I'll go with Spring Fever. Here's a photo I took on the lawn, loaded with tiny daisies, when I was between cleaning the gutters on a particularly warm day last week. You can tell it was warm- I'm down to two layers. Oh yeah, I really wanted that picture, so I lay down on the lawn even though it was squishing water through my shirt onto my back.
Catching up gets harder the longer I put it off. These are some of my notes from April, and I will just publish them so that I can get to the present, mentioning some of these things as required later. I will put a sentence on the topics and move on.
Buying firewood
We found that the wood we had been putting up was far too wet to use- I demonstrated this at one point by putting a load into our oven at 250F and observed a plume of steam coming out of the oven vent for six hours. We bought another cord of fir, and it is better than ours, but not as well seasoned as we might have wanted.
Stacking
MM is getting good at it, and is pretty much in charge of splitting wood and stacking in the wood shed. Wednesdays we now designate "wood day" and as she works on that, I have been gathering downed wood and also planning a woodshed extension to allow for the six cords we think we need to have stacked for 3 cords this year and 3 the next, drying.
First Mowing and composting grass clippings
I spent two half-days mowing the meadows for the first time, mowing and bagging most of the meadowlands and siloing it in 4 foot cylinders of wire cloth. I filled three of these four foot diameter, four foot high cylinders, which over the intervening time have reduced to half.
Buying pallets
To provide good flooring stacking wood MM found a source of used pallets (some badly used) and I drove the Blue Bomb to Eugene to pick up a load of 24 for $70.
work on Blueberry hill
Work progresses- my #1 job these days
Hillside garden plan
after Blueberry Hill I want to develop the hill to the left of the sightline to the yurt. I have flagged contours and towed the extra logs there from Blueberry Hill to use in terracing there.
Mowing the back
Even though it was not really dry enough, I mowed the remaining meadow near the legacy fruit trees without catching grass.
Mystery tree may not have fruit.
The 20 foot tree which was a cloud of white blossoms is green with leaves coming out, and the blooms have dropped. I cannot tell if any fruit has set. Neighbors cannot recall if fruit was ever found on the tree; though the 5-petaled flowers look like apple or pear blossoms.
All four legacy labeled fruit trees have bloomed or are blooming. The Golden Delicious has one viable branch and the rest seems dead, so pruning required there. I hope to remove the cages and cardboard/ shade out the grass at their bases and replant with fruit tree guilds.
Purple iris 4/13
A few popped up here and there much to our surprise and pleasure. Also revealing themselves are Oregon Grape, with yellow flowers, horsetail, white daisy in the meadows, the bushes out back might be Schip's Laurel. A stand of stinging nettle has come up near the yurt. Critters revealed: garter snake in the hot compost bin, tiny ants scouting the kitchen,
shooting
Some local boys were having a good old time in the M3 land for a couple weeks, but they have gone elsewhere lately.
Harvesting fence posts.
Lots out there to harvest- I did cull out a few- many more to go. There is a shocking amount of down wood in the aftermath of winter that needs cleaning up.
Buying bare root plums and apples
Both two plums and two apples as bare root at a nursery North of Eugene where I went to get my soil tested. They are heeled in to two tubs of pot grower's mix until I can find permanent places.
I have started planting sticks along the upper road in the blank spaces- alder is preferred, but I also have planted some maple and some mountain dogwood which appears to be very vigorous. I am on the track to plant more alders, having identified a downed alder tree near the gnome village which has healthy looking leaves in spite of it all. I have planted miscellaneous sticks 3 feet apart with the intention to plant alders in between on the 18 inch marks
4/18: Today after an early morning dental appointment I planted planting cuttings from various local trees along a 25 foot stretch of our roadside- mountain dogwood, and another tree that I'm not sure of, but looked like it really had the will to live when I was gathering fencepost poles. Good thing- I rammed an 18 inch hole in the wet clay and dropped the bare cutting in the hole, and closed it up. The ones I planted like this with Q, including a male alder, both survived, so that was encouraging. As she said at the time, if it dies, you've got a stick in the ground, but if it lives, you have a new tree. I planted them 3 fee apart, leaving room for alternating alders if I get some more cuttings.
