Photo notes on May 19th, 2020

There's a bunch of these scattered around the property.  A friend on Facebook thinks it's barley.  I hope so.  I'm going to collect the seeds and use them next year.  Or, wait, isn't barley a winter grain?  I'll used them when I can.  The drivable path can't be used for row crops until I'm done trucking stuff onto the property, though.  :(

I finally decided where to put the hops.  I potted them carefully, with mycorrhizal fungi, and sowed clover for nitrogen, and watered with EM-1, and finally added some sweet alyssum seeds.  That was a week ago, and look how fast the clover sprouted.

The thingies are already curving around the post.

Finally set up the trellis for the kiwi plants I have, on May 14th, with fungi and clover.  I slash mulched all of the vegetation first.  I have 2 male Hardy, and 6 female of slightly different strains.

They're going gangbusters now.

Already winding like crazy around the wire.

Holy crap, look at the rhubarb!  It's setting seed.  It's taller than me.  And last year I thought it died.  Gonna harvest these seeds because they'll be genetically adapted to my soil and my neglect.  :)

Look where it was on April 30th when it started sending up the stalk.  The leaves were already big.  

Every day or so, I MUST go check on all the big plants I paid money for.  Because moles.  They raise up soil, often covering my stuff, but more importantly, exposing soil, which increases evaporation.  I spotted this around a new rhubarb and covered the exposed soil with slashed vegetation.

Holy cow!  The King Stropharia spawn I got last fall worked!!  This is at the base of one of my apples-from-seed.  Now I need to learn how to harvest the spores.

I saw so many damselflies today!!!  They started coming back last year.  Never saw them before that.

Another thing that came back!  This was a hazel that I got for free from a KNF meetup.  It seemed to die last year.  Man!  Patience pays off.  It went from a little barely-visible sprout 10 days ago to this.

This is disturbing, these brown spots on the rose leaves.  Last week, I made a point of spraying the roses with the EM-1 that I propagated.  I think I did this damage.  It's on all of the roses I sprayed, it's not on roses I didn't spray.  But luckily, it's not on anything else that I sprayed, which includes the veggies.  :(

Oh man, the dwarf apple--I sprayed the dwarf apple!  And now it's completely dead.  It was only mostly dead before I sprayed.  Fucking goats almost ringed it at the base.  But I thought it might come back.  I think they ringed the rootstock and not the scion.  Maybe that's why it didn't survive and thrive like the other two apples.  But I think I pushed it over the edge with the spraying.  I mean, there were 2 tiny, half-formed leaves that were alive and which are now dead.  Bummer.  MUST improve my EM-1 propagation skills.  I now have the pH test paper to make sure it's potent and not growing bad guys.  But I also need to get my microscope out and start identifying what's in my brews.