid wastes and you can go get as much as you want for free. I went and got a truck load recently to add to the hugel beds and the swale berms. The pile in the picture is about twelve feet tall. It seems like it's decent compost. I've used it before. I just cannot afford to buy a ton of compost so it's a nice option.

It took me about half an hour to load the truck. I could have put more in but my arms wore out so I stopped. It took much longer to roll one wheelbarrow load at a time from the driveway into the backyard. That's the hard part.

Swale

On the right is the compost spread out onto the swale berms on the downhill side. These are ditches on contour that catch rainwater. The water then slowly soaks into the ground. Note the pitch of the terrain by the green fence in the background. It's fairly steep. I will plant in a wide selection seeds here as soon as it warms up.

Probable plants will include, mustard, parsnip, daikon, comfrey, calendula, dill, yarrow, bee balm, fennel, chamomile, parsley, chicory, echinacea, garlic.

Hugelkultur mound

I also spread some compost onto the top hugelbed. I will seed it with a similar mix as the swale berms.

This element is above ground as opposed to the swale. The septic tank drainfield is in this vicinity so we are containing the plantings above ground or only ground covers. I am avoiding putting trees into this area.

Green Deane

By far the best site on the internet for information about foraging from your yard is Eat The Weeds.com. It is the site of Green Deane.


There is a forum there that has helped me over the last couple of years to identify many "weeds" from the yard. It turns out that many, many things are edible.

Just to name a few: sorrel, begonia, henbit, dandelion, pokeweed.

If it's edible, he's probably done a video on it!

Purslane

Spatulated leaves are purslane

I found some purslane (Portulaca oleracea) in the yard today. It's edible and medicinal.

According to Green Deane, "Regardless of what one calls it, purslane contains more omega 3 fatty acids than any other plant source in the solar system, and an extraordinary amount for a plant, some 8.5 mg for every gram of weight.  It has vitamin A, B, C and E — six times more E than spinach — beta carotene — seven times more of that than carrots — magnesium, calcium, potassium, folate, lithium — keep you sane — iron and is 2.5% protein. Two pigments, one in the leaves and one in the yellow blossoms, have been proven anti-mutagenic in lab studies, meaning they help keep human cells from mutating, which is how cancer gets started. And you get all that for about 15 calories per 100 gram (three ounce) serving. As a mild diuretic, it might even lower your blood pressure as well. "

I don't remember ever seeing it before in the yard and it was growing in a shady area. 

Mid-winter update

Two eggs per day now...usually. It's easy to tell who's egg is who's since they are such different colors. The light colored one is Cleo's and the darker one is Blondie's. Blondie's eggshells are very thick and kind of hard to break. Cleo's crack very easily and it's mostly yolk. I think she is a Jersey Giant. Hopefully they will all be laying very soon.

Fall Elderberry cuttings 

Elderberry cutting in 10"pot

The elderberry cuttings I took in the summer have done well. They are indoors and continue to put on new growth. It's basically a bullet proof plant to propagate.

Most of the goji berry cuttings have done well also. I have at least a dozen of them growing in pots indoors now. I believe that I paid around $15 for the one that I bought and it was about the same size as the ones I have potted.

Propagated goji

The goji's are just ridiculously easy to propagate. I don't remember having a single one not strike.

I cut up a long branch that fell off into little pieces and nearly all of them are now growing. Only the green section of the limb didn't take, all of the woody pieces are living in a couple of coffee cups filled with rain water.

Probably 10 or 12 4" long cuttings.

A few of the fig cuttings are now growing in pots. But I didn't have one hundred percent success with them.

I have a few of the raspberry root cuttings that are still going but they haven't been very vigorous. I think they are dormant.

Most of the comfrey root cuttings survived but the cats were eating the leaves and they got set back some, they are starting to rebound now. I put several goji, elderberry and comfrey plants from cuttings into the yard in the fall. The elderberry I put into a raised bed is going good but the cold hurt the goji a bit. The others in the yard got hammered by the chickens so it remains to be seen if they will come back up in the spring. I think there is a good chance they will.

Persimmon seedling

Seedlings
There are a few seedlings coming along quite well at the moment as well. Back in the summer I put about thirty wild persimmon seeds in a flat and of those two germinated. I put them in pots in the fall and they are indoors now. Persimmons grow very slowly. The tap root goes way down before the above ground growth shows itself. Both of them still have the seeds attached.

Lately, I've started a few citrus seeds from some fruit from the market. I've got four grapefruits growing from seeds I started with the damp paper towel method.

I also saved ten quince seeds and put them in a damp paper towel inside a zip bag and one of them germinated. It's now in a pot.

Quince seedling

Five tangerines germinated using the same method as well. I transplanted those over the weekend.  They are yet to break the soil.

I saved a lot of Bosc pear seeds and they are in the refrigerator until spring because they need to be stratified before they will germinate.

Grapefruit

Although the fruit trees in the yard are said to be dormant over the winter, that isn't exactly the case. Buds have been forming on a lot of the trees and also some of the shrubs have them too. So they aren't totally "asleep". The apricot has by far the most but the peaches also have a lot too. The last frost date for us is the last week of March, so it's just around the corner.

Sheet mulching

The county mulches Christmas trees every year and puts them out in various locations and you can go and shovel up as much as you like.
The place near me is right next to this pastoral looking horse farm, which is actually in a very urbanized area across from a mall.

Little Creek Farm is it's name.

Pitch fork is best
for mulch

Almost three years ago we sheet mulched and piled compost over the nuisance ivy and monkey grass. After a while we put strawberries in that spot. They did well, but this past summer the English ivy (Hedera helix) and especially the monkey grass (liriope muscari) got the upper hand again.

We had to go over the strawberries too, which is sad but there was no way around it. The grass had taken over the patch.

Sheet mulching

This time we are not going to try and combat that niche with another ground cover. We are putting raised beds on the flat next to the house. It's the only area receiving good sun year round. And the white wall amplifies the light. It's facing east. We would very much like to be able to grow a bit of annuals and every other place in the yard gets shade.

First you lay down the cardboard and soak it with water. I always flip it over after one side is wet because it never seeps all the way through. After that pile on the wood chips. Six to eight inches at least. If you can time it with a rain event that is better. You don't want the cardboard to dry out on you. It doesn't really start breaking down until its saturated.

Some people recommend newspaper but the Sunday paper costs $2 and that won't cover anything much. Thick cardboard boxes are the best, think refrigerator box. Or two or three layers of thin cardboard like beer containers etc. Lawn bags also work well and you can get them free from around your neighborhood already filled with organic matter. Here is a pretty good video of the process.

It's amazing how fast the cardboard will disappear. Actually it is consumed by various organisms. Mostly by fungus here though.