I need to start collecting these lessons learned the hard way, especially since my last concussion has made my memory a little unreliable. I'll just keep updating this one post as each new lesson occurs to me.
Do not drive on the land after the first autumn rains
This might be common sense to most people, but for months, I was able to drive around causing only minor damage, so I kinda got used to that. But OMG, the ruts. They're so deep. Especially since I kept having to drive over a ditch, with a truck full of logs and/or a trailer full of horse manure. At my last attempt, I got the truck stuck IN the ditch and my gracious neighbor had to pull me out. (I have now purchased a tow strap. :))
(Picture of ruts to come.)
My original plan marked a drivable area, and I should've prioritized creating it (removing plants, laying down gravel or tilling in cement powder or something. Anything). Instead, I set priorities but I changed them according to what materials were available, which is what was necessary, but really, getting those materials to where I needed them to be was the most necessary.
Make sure you can drive to every location to which you need to bring materials
Geeze. I laid out firewood and logs to mark the terraced rows of the future market garden (on a slope, which doesn't really relate except that the truck kept sliding downhill). Because of the way I laid out the wood, I eliminated my ability to drive the truck to the same spots again, in order to deliver the compost to fill in above the retaining wood (ie, creating a terraced row).
(Pic to come.)
So now, I either have to redesign and temporarily move the wood out of the way and move it back row by row (ie, lay a row, come in and backfill, lay the next row, backfill, repeat), or I have to carry the compost by wheelbarrow. We're talking backfilling up to 2 feet at the deepest row, in four rows that are 70+ feet long. I'm tired just thinking about it. I have a little lawn tractor and a mini trailer that dumps, but it doesn't hold much.
Don't dump materials on your drivable path or other reserved spot (you double the work)
Wow. It's funny (and sad) that these first three lessons are related. I stored all of the branches that I collected over time on a portion of the future drivable path. Now, I've had to spend money on extra help to move them to their final locations. I should have NEVER brought in so much material before I knew where it was going to go, and I should have marked out the drivable paths first thing and prepared them.
Don't bring in the next pile of material until you've made use of the last (it becomes overwhelming)
OK, make that four lessons that are related. I collected branches and wood from neighbors. It was a perfect quid pro quo. I'd post on NextDoor that I needed lawn trimmings, and it resulted in more than I could use. I had planned to chip it all, but the piles grew too fast. It was a good plan. I mean, I was going to sort the piles into categories (use for wattle fencing, burn for biochar, use as borders), but OMG, how time-consuming. It probably wouldn't have been overwhelming if I had handled one pile at a time, but I'd get these pleading requests from elderly or infirm people to "please collect it soon". You can't say no to that. At that point, I should've had a plan, and a long-term storage location that was out of the way. --A long-term storage location that would've kept the wood dry (the wood that I was going to burn), because now I can't burn any of it until it dries out next summer. :(
The best ideas and knowledge come from being out there, not at your desk daydreaming
On the flip side of all the previous lessons about planning ahead, you can't sit indoors with a pencil and paper and come up with every cool idea. The best ideas and that I had and knowledge that I obtained happened when I was out there messing with something in the yard and a problem would occur to me, and the solution would be hot on its heels. What an invigorating experience!
For example, as I was struggling to move all of the branches (and getting terribly demoralized), I noticed birds flitting in and out of the piles. I realized they were bedding down in there for the winter. This brought up a conundrum. If I didn't move the piles, I wouldn't be able to clear my drivable path, but I didn't want to evict the birds right as the temperatures were dropping. Then I realized, hey, I could just make the row of branch piles thinner and extend the row out along the southern property line, and that would have the awesome side effect of slowing down the frigid wind we get from that direction in winter.
As another example, I didn't like how my market garden rows were like a squashed figure 8, making the rows really wide at some points. Plus, my market garden rows (terraced) are taking too long to construct and I might not be ready for spring plantings. And I have fingerling potatoes that I want in the ground now. But as I was trying to decide what to do with some old raised bed frames, I realized, hey! I could put these at the widest parts of the rows. They don't really fit as rectangles but since the corners are attached using hinges, I can skew them into pleasing rectangles. That fills in the space a bit and gives me something I can fill up right now and get the potatoes in there.
There will be failure and it's important to reconcile yourself to redoing things (because you learn 3X as much by failing)
I've redesigned the slope for the market garden terraces twice, and I'll be doing a third redesign. Because really, you won't know if something will work until you've tried it and stood in the middle of it. I don't even think I could've used 3D modeling software to figure out the best thing to do for the market garden terraces, not even with 3D goggles. This must be why quick prototyping apps are so important when creating software. You don't want to invest in the visual design (or even the code structure) until you can test things out. But I digress.
As another example, back in spring, I started brewing microbes and watering with them. It was working and it was amazing! And then it stopped working when I lapsed on the waterings. Once I figured out why, it gave me a much deeper understanding of soil fertility.
