Today's shots, plus, I'm stalled

After raining about 1/3 of the days since the last pic.

I'm stalled.  I don't know what to do.  My body hurts too much to do the hard labor anymore.  But I don't want to spend $800 renting a backhoe for a week.  We have other expenses due that benefit the whole family.  

I know that the driveable path and soil fertility needs to be top priority rigjt now.  My plants suffered due to a shitty, bacteria-only foodweb.  I'm having trouble making compost with a good foodweb, and my soil in imundated with oomycetes, including some that exude a residue that makes soil particles hydrophobic.  The temps are getting colder, so... do I bother with predatiry nematodes right now or wait?  BAH!!!

Today's shots: hot, hot summer days

I wanted to remember how dry and dead the property gets after a hot couple of weeks.  It's the middle of August.  Tomorrow and the next day has a forcast of temperature over 100 deg F.  My soil still has almost no fungi and no protozoa nor nematodes.  It is still succesptible to drought.  Hopefully, next year we'll see a drastic change for the better at this time of year.

Today's shot July 6th, 2020

I'm in a rush, so here's today's shot.  

 

Things are going to seed, aging, drying up.  But check out this area.  I need to identify the types of plants in each section, but I have noticed that on the left are more weedy types of grass, so like, early successional grasses and annual, true weeds.  On the right are some later successional grasses (wheat, barley), and some stronger weeds like the prickly lettuce and some better flowering "weeds".  Why are the right ones greener?  The left ones are in the divit that usually has more water available in the ground.  And we've recently had a nice rain.  I know the stuff on the left is gone to seed, but so has a lot of stuff on the right.  I'm starting to think that the right is greener because of:

• More diversity of species.
• Later successional plants.
• No big patches with the same species.

I bet I could slash a small patch and grow some veg, and they'd come up well.  Maybe I should do that.  I'll do a slash-mulch in both spots and throw my tomatos and tomatillos in there and see how they fare.

And as a bonus, here's a little guy I found in the kitchen.  iNaturalist says it's a bold jumping spider.  He was SO CUTE!! 

 He had a total little personality, just like this guy.

Today's shot

My neighbor asked if she and a friend could have a tour of the garden.  In my head I was like, why?  

The difference between the picture in my mind and what it looks like now makes me feel like I'm only 10% of the way there.  But I guess if you look at what we started with, there is a lot of change.  I gotta remember that.  It'll be very encouraging to give a tour.  :)

Today's shot

Just a photo here.  I wanna put all these together in an animation once some real change starts showing.

Here it is without the future play court and the septic drain field in the foreground.  

Man it's so hard to get a sense of what you're looking at at that angle.  Sorry.

Work log: Terraces and first annual bed

Too worn out to type much.  Our lawn guy helped me with the beds and terraces.  He's got the endurance of Superman.  Looking good!  Gonna sow something soon.

Update: April 2nd.

Finally all the wood is placed!!  Does it not look wayyy better?!  

Next, I need to lay the cardboard and fill in the next row of planting beds.  

Also, I want to come up with a solution to the slug-attracting problem of exposed wood.  Spraying nematodes might work, but I think I want to cover them with burlap or a thick layer of coir so I can sow ground cover into it.

Work log: Terrace and piles of branches

Today, our lawn guy came by to help.  He was amazing!!  He took my chainsaw and his machete and demolished ALL of the piles of branches so that they're in smaller pieces and flattened.  They're ready to spread a little and then start dumping on the raw horse manure (to make them break down faster by balancing the carbon to nitrogen ratio).
While he did that, I worked on the last terrace row (marking it with wood), tidied up, laid out cardboard, and started dumping barrows of compost on the top-most terrace.  I need it to be ready SOON!!  It's gonna be my first annual veg bed.  At the ends, I have 2 thornless blackberry, and will have a bunch of sunchokes (both perennials).  I wanna do that to cap the ends.  Once I get some perennial kales, I'll put them there too.  I also need a nursery bed for all of my cuttings, but that can be any material (even raw manure), but deep enough for the pots.
I recently discovered that I could drive to the local compost maker (1 mile away), have them fill my trailer for $20, and bring it home to dump it at the top of the slope.  It's laborious to unload it, and even more so to haul barrows to the beds, but MAN!  It certainly is less labor-intensive than manually loading the trailer at the horse property (where I can't even park the trailer next to the compost bins--I have to toss shovel-fulls over a fence).
Here's a pic of the results of today.  It looks SO TIDY and like it's coming together!!!

This is the 4th redesign of the terraces, and you know what?  It was worth it.  They're starting to look amazing.
I hope our lawn guy can come back and help soon.  And maybe help with getting all of the horse poop.  I want to rent a dump trailer and try to get all of the horse poop in one day, and perhaps even a couple loads of compost from the local maker.  The compost makers double-cook their compost (hot then warm) and double-sieve.  It's at least a year old by the time they sell it.  They're awesome.  So if I could get a dump trailer for a day, I could get one or two loads of compost without using any physical labor to get it to the top of the hill.  The only labor would be in loading it at the horse property.  I'm trying to convince the owner to dismantle a section of the fence so that we can get the trailer close.  I don't think she can picture what I'm saying, so I'll see her on the weekend to explain it better.

Work log: Terrace and backfill

I'm gonna start logging what I do, with before and after pictures (uh, which I didn't take this time.