After lunch it was time to move logs to finish the retaining wall for Blueberry Hill- really an 18" raised bed. I made some progress, but it's not something you can do in a snap, logs being heavy by nature. I stack them two high, about 16-18 inches high, them bore 1/2" holes through both logs and pound a 1/2" rebar through both logs and 16 inches into the ground, for stability. Log ends secured in this way, and I made sure to stagger the joints so that it ended up all connected.
I added 4 or 5 today, two more to go, working with a chain and a-frame, 18 inch long spade bit, 8-pound hammer, t-bars, mostly standing in an inch or two of water from the morning rain. What's left to do after the retaining wall is built is to layer cardboard for the upper shallower portion, gather rotten wood for the bottom foot, get a truckload each of pine shavings and topsoil. Add pine shavings, manure, topsoil, (let settle and grade flat) and top off with that cannabis grower's formula special soil and plant the 6 blueberries. Simple! At least on paper. Earned generous praise from MM who knows about the care and feeding of her mate, (animal husbandry). Some of these tasks will be concurrent with getting the hoop house beds built and aging into readiness, which requires much the same treatment.
Monday April 24 I had a young man named Edgar help me for 6 hours. We focused on harvesting rotten logs for Blueberry Hill, managing to fill Big Blue's truck bed and getting it halfway up the driveway before reverse just quit. Jim the mechanic is looking for a replacement transmission, but if it only costs us $1K we'll be lucky. So we're without drayage for now.
Tuesday April 25
Building more permanent compost bins: Used 5 pallets and some repurposed 1/2" hardware cloth from the storage cylinders to make a single-station compost bin, 40" x 40" x 48". Quick calculation: 1 cu ft = 1728cu in. That makes 44.44 cu ft = 1.6 cu yd. compared with 1.86 yards in the cylinders I used before.
I plan on two more bins side by side, to make a compost system, but I think I may need four. All the grass composting from two bins has settled down enough so that I could load it all into the one bin, heaped up to the max, with a shovel of manure every 6-8 inches of layering, and a generous hosing down each layer, So two collection bins become one composting bin over time. I had been surprised to find dry places in the bins, though the grass had been wet and I had watered some as I was adding it. The compost had cooled from 160 to 150 over the last few days, and I reckoned that the pile needed turning, so a new bin, easier to turn and ventilated on six sides was needed. I'm hoping that turning twice may be enough, when juiced up with manure and guided by the thermometer; that will allow me to turn out a new batch of compost every month, in time with the mowing.
The next thing I need is a shoulder-hung brush trimmer for brush and cutting grass in the ditches where the mower can't go. I don't want to mess with a scythe until I have some leisure time to learn how to use it and strengthen my muscles. I'm looking at one at Homer's on hwy 99 for about $400. Can be used with a multi-string trimmer or a triple blade.
Tomorrow is wood day again- and lots of rain predicted. We'll probably go down to the culvert where the creek crosses the road west of the house. The same area where Edgar and I were gathering rotten logs on Monday. We will have to cut the logs into splittable stove wood lengths and transport it in the dump cart, because Old Blue is still waiting for a transmission. Clearing out sections of one rotten log we uncovered three animal leg traps within a 5 foot circle. No telling how long they'd been there, under that rotting log.
Thursday I would like to throw together a couple more bins for grass clippings, or maybe one double sized one. Lowell is coming Friday it looks like, so I might not get as much done, though it is predicted to be the first day of at least 5 days with less than 0.1in of rain predicted and high temperatures climbing almost to 70 coupled with 10mph breezes in the afternoon, which may provide enough drying to mow and bag in the afternoons.
Sorry no pictures this post- I'll make it up with a photoessay on the hugel-ish raised bed at Blueberry Hill, with techniques, etc, which is now on my mind.