Book learning is as important as being out there, and should be interlaced
To continue on with the microbe watering example, I didn't figure out why my soil started failing until I had listened to the entire book,
The Hidden Half of Nature, by David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé. And I wouldn't have figured it out if I hadn't been alternating between being outside messing with stuff, and being inside tinkering, reading, and watching videos.
Microbes, like fire, have a prism of requirements
So, to recap, back in spring, I started brewing microbes and watering with them every 7-14 days. It was working! A dead patch came back to life and 4-year-old grass seed sprouted (see
this post). But then, as I slacked on watering with microbes, the dead patch started to die after a month, and my soil fertility lagged badly. I though, WTF? I inoculated the garden. Why isn't it staying healthy? Is the neighbor still spraying roundup? No. Then what's going on?
I asked my soil fertility mentor
Charlotte Anthony. She said she has successfully grown healthy veggies in just sand! We discussed in order to find the differences, (ie, what kinds of inoculants, etc), and I realized she kept watering with microbes every 10 days throughout the lifetime of the sand garden. I had stopped. Wait, was this like the other theory I had, about human gut microbes?
I had heard that if you eat yogurt to add good bacteria to your gut, you had to keep consuming it over time. I never understood why, because I had also heard that keifer had the ability to "colonoze your intestines". Why could some microbes colonize and self-perpetuate their population and some not?
The book Hidden Half of Nature talked about eating lots of leafy greens to feed the microbes, and avoiding lots of bad foods in order to maintain a healthy environment that would support the life of your gut microbes. That's when it clicked!! Sure, I had inoculated, but the soil was inhospitable to the microbes somehow. Why? Sand is inhospitable, so why had that worked? Because Charlotte kept adding microbes, like a human would have to keep consuming yogurt. So, why was my soil inhospitable. Neighbor wasn't using Roundup on our property anymore.
Then I watched an Elaine Ingham video where she mentioned organic matter. Hidden Half of Nature had mentioned organic matter too. I tried to picture the organic matter in our yard. I then remembered that the last time I had dug a hole and filled it with water, it took forever to drain, and even when it had drained, if I dug down a little more, the soil was still dry. Where had the water gone? It had actually wicked up into the top-most inch and spread out flat! Absurd! I thought I was imagining things so I tried twice more (filling a hole with water and waiting until it drained). Nope, the water was somehow moving up the sides of the hole to spread out along the topmost inch. What was so special about that inch? It had organic matter in it (grass roots and a super thin layer of decomposed material. But not much.
OMG! I was missing organic matter! That was the leafy greens of the soil microbes! And I'm sure the absence of organic matter was also creating an inhospitable environment. Why was I missing organic matter, for crying out loud?! I had asked our lawnmowing guy to mulch the grass instead of bagging it up. Wasn't he doing that? (Turns out, no he wasn't. So now, he's not allowed to mow the planting areas--only the drivable paths.)
With that epiphany, I drew up a prism of requirements for healthy soil microbes (kinda like the triangle of fuel, oxygen, and heat for making fire).
Bah! I can't find the picture I drew. I'll have to post it later. It joined water, organic matter, microbes, oxygen in a prism of relationships. Although, now that I know living roots are needed too (thanks to Dirt to Soil), I'll have to reconfigure it.
Sometimes you'll have to delay things a whole season or two
I lived in the tech world, where things could happen "right now". With the garden, it was a demoralizing blow to set things up to be done only to find out that it was the wrong season to do them. For example, planting potatoes. Planting fruit trees. Pruning fruit trees. Driving onto the property without creating ruts. Burning wood for biochar. Sowing seeds. Watering with microbes (pointless if the soil is colder than 50 degrees). Gawd! I wish I had done the research to find out the best time to do all of the anticipated tasks, and chart them on a timeline on one massive piece of paper. I could've starred the items for which there'd be a workaround, for example, getting bareroot fruit and berry plants is the cheapest way to get those plants, but they're only available in February, however the workaround is to get a potted one later, but be warned that the price will be quadrupled. I still might draw up a timeline. So many things I planned on doing have been delayed by entire seasons, setting back my progress.
Let the people near you know what to expect
Hoo boy. For a couple years, I felt hamstrung by my husband's requirements for the acre. He kept saying, "you can do what you want with the acre." But as soon as I wanted to do something, he'd complain about the cost, so I'd figure out a cheaper way. But the cheaper way was messier for longer, so then he'd complain about how it looked. It put me between a rock and a hard place for a really long period of time because I got to the point where I'd be afraid to take a step (to avoid the inevitable conflict), and then he'd complain that I wasn't doing anything. And because I didn't vocalize any of this, he didn't realize how he was creating the situations that he was complaining about. It didn't help that I have a HUGE emotional trigger around being put between a rock and a hard place (thanks, shitty childhood). I finally realized this, sat him down, laid it out without being whiny or bitchy (that took therapy, btw), and I said, "look, this is what I want for the garden, and I can't do that if you remain mentally invested in it. I need to never hear any opinion about the acre for at least 3 years, because that's how long it'll take before it looks like the picture in my head. In return, I'll tell you what I'm doing, keep the costs low, and leave the upper 1/4 acre alone." We negotiated, and I added the job of keeping the 1/4 acre tidy. Since then, I've been making steady forward progress. Slow progress, but it's ok.
