I’ve been slowly working on ordering seeds for this year.

The envelope is already sealed on my order from Sandhill Preservation Center in Iowa.  I will post what I got when I plant it.  But I am excited to try the sweet potatoes I ordered from them.

I am still looking for a good paste tomato to plant.  I will also be trying out Stupice, which I ordered from Bountiful Gardens last year.  It is an early tomato that is supposed to produce throughout the season.  Most of my tomatoes are going to planted from seed outside.  Thats a blog post for another day…

I have also ordered some trees.  I have hazelnuts, chestnuts and hickories on order from Badgerset.  Jessi has ordered a scary amount of grapes to line our fence out front.  And I am planning on possibly getting a couple Northern Pecans and Oak trees from Oikos as well as some trees from the county conservation district and native plants from Morning Sky Greenery.  There is a lot of work I’d like to do, but there are limits to my time, attention span and cash so a lot of these plans will have to be put off.

There are a few more herbs I’d like to get as well, but other than that I am trying to keep everything down to a manageable size to do limits on my time and money.

Thats enough for me to pretend like it is already Spring.  And here is an area where Puck and I walked to as the sun set.  The plants are mullein gone to seed:

I added vegarden to a new permaculture social networking site called: Worldwide Permaculture Network.  I’m not sure I need another social networking site in my life, but its another way to get traffic to our blog.

(image from http://permacultureglobal.com/)

I got a question on our facebook page from John about planting fruit trees in the Anoka Sand Plain.  My answer got too long so I am putting it here:

John I can tell you what I have done and plan to do.  take it with a grain of salt because we just moved here and just planted fruit trees this year…

compost:  i priced out compost from plaisted and the price was quite a bit higher than the municipal place in coon rapids. that might change if you were ordering larger quantities than i did.  if you go with them i’d ask plaisted if they have tested their compost and can send you the report. i also bought some greensand for micronutrients and water retention and rock phosphate for phosphorus.  I’m pretty sure fruit trees in the rose family like their phosphorus.

fruit trees:  from what i’ve read its not a good idea to get dwarfs in the cold windy sandy area we live in.  we ordered semi-dwarfs.  i had trouble finding the varieties i wanted locally, but getting them from a good local nursery would be ideal (if they have some brand name tag on them i assume they were brought in by the nursery and in that case I’d ask them where they were grown).  make sure to get disease resistant varieties.  our crabapple trees had some nasty apple scab this year.  i got one late ripening keeper and one early variety.

i wanted to get rid of the grass around our fruit trees.  it competes with their roots.   after mowing low around the area for a couple weeks i sheet mulched with compost, leaves, wood chips and cardboard this fall, but ideally this would be done along with planting.  i made sure not to mulch too high trees don’t like that, but keep in mind if sheet mulching it should shrink quite a bit over time.

this year we will plant nutrient accumulators, nitrogen fixing cover crops and beneficial insect attracting herbs and flowers under the fruit trees.  i will not be spraying our trees except for a an oily solution early in the spring (i found the recipe in The New Self-Sufficient Gardener).  the plants in the understory of the trees will be the pest management.  not sure if you have heard of this before it is based on the idea of apple tree guilds.

hope that helps – thanks!

“The novelist Nigel Balchin, was once invited to address a conference on ‘incentives’ in industry. He remarked that ‘Industrial psychologists must stop messing about with tricky and ingenious bonus schemes and find out why a man, after a hard day’s work, went home and enjoyed digging in his garden.”

I have been doing a lot of reading about permaculture since this fall and have lots of plans for nut trees, berries and guilds and the like for spring.

I have some thoughts about this past year I plan to write up later.  As you can see from this picture c. October (my garden is in the background) there wasn’t a whole lot growing in the fall.  There was some parsley, broccoli raab – most of which i didnt’t harvest saving it for spring and a huge purple sprouting broccoli which never sprouted any purple broccolis that i mulched and hope will live through the winter.  Thanks to me we also still have 5 or 10 pounds of jerusalem artichoke to eat.  I baked it one night and didn’t care for it much, but its not bad raw.

We ordered a Nichols plum tree and Goldrush and Williams Pride apple trees from One Green World.  They came in last week, but I forgot to call to get the lines marked beforehand so we had to wait to plant them.  They sat in the crawlspace and the plum tree decided to flower.  All are semidwarf and disease resistant varieties.  Goldrush ripens late and William’s Pride early.  We planted them by our crabapple trees in the front yard – hopefully they’ll get enough sun!

I didn’t think the asparagus was going to come up, but all the rain recently must have done it some good.  Its planted in the far corner my my garden plot next to the compost and past the strawberries.

I just planted two Goumi (Goumis?) this week.  They are in the Eleagnus genus along with the Autumn Olive and official invasive species the Russian Olive which you may have seen around.  Goumi came reccomended in the permaculture book Gaia’s Garden.  They grow fast, fix nitrogen and give you fruit too.  So I planted them at the end of two rows.  One is a keyhole bed which has two tomatoes planted in front of the Goumi.  I’m hoping the tomatoes can get in on some of that nitrogen fixin’.

So I’ve been busy this spring and my garden plot and seedlings aren’t what I pictured before we started this year. But thats ok. You can see the row I’ve had planted for quite a while.

In the front there are poppies which haven’t come in yet (actually, come to think of it I may have tilled where those got planted). Then there are onions, shallots, parsley root, clover and vetch surrounding broccoli raab, red cabbage and chickweed (i think – i forget where i put this exactly). Then we have what was my experiment with a cold frame where I planted radishes, several kinds of lettuces, mustard greens and turnips. This area was raised at an incline to better capture the sun and there are logs surrounding it which will hold water and continue decomposing. Behind that there are carrots and nettle planted. Then new onions planted this year. Then the peas. And finally borage which doesn’t want to sprout. And I’ve left some weeds like mullein here and there as they tend to have big root systems and are good nutrient accumulators. Kinda boring post. Oh and check out my America mug. I love America. More later…

hey this space has been dormant for a while. i’m going though seed catalogs for this years garden. i’ve also been reading gaia’s garden a book on permaculture and rereading the one straw revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka.

It’s one of my favorite books which I am too lazy to talk about right now, but hopefully I’ll find time every week or two to put something in this space as we start year 2 of our garden.