Just shy of 4 hours:

• picked up trailer.
• reinforced lowest terrace wood.
• extended it a bit.
• created 75% of the topmost terrace wall and laid cardboard along 40%, and a small load of composted manure that was left over under a tarp.  Decided this will be my first bed, and thus must have only composted manure.
• unloaded the trailer into the bottom-most terrace via barrowfuls.
• decided to have 5 terraces instead of 4.  That solves the problem of how godawful deep they have to be backfilled, but introduces the problem of not having enough wood.  Might change my mind again. 

Here's an after photo, at least, of the part I worked on.

I took my time and pondered and toyed with the wood, and it was SO enjoyable!!!  Not only because of how messing with the wood was like Tetris, but....  When you prevent yourself from feeling rushed, life is SO FUN!!  Must remember that.

Time for an update

Boy, have I made a mess.  The acre is a frickin' mess.  There are partial projects all over (making borders, making terraces, filling in beds with materials to decompose, a dismantled compost pit).  I've now put deep ruts in the ground because I drove on it past the first fall rains.  The only new trees look bad without their leaves.  I still have piles of branches that birds have probably made their winter homes in but I have to move them so that I can drive onto the property in a way that won't make ruts.  Grr.

I'll be posting soon about "Lessons Learned the Hard Way: ".  If I knew then what I know now, I'd be so much further along, so I want to document the lessons in case I ever get the chance to build a food forest on someone else's property.

For now, here are some awful pictures of our trashy acre that the neighbors are probably steaming about.

First, unannotated.

 Same pic, but annotated.

What we're starting with

We have about an acre of open, sloped land.  This is an aerial photo from probably 2012.  Look how burned the land seems.  The home-owner used pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers for about 20 years.  We bought the property in 2013.

The land slopes downwards to the right, with a bit of a leveling off in the middle.

Here's a photo from Google's enhanced satellite, taken probably around the same time or shortly after.  Notice the difference in burned spots.  Every summer is different.  Patches move and grow.  It's odd.  (Flash forward to now, 5+ years later, and the green stripe you see below is a bit wider to the right, covering the entire leveled off patch.)

Last year (2017), I took soil samples from various spots all over the property.  The results?  No nitrogen anywhere, except for a tiny amount in the green stripe (mentioned below).  And the soil was highly acidic everywhere, even where there aren't any evergreen plants.

Luckily, shortly after the tests, my kids caught my neighbor spraying something along the south and east ditch, which is 10 feet from our property lines.  We don't own the ditch, but neither does he.  I knocked on his door, and his wife told me that he sprays the ditch twice a year with RoundUp, "to keep it looking nice".  I said, "he's spraying someone else's property?"  She said, "he got permission from the property owner."  I said, "the rain water drains from all of our ditches straight into the lake in the conservation area east of us.  We're polluting that water.  Additionally, I just tested the soil all over our property, and we have zero nitrogen everywhere.  RoundUp kills the microbes that fix nitrogen in the soil.  If I get permission from the owner of the ditch to maintain it, will you please ask your husband to stop spraying RoundUp?"  Later, I got permission, and our neighbor agreed to stop spraying.  So, we're now a year without RoundUp.

This is an aerial shot from around that time (2017), but sadly from Yahoo Maps, which doesn't allow for better focus.  Regardless, you can see a vertical green strip, which is the left half of where the ground levels out a bit before sloping downwards to the east again.  That spot of leveling-out is acting like a massive, shallow swale.

We plowed the manure pile into a 70' by 70' square, almost in the middle.  This was before I found out that tilling destroys soil structure.  But hey, we didn't do anything with the land after that, and the soil structure recovered.

This past summer (2018) was the worst yet, in terms of heat and rain.  Imagine the same picture as the one above, but even more brown.  We have a huge variety of weeds, dead grass, and moss.  But all through this past summer, the 70' by 70' square always stood out, always slightly more green than the rest.  I wish I had taken a picture from when you could actually see the edges of the square.

Here's a more recent picture, taken at the end of September 2018, looking eastward after a weekend of rain.  You can still sort-of see the edges of the green square, which I've drawn in with white lines.

The pile of poo you can see is a new pile.  Our neighbor on the left got a horse and graciously drops off the manure for me to use.  I have plans for it, to spread it thinly over scattered straw like in The One Straw Revolution.  

You might have noticed little pylons in the photo.  Those are garden stakes with pool noodles fitted on them to make them highly-visible.  The blue ones mark the edges of two 70' by 70' squares that are earmarked for a food forest, and the edges of the future veggie swales.  Pink noodles mark the locations of the main trees (apple and walnut).  Orange noodles mark the mulberry and Russian olives.  

In order to stake these out, I had to have a plan.

After 5 drafts and lots of thinking time in-between, my plan is pretty well set now, though not in stone.  I'm using guidelines from the permaculture book Gaia's Garden, the no-till, do-nothing book The One Straw Revolution, and the principles of Korean Natural Farming and JADAM.  For the veggie swales, I'll use Winter Gardening in the Pacific Northwest.  This next picture says "Plan 4", but with all of the modifications, I consider it Plan 5.  :)  One modification not shown is that the two super-guilds are going to make a U-shape instead of a Z-shape, in order to create a permaculture "sun trap".

These are the plans for each of the two super-guilds that will make up the food forest.

Here's a little pic that helped me place the stakes on the diagonal from the corners of the two 70' by 70 squares.  This probably isn't interesting to anyone but me.  A quaint reminder that, yes, you will use high school math again.  I had to use the Pythagorean Theorem to get the right distance.

So... here we are.  A month ago, I started the actual work.  My budget is skimpy, and so is my time.  It's going to take 10 years until it looks like the picture in my head, so I won't beat myself up about it too much.  

Wish me luck.  :)