After three years of drought, the rains of spring have brought an incredible intensity of life to our homestead… plants flourishing in variegated shades of green, flowers blossoming in profusion, and the bushes bending heavy with fruit. As we work hard to harvest the crop and complete projects before the coming of winter, it is wonderful to stop for a little while and enjoy the great beauty of Nature around us.
As the summer whizzes by, I think we have entered the Year of the Tractor. Although it was quite a challenge getting our new two-wheeled Grillo tractor to the homestead, it has turned out to be a real workhorse for us!
Our first major task for the tractor was mowing the road that winds through our property… nearly a kilometer long and left largely unmaintained for the last three years. We hooked the sulky up to one end of the tractor and the mower to the other, which made it into something like a “riding mower” and off we went. Giddy up! It was amazing to chomp through 4′ tall salmonberry and leave a trail of mulched greenery behind. The mower was impressive. I hit a few rocks, but other than throwing some sparks, there was very little damage to the Y-blades on the mower. So, we were very happy with the choice of both the tractor and the flail mower.
About this time, the orchard burst into blossom. It was as though all the trees were trying to make up for the last few years. The sight and scent of it all was amazing.
Then it was on to dropping some trees for the coming winter’s firewood. In the past, we have dragged all the branches which are too small to use in the stove off to “compost” heaps. This year, we got to test out our new chipper… a great way to make a waste product into something useful!
The chips have many uses… as mulch around the raised garden beds to keep the weeds down, as a deep layer around the young trees in the orchard for both weed control and water retention, and as “carbon” for our humanure system (distributed by the handful in the bathroom). The alder chips had a wonderful sweet smell, and now I finally understand why they are preferred for smoking salmon!
Mulching all of our trees was the first step in drought-proofing our orchard. The second step was installing a drip irrigation system. This involved Ken making hundreds of “deep watering stakes”. These were 24″ lengths of 1″ diameter poly pipe with a cedar plug driven in one end, and holes drilled along their length. The stakes were driven into the ground, plug end down, around the bottom of the trees. A drip emitter fitted into the top of each “stake”. In this way, when the trees were watered, the water was applied directly to the roots, and no water was released on the surface. This greatly enhances water conservation, gets the water to where the plants need it, and reduces weeds growing on the surface. As I write this blog entry, the irrigation system is nearly completed (think almost a thousand feet of 1/4″ tubing, just a little less than a thousand of 1/2″ tubing, and gazillions of emitters and tiny fittings)! But it works amazingly well, and is soooo much better than hand watering each tree with a hose and watching the water evaporate almost as fast as it reaches the ground!
As we were chipping branches and working on the irrigation system, the berry crop came on… berries for breakfast, berries for dessert… strawberries, raspberries, loganberries, gooseberries, currants, blueberries, and even a few cherries that survived the early summer rains. I dried them, made them into jam and fruit leather, and even have one mason jar of raspberry mead percolating away. The apples are heavy with fruit that will be harvested in the fall, and the “rescue plum” (salvaged from a neighboring abandoned homestead), is groaning with a load of little green plums, soon to be ripe. The marionberry is just starting to get ripe, and the blackberry bush has an incredible load of green berries. There may be blackberry jam this year, and maybe another test jar of blackberry mead in the works. What a wealth of goodness!
Now we are working on chopping the wood from the alders that we have fallen, and trying to catch up on the million and one maintenance tasks on boats and buildings. It has been a summer of hard work and great beauty. Now it is time to smell a few flowers, take a momentary breather, listen to the birds or the falling rain…
