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.
With the weather turning cold for the next week or so, we are taking advantage of it to get our winter pruning done. We started with the orchard trees we planted in 2023. Last year we pruned them in February, But did not get around to summer pruning them, which, as it turned out, was… Continue reading Winter Pruning, day 1
About a year ago Daddy and Seppi and Winnie were out in the north pasture near the beehives. The small ones have grown a lot in the last year. They are become less small... More mighty. We have to revamp our tree protection system this year, for a couple of reasons. For one, I didn't… Continue reading Willow/Witch Hazel/Orchard update
The grass is coming back in the pasture, slowly. To buy time until it is ready to put the sheep and cows back on it, we have run them through the orchard, and pastured them on the laneway, but they still want more. We don't want to feed them exclusively on hay before winter even… Continue reading Four Legged Brush Removal
Apparently the sheep like fig leaves. My poor little survivor I was so pleased about! Might have known. Shouldn’t be an issue once they get establish and are pruned higher than sheep can reach, but they have to survive long enough to get there.
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
Little Farm in the Big City 