working on the apple guild

Here's a picture of the apple orchard. The first apple tree in the picture is a bit of a twig, and the second apple tree's white stake is more noticeable than the tree itself. On Halloween, just behind the first apple tree, I planted a nitrogen fixing shrub. What I'm hoping is, with the added fertility, we might see an apple or two in the next six or seven years.

According to the plants for a future website  This species has a symbiotic relationship with certain soil bacteria, these bacteria form nodules on the roots and fix atmospheric nitrogen. Some of this nitrogen is utilized by the growing plant but some can also be used by other plants growing nearby. An excellent companion plant, when grown in orchards it can increase yields from the fruit trees by up to 10%.

I picked out the shrub from Figaro's Garden.

Apple Guild

 I decided a few months back to take this little apple tree under my protective wing.

I put this dirt on it in July. I have no idea where this soil came from, just free stuff. Looked like the kind the city makes from ground trees and such. The apple tree was sitting in a bit of a hole. I don't know if filling the hole was a bad idea or not. The dirt has since settled, and the chickens spread it around a bit, so I don't think I buried it. We'll see.

My next trick was straw and a legume mix.

I've since cut a ring around the tree to plant daffodils. The soil, if you can call it that is six inches deep, and then near rock solid. Anyway I planted ten bulbs around the tree. I covered the disturbed earth with straw and then the straw with leaves raked from the sidewalk.

In the spring, I think anyway, the rest of the guild will be planted. Comfrey, artichoke, yarrow, nasturtiums, dill, fennel, dandilion, chicory, plantain, clover, fava beans, goumi, bladder senna, siberian pea shrub are all under consideration.

Winter Gardening

Other than a few cherry tomatoes, nothing grew to harvest. We went away for ten days in August and every vegetable other than the tomatoes died.

At this point, I'm preparing the soil for next year, and maybe trying to grow some kohlrabi. We'll see. The chickens destroyed the small planting  I started at the end of August. I'll try again in the same little plot and maybe take over a plot in the actual coop garden.

I took this video to show the soil I'm starting with. Supposedly rye grass roots can work through the hardest soils, we'll see.

As well as broadcasting rye grass to prepare the soil, I've broadcast clover and a legume mix. The chickens tend to eat the seed, so I've broadcast it a number of times this September. I've also spread a thin layer of straw to eventually give fertile structure to the soil.

Zen and Coop Gardening

There's a certain Zen-like mind necessary for gardening in a coop. Add stomping children and scratching chickens and pissing dogs and shitting cats to the mix and non-attachment is a coop gardeners key to sanity.

And say, for example, you and your daughter plant some flowers in a patch of dirt outside your door, it's entirely possible that another coop member might dig out the entire contents of that patch of dirt and replant it with something else one night after work.

And you might plant a native rose only to have it run over by a lawn mower.

Random wild-like plantings like the kind suggested by Masanobu Fukuoka in The One Straw Revolution are likely to be stomped, weeded, or mowed. Permaculture designs might be more obvious, but that kind of grand plan gardening would have to go through a committee, and the fun, the spontaneity of gardening would be lost. Maybe at some point I might pursue permaculture design and find ways to work some of the principles into the coop grounds, but at this point small attempts at growing are all I'm interested in and more to the point capable of. The do-nothing philosophy of gardening explained by Fukuoka is all right with me.

I've continued to add matter to the woodland garden. After a trip to the UBC David C. Lam Asian Garden where I noticed a lot of rotting logs used as a growing medium, I decided to add some logs to the woodland garden I'm working on.

I've put about six small logs in the woodland garden. It'll be years before they are capable of growing anything, but right now they are also, with the trees, defining the space.

The twisted stalk has beautiful berries. Apparently the whole plant is edible.

Here are some recent photos from the border garden in progress...

 Olivia added some cages to keep the tomatoes from flopping over.

 Chickens thinning out the seedlings. tomatoes, pumpkins, wildflowers, clover, calendula.

 Roses from last years end sale at Rona. yarrow, mints, fennel, strawberries, and a couple stomped blueberries.

 Blueberries, daylillies, wintergreen, black iris, nodding onion, grasses, (why is it you can't keep grass from growing in your garden, and it won't grow it in your lawn?)

 Mowed native rose rebounding, kids' seed vegetable garden, grasses, clover, irises.

Slowly sowing some seeds

This weekend we picked up a few seed packs from Figaro's Garden. We chose Nasturtium because they're edible. Calendula is edible as well, and I have a fondness for the flower. Lupins fix nitrogen in the soil,  and they look interesting. We planted a few seeds today, I don't know that the Lupins will germinate but we only  put in a few. The rest we'll sow in the fall and next spring.

Here's an update of the run-over rosebush.

Creating a woodland garden

Today I moved the rotting tree chippings that have been composting in a parking space for the past year. The chips were moldy and crawling with worms and centipedes and various other wood eating insects. The mixture was damp. Just what I needed to fertilize the space under the trees where I planted four local woodland plants.

The soil under the trees is compacted and pretty much dead. It's dry and hard, hard to the point dandilions have a hard time. Now there's a six or so inch layer of living mulch. I soaked it after moving it. The plants there now like a moist soil, I'm hoping they spread into the mulch.

I'm thinking about some native ferns and a neighbour mentioned Salmon berries.

I also sprinkled some white clover seeds around our blueberry bushes. I think our soil here is a little weak, so I'm going to try some ideas to increase its fertility.

Pumpkins are sprouting

We've planted pumpkin seeds and they've sprouted.

Well, the garden continues to grow. Pretty much everything we planted is doing well. 

One rose bush was run over by a lawn mower but has already sprouted new shoots. 

After the lawnmower accident I put up some more protective structures. Gardening in a coop means not everyone knows what you're doing and a garden should look like a garden.