Our Place In The World

It takes a while to really understand something. The first time you do anything it is difficult or confusing but after a bit of experience and repetition, patterns emerge and the strange becomes familiar. In our case, even though we had grown lots of things in our yard, it was more like we were just using it or working on it rather than nurturing and enjoying the abundance of our garden. We only started to feel connected to this place when we decided to stay and make some long term plans for its development.

We are very fortunate to have a sunny, south sloping yard in a climate with plenty of rain and a long growing season. There are also lots of trees in the neighborhood to protect from wind. The high humidity and lack of a hard winter probably encourages bacteria, fungus and viruses and different kinds of bugs so the fun now is to discover more food producing plants that do well naturally in our environment. We realized that even without special season extending efforts, we already have "four season gardening". By observing the seasons, lifecycles and interactions among the living things in our garden, we learn that timing matters and sometimes they produce more with less effort. Often the right thing to do is no-thing. At the very least, the products of a failed experiment will make excellent compost to feed the next, hopefully more successful one .

And after deciding we didn't need to produce as much as possible to sell from every square inch of garden, we saw that we actually had a LOT of room. We had worked hard for that, and now we had the luxury of remapping the blank canvas and allocating beds for what we really wanted. Crop rotation is not as important as we previously thought because regular application of compost and the intentional interplanting of different types of plants prevents malnourishment, imbalance and disease and confuses the pests. I'm describing something like a managed permaculture, but we're not into labels. We have no expectation of becoming self sufficient so that takes the pressure off and makes almost every day in the garden pure pleasure.


Above is a recent picture of a section of the kitchen garden raised bed with dill, red kale and collards.

So here are some of the things we are doing now:

• Replacing the upper and front garden with an expanded fruit/nut orchard, including (so far) just one or two of each of apple, pear, fig, jujube, persimmon, peach, apricot