The other people you need to let know what to expect are your neighbors. I have one rather opinionated neighbor with whom I anticipated the most pushback because all of his complaints were based on appearance, but he turned out to be the most on-board because he now sees me out there all the time, making change. That blew my mind. And I never would've found out until I spoke to him (something I was dreading). The other neighbors have dropped by over time, and I let them know the "no tidiness for 3 years" thing. One furrowed their brow until I called it a "food forest for the neighborhood" and then they were totally on board. It's true that it's going to be a food forest, and I'd prefer it was not for the neighborhood, but it would be unrealistic to expect people not to pick their own food, so I may as well accept that and declare that it's "for the neighborhood". :/
Always label--seeds, cuttings, plantings--ALWAYS!
Not only will you forget which seeds are in some pill bottle over time, but you could forget the very next day.
For example, one Saturday morning, I went to a plant swap, and I got a bunch of cuttings and seeds.
That afternoon, I slipped in the garden and got a whiplash concussion. My husband has been telling me things that I don't remember happening, including standing at a garbage can, pulling pill bottles of seeds out of my pockets, going, "what the fuck are these?" and throwing them in the garbage. I didn't even remember that I had been to a plant swap.
The next day, I saw a post-it note that I had left the kids saying, "Going to a plant swap. Back in an hour." And I thought, what? Did I go to a plant swap?
Then I started recovering memories, but they played out in my head like a wispy dream. As if I was remembering a dream.
The memories are still hazy but I do recall saying to myself, "there's not that many cuttings. I'll remember what they are." I had put them all in dirt in a single pot. "I'll remember that these flat seeds are raddish." Yeah. I don't know what the other ones are though. I think they were important.
Thank goodness I took pics of the cuttings that were laid out. Maybe I can match them to the cuttings in my pot.
See those cute shoes? I had bought them the day before. Apparently in the ER, I kept looking at them and asking my husband, "are those... my shoes? They're so pretty." :(
Protect your plantings from animal damage!
Just... you don't know. You never expect damage. It'll happen, though. Either by domestic or wild animals. I protected my grown-from-seed apples, but not the 7 foot tall fruit trees I got from a nursery, and now they've been ringed by goats that got in through a damaged fence. How'd the fence get damaged? :(
Make sure you have water available before sowing seeds
I sowed seeds in early March. I covered with the white insulating fabric. I left the bed alone for 2 weeks. After 2 sunny days, the soil was bone dry. Get your soaker hoses out there and laid out. I'm actually going to set up a loop with regular hoses (short peices cut from a damaged hose) buried under the path going from one bed to the next.
Body pain and fatigue stop you from wanting to go out
Here's what has helped:
- Excedrin first thing in the morning.
- Doing a couple house chores first to warm up body and mind.
- Meditate and breathe to get energy back, relax muscles, and counter negative self-talk.
- Throw away all tasks except one and tell yourself you'll just do that.
- Walk on the treadmill on a steep incline for 20-30 minutes and stretch.
- If you've already had coffee and the pain and fatigue is coming back, then take the naltrexone.
Yes, there is, absolutely, too much to do
And it's fucking overwhelming. Look at how much change there's been already in order to remember that it can be done, but over a long time. Shift things off until next year (like propagating the roses). ANYTHING can be shifted off. You're not on a deadline.
Expect moles to dig it up or cover it
Bastards. Plant rings of daffodils around the stuff you paid for or care about. Check on them regularly until they're established. Unbury them so they can photosynthesize and remember they might survive. I proved that with the thrice-buried apple who is growing super strong now.
Rain truly is a compaction event
If you plant something, make sure it's protected from the impact of rain. I had compost wash off of newly planted asparagus crowns! A layer of wood chips prevented that.
Definitely mulch with cardboard--weeds will overtake your stuff
Buttercup is already taking over the rhubarb and asparagus. I should've weed whacked to the ground, then laid out cardboard, then compost, then the plant, cover its roots, then top off with wood chips.
Styrofoam floating seed start trays are the bomb!
They float over your water reservoir, so you have to check on your seedlings less.
I hate the extra work of seeding indoors and then transplanting
Maybe I won't hate it forever. And I might like it more after I have styrofoam trays and a pulley system for my skylight shelves. But I might want to invest in more polytunnels. And maybe a big walking polytunnel like Charles Dowding has where I could put a massive poop pile and warm up my seed trays on it. Gawd, some of my seeds also need "cold treating" before planting them out. I must invest in what I need to streamline everything.
Spray microbes in the early morning or after the sun is about to set
Whoops. I burned some leaves probably because the little drops of water acted like tiny magnifying glasses in the sun. :(
For more lessons learned the hard way...
... click the
lessons learned label below.
