An Orchard Appears

Standing toward the back of the orchard, looking toward the garage ~

As Adam clears the orchard of weed trees and vines, its bones appear. Mr. M. (the previous owner) planted one row of fruit trees (above), a line of Scuppernong grape vines (to the left in the photo above), and espaliered apple trees along the west and south sides of the orchard (right side in photo, and side against garage).
The west side fence is still wrapped in weed vines like Virginia creeper. The apple trees there are choked, and it will be a challenge to isolate them and clear the fence.

Mr. M. did a huge amount of work building raised beds in this long orchard. It's about 1/3 acre. You can see the outline of a raised bed here. Peter also cleared out so many of the weed trees here.

And a raised bed for those fruit trees. You can see the original pruning plan, and the water sprout branches that have shot up. These will be pruned.

Yet another raised bed between the trees and the grape vines:

And last-but-not-least, the Scuppernong grape vines running along the east side, near the fence. They were/are wild. Adam is pulling vine from the trees.

From the front, looking back. Barn on the right. You can see that there's still much clearing to do back there. The layout changes somewhat in the back. He put in more grape vines there in the middle.

These are no ordinary raised beds. He didn't simply dig out the ditches and pile the dirt into the beds ... oh no! He brought in new dirt for those long beds, built wooden edges for the beds, and held them in place with these re-bar pins. They are all through the orchard. Adam plans to pull them up and use them elsewhere. Nothing wasted.

I've found several of these pods lying around. Don't know what they are. Any ideas?

It looks like a little canoe. I can't help wondering -- did some native once see a pod like this floating down a stream and think, "Hey! Let's build a big one of those to travel in!" And he build a canoe :)

Adam is rethinking his chicken coop plans. Since we're putting some money into the greenhouse this year, he doesn't want to build a coop this year also. We may put baby chicks into the far left portion of the barn. There's a small fenced off area right there for them. They would be in between the barn and the pasture.

It would need a little work, of course. I'll keep you posted.

Starting the Greenhouse

We've been discussing how to proceed here on the farm. We want to start planting and have early crops, but the compost is not ready to use as soil yet to make raised beds. So Adam decided to build a greenhouse -- a hoop house. Here are the picks thus far:

 He's building it in front of the barn where he has electricity for his saw/drill. But later he will move it (in sections) into the highest part of the field in the full sun.

 He bought a 100 foot coil of black PVC. It was cheaper that way, $25. It ended up being closer to 125 feet long. He cut it into 25-foot lengths. He mounted them to the sides where those short stem walls are.

 It will have a little prop window in the back and a door in the front for ventilation. It is 10 feet long, 8 feet wide, and almost 8 feet tall in the middle

 The wood was given to us by a friend.

 These great metal shelves were also given by this friend; he's closing his restaurant. They will hold the plants we grow there from seed.

They will be up about 2 feet off the ground. Under the shelves will be raised beds. We'll grow plants on the shelves in the spring, and grow crops in the raised beds in the fall/winter.

Above, Adam shows you where the doorway will be. He'll cut off those pieces, of course.
We had such warm temps over Christmas that lots of bulbs are already coming up. They will be fine -- crocuses and daffodils.

Our winter garden. This is the best of the greens (kale, I think) so far.

 It is not curly kale. Something's nibbling it a bit, and it ain't me!

 These are spicy mustard greens.

 We stop by Starbucks every time we're in "big town" to pick up their old coffee grounds for our compost. This is what it looks like in the bag:

 Adam's composting proceeds apace. It is his favorite farm activity. That's the big trash bag of coffee grounds in the front, to give you some scale.

 Our bees are doing fine this winter. Adam put wads of grass in their gates to keep the cold winter winds out of their hives. But in December the bees chewed it all up and carried it away! He'll need to put sticks on there instead.

It's a quiet time on the farm. Too wet to burn our burn piles. Next time I'll share more pics of the orchard.

Mouse Patrol

This morning I decided to bite the bullet, as they say, and address the most mousy place in our old farm house ... under the kitchen sink.

I've been avoiding this task. But I knew from the mouse droppings and the volume of mouse poison being consumed, that it was a Very Mousy Place.

Adam put this poison bait down there yesterday; it was already half eaten, 24 hours later.

I got my stool, sat in front of the sink, opened the doors, and pulled everything out. Then I began to spray and wipe.

Great mouse holes abound under our sink. I plugged a couple with steel wool, and a few others with old dry sponges. I told Adam we need some of that hole-filler stuff in a can. We had a can of it under the sink, but of course it was so old I couldn't even get the cap off!
I pulled out my two tubs of cleaning supplies, cleaned out the tubs, threw out some stuff, and reorganized.

In one spot in one tub, the mice had truly set up residence. They'd chewed up lots of sawdust and made some sort of nest, I think. It did not smell like other mouse nests I've smelled in my time. They'd also chewed into a plastic container of drain cleaner. I wonder what they thought of that!
A few items had drifted down there and belonged elsewhere.

