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Quick garden update

allen levine said:
you guys make me jelly. i have a 75 foot driveway....thats long island. we do have a lawn, maybe 20 feet by 30 feet.
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Once I finish getting a path cleared I'll do a tour to the first of the lower-lower fields. :D

I trimmed a bit over a hundred yards of limbs out last weekend and knocked the last 3 - 5 if you count double stems.. trees down that were in the way. Now I just need to move all of the limbs.. Some of those are small trees in their own right so still a bit of a project.
 
Little trip to the lower field.

Heading from the house area down towards the big shop

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We take a right at the prison fence, past the pile-of-logs that were previously "trees hangin precariously over the shop" where our trusty steed lies waiting in the shadows.

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And on to the newly cleared road through the Upper Dark Forest

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On the far side of which we pop out into a bit of a clearing, there's a bunch of newly planted walnut and heartnut trees on the hill to the right.

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Looking left we can see the squash, melon, corn field on the First Upper Field
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Followed by the Teasel Swamp above The Field of Many Roses.. Inbetween these two on the berm we have a bunch of cider apple and pear trees going in.. Also next year I'll do at least the next berm down,...maybe more..

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Finally we arrive at the newly cleared Upper Road. Last year this was literally impassible, it took us all afternoon to walk (err cut a walking path) through the next 80+- yards. The tree limbs were interlocked all the way down to ground level

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There are of course still a lot of brush piles...
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Did I mention that there are a lot of brush piles?

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But finally we arrive, yes it's still wildly overgrown.. BUT I can at least get the tractor down here now! Huge milestone!

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Also did a little work going the other direction (left at The Prison Fence instead of right). There's a spot down here I'm trying to open up as a space for friends to day camp.

Spot the cat..

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The road ended here this morning in an impassible wall of blackberry.

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You’ve made a lot of progress. You’re gonna have to figure out a way to put the flail mower on the front end loader as an attachment.

So what chain saw scabbard did you put on the tractor? I’ve not seen one with a tray like that.
 
Darren Wright said:
So what chain saw scabbard did you put on the tractor? I’ve not seen one with a tray like that.
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It's actually a chain box that's fairly deep. Although I'm currently using it more as a tool box for small bits haha.

I didn't get the cheapest one, but it is pretty nice and is easy to put on/take off and I have a toolbox that clips into the same mounting bracket.

itcquickattach.com

Saw Boss Chainsaw Carrier for tractors. LIFETIME WARRANTY

itcquickattach.com

Darren Wright said:
You’re gonna have to figure out a way to put the flail mower on the front end loader as an attachment
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Flail was giving me a bit of headache today actually. The hydraulic side shift isn't shifting so I need to dig into the hydraulics. It's something in the cylinder, if I put pressure to it I can push it sideways and it'll shift BACK with either line hooked up .. so lines good, valve good, something at the cylinder side.
 
Maybe I missed it in your previous postings, but I just got to ask. What was the previous owner keeping in the prison fencing? I assume from the angle of the barbed wire, it was fenced to keep something contained within. And is whatever was inside the fencing now roaming around the homestead? If so, maybe you need a rifle scabbard for your tractor.
 
Your property reminds me of the land where our house was growing up. Our house was located on the highest point in the area and sloped downhill with the lowest point being about 80 feet below the highest.

We had a large clear area of several acres around the house, then a large patch of woods with a path cut through large enough for vehicles. Once you exited the woods there was a huge cleared area of farm land totalling about 12 acres where we grew our garden. Some of it was overtaken by broom straw. Most of the soil in this area was red clay which made gardening a challenge. And then the rest of the property was woods. There was an old saw mill buried in the woods close to the garden area with huge mounds of rotted sawdust. If I knew then what I know now I would have hauled that rotted sawdust out of the woods and distributed it on the garden areas. That would have helped the tillage and tilth of that clay. Of course back then I knew nothing about organic farming. We had huge oak trees around our house and the leaf drop would have been a wonderful addition to have tilled into the clay to improve it.

Once you got that clay broken up it was pretty good to grow things in but it sure was hard to plow, cultivate and hoe.
 
Bill Satko said:
What was the previous owner keeping in the prison fencing? I assume from the angle of the barbed wire, it was fenced to keep something contained within
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They were running a wolf dog rescue. The big shop was actually a kennel they had built just for that purpose. I still need to do something with all of the man sized “dog doors” on the sides of it. My neighbors aren’t really close but several have noted that they used to have quite a lot of barking and howling.

My plan is to take it all down and put at least some of it back up around the one orchard space. There’s at least 2000’ of 9’ chain link there!!! It’s not cemented in so I don’t think it’ll be too bad to pull hopefully. I’ll skip the prison fence topping though. But somewhat predictably I need to remove a bunch more trees there as well first (I took down the first pass this year to get what we were planting so far and have that “protected” by a combination of small ring fences from scavenged wire and a double hot wire around the outside for now.
 
Mike Stafford said:
We had a large clear area of several acres around the house, then a large patch of woods with a path cut through large enough for vehicles. Once you exited the woods there was a huge cleared area of farm land totalling about 12 acres where we grew our garden. Some of it was overtaken by broom straw. Most of the soil in this area was red clay which made gardening a challenge
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Really similar layout. There’s about five clear acres here by the house. Some of that (a bit over an acre) is unusable shale outcropping (that was used as a wash out area for logging trucks apparently). I’ve considered putting a fancier year round greenhouse on the edge of that. There’s several wooded areas but the big planting is about ten acres between the house and the lower fields. All told the lower fields are around another ten to fifteen acres depending on where you draw the line. The remainder is scattered woods and overgrown small meadows and the creek line which is mostly deciduous (oak and ash forest) with a very heavy blackberry, scrub ash, and vine maple understory. Some of the wood lot along the field is poor performing due to the moisture (the fir likes mostly dry feet) so over time I’ll push that out a little and plant some other deciduous trees along those edges.

The soil here isn’t as much clay as the neighbors a little lower down (they have solidly 12-20’ of it), but it’s fairly heavy for the most part. There is a clay base under the clay loam in some areas as well that holds water pretty well (a bit too well in spots). It does grow grass real well, but for garden spaces I’m definitely working on adding more biomass. I’ve got several good sized chip and grass clippings piles cooking and we’ll get more cover crops on spots as we get more ahead of things.

I’d never thought of broom corn as being kind of invasive. That’s an interesting side note. Were marginal here for growing most sorghum’s although we do have a test plot going of a local northern variety we got from one of the seed savers groups.
 
Don Baer said:
If you start to run out of space here's a good crop to save fertile ground.
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For getting those return customers hooked at the market...

www.telegraph.co.uk

Simpsons stories: the tomacco man

www.telegraph.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk

This guy actually did the tomato/potato graft successfully. My impression was that you'd end up with the problem like when potatoes get to much nitrogen and go all to tops and you don't get much for spuds... but maybe not...


There's a pretty big project at the local university to work on grafting higher producing tomatoes onto hardier rootstock. This is primarily to solve either wet roots issues or use more aggressive roots for dryland farming (which interestingly are mostly the same rootstocks.. We've found tough plants are tough plants.. usually).
 
Vaughn McMillan said:
I think it'll be a while before he runs out of fertile ground.
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Available ground no.. FENCED ground that the elk, deer, and turkeys don't decimate is OTOH another problem. More a problem of time for fence building/rebuilding than anything else.. but .. yeah.. Luckily I picked up a handful of solar fence zappers at an auction last year and have 3 of them fixed enough to be functional so we've deployed those a bit strategically to help out for now.
 
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