They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit.
We pruned our elderberries back to the stumps earlier this year, (along with the mature cherries, which, incidentally, produced a much better crop this year than they did last year). Look at that majestic shrub! And the two purple-leaf varieties are doing quite well too. What we have learned from this is that the Elderberry… Continue reading Younger Berries
And that one, And that one, And that other one. We didn’t intend to let this quince tree fruit this year, as it is still quite young. After the blossoms started to wilt, I pinched them all off. Or thought I did. Apparently, I missed four of them. So it looks like we will be… Continue reading Well, I missed that one…
Time is running out before daddy hast to leave for National Guard for a couple weeks. Time is also running out before the hot and dry season is upon us. Trying not to repeat the mistakes of last year, where we lost a number of orchard plants due to drought,we are working on getting all… Continue reading Mulching the Orchard
 spent a few mornings over the last couple weeks, running loads of wood chips out to the food hedge. Not very time efficient, takes about an hour to load up drive out unload and drive back, but eventually we got it done. This was the most difficult section to mulch, because every shovelful had… Continue reading Mulching the food hedge
Saturday we spent most of the afternoon racing to get the rest of our orchard order into the ground. Bare-root trees have a limited time before their roots dry out and they die. We picked up the order on Thursday, and it was well packed in wet mulch and newspapers, but we didn't want to… Continue reading More Orchard Planting
After the bull pasture fiasco (which took up most of the morning) Daddy and Uncle and Seppi and Edmund got busy planting our new orchard trees and bushes. As we mentioned before, our orchard is not so much a single discrete area as it is a network of fruit trees, vines and bushes scattered around… Continue reading Food Hedge Planting
We always have so many projects going on at any given time, but every once in a while there is a rare day that we can all come together and check off a few of them. Last Friday before Palm Sunday (Not Good Friday) was one of those days. We had a coupon for $30… Continue reading Finishing Things Friday
Another project we have moved forward (ever so slightly), is our orchard. As I mentioned in a previous post, our orchard is not so much a discrete area of the farm separated from other areas, as it is the total of perennial fruiting plants we have scattered about the place. We have the apples, pears,… Continue reading Strawberry Trees and Lingonberries
Monday and Tuesday of this week we only got about an hour each day to do any farm work, between weather and school, inside chores and runny noses. We used that brief time to get caught up on some tasks that needed doing in the orchard. The orchard, by the way, is not a separate… Continue reading Orchard work
It is February, time to get the fruit trees pruned. This is a time consuming job every year, but it is also a fun job, once you get the hang of it (and when I say "get the hang of it" I mean, develop a hermeneutic of pruning that allows you to move through each… Continue reading Pruning time
Little Farm in the Big City 