And then I texted Adam (who was back by the barn) to tell him we had a leak under the sink. I found water and bubbled down there, indicating I'd just dumped some water below when I finished doing dishes. (sigh) Adam came to examine:

 He had help, as you see. Adam has done just about every kind of work there is to do around an old house. He had that plumbing fixed in no time.
I will not tell you how much mouse poop I wiped up under there. We have declared all-out war on mice. Sometimes I sit in the quiet house and instead of hearing the clocks tick I hear the mice nibbling on that rock-hard poison. It's a little disturbing.
In other farm news, Adam's made great progress clearing out the orchard, but he wrenched his elbow a bit, tearing vines out of the trees. He's also been scything some areas around the little guest house. And he's hoping (beyond hope) that it will dry enough to continue laying water pipe in the ground. Tonight his hip is hurting, and his bad leg makes him limp. The damp, cold weather got him so disheartened this morning that he had to bake. That's when you know it's bad! haha! He made blueberry muffins to cope.

I don't like his discouragement, but I sure do enjoy his coping mechanisms.

Growing Taters

Adam's potato-growing experiment was a smashing success! It's so nice here on the farm to finally have a smashing success. We've been a waterlogged soaking mess for so many weeks. Do you recall how he grew his potatoes in a beat-up plastic trash can, buried in his big compost pile? They loved it in there, nice and warm.

The old, soft potatoes he put in there emerged last week bigger and harder. 

But he wasn't interested in them; he was interested in their root systems.

And the straw he kept adding to the trash can had turned into lovely dirt ... see?

It's hard to see this to scale, but those potato roots are about 3 feet long. They filled the trash can. If they'd bloomed and put out tubers, we'd have had LOTS of potatoes in there.

That's Maggie, btw, nosing the dirt. She's over 20 pounds now and has had her shots. She's doing great.
In the spring, Adam will plant more potatoes and we will have lots of them later in the year. He wants to plant specialty fingerling potatoes to sell, but we will eat lots of potatoes too. He's quite excited.

Adam's also been putting in a dog fence so our dogs will stay out of our very-dangerous highway. He ran it along the entire perimeter of the property, mostly along the fence:

the yellow wire

It starts on the side of the garage ...

And runs in a little trench to the corner of the orchard ...

He uses a funny tool to dig the trench for the wire:

This is a lot of property and a lot of wire. He's done this in the past couple of days, the coldest of the year thus far. He's almost done. Brrr. Makes my hands hurt just to think of it.

Some of it he dug into a trench along the road, and he's come across all the driveways now.

This is for Beau and Maggie. Sandy is our intelligent dog who will obediently stay where you tell her to stay. Beau and Maggie are escape artists. After all this work, I hope the electric fence will keep them in. Maggie seems to be oblivious to pain.

Soggy Christmas Eve

I went sloshing out in the field this morning wearing these:

Lots of rain last night, and the ground is saturated.

Adam has yet to get water pipes into some of his trenches, after all this time, because they have never yet been dry enough.

The rows in the winter garden are full again. Those poor greens, how they do soldier on!

It's Christmas Eve and it was 85 degrees this afternoon. Thus is the South! The bees were flying, but we really wish they wouldn't, as there's not much for them to eat right now, but they burn energy (i.e. use up honey stores) when they fly.

Adam's trying hard to get his compost wet. You wouldn't think it would be hard with all this rain, but the rain only seeps in a little ways, and the compost remains dry inside. So he has to turn and turn it.

From the bottom of his first bin you see dark soil beginning to form.

Maggie loves the outdoors. She leapt onto the burn pile happily.

Adam still works on his water system. Here are the pipes he's removed from nearer the house (where it's wetter), to the back of the property where it's drying. A little. Not much.

He got his four barrels up on the backside of the barn. He rebuilt the table on the left and built the one on the right from scratch.

Barn roof water flows into the gutters and into the blue barrels as before.

He put in some PVC lines to direct the rainwater ...

And attached that line to the new black barrels too.

And attached a spigot to one black barrel. A hose attaches there.

He was excited about all our rain last night and went back to the barn first thing this morning to see all the rainwater he'd collected. He'd found an old toilet float in the barn and put it into one of the barrels with its little stick pointing up, so he can easily see when the barrels are full.

He was rather disappointed this morning though. He's accidentally left the spigot open. All that rainwater came into the barrels and right back out again. All in one place. Needless to say, the area below the barrel tables was quite wet this morning.

I think this weed is sorrel. In spots where all else is bare, healthy tufts of this herb thrive anyway.

Adam and Peter have been working on the orchard, and Adam's pulled out lots of grapevine. Here's a stretch of vine that's not yet been pruned and pulled out.

Here's a portion with vines removed but a few scrubby pines and wax myrtles remain.

Here's the front of the orchard where the most clearing has happened. There's little remaining except the pruned grapevine stumps and a line of fruit trees down the middle. We're unsure what they are exactly.

The mass of grapevine Adam's pulled out for me to work with.

Our pecan trees continue to drop nuts, but I think we're done collecting them for this year. It's been so very wet, and they sit in the soggy mud. It doesn't do them good. We'll hope for a dryer fall next year.

Merry Christmas to everyone from our little farm! We'r'e eager to see what the new year will hold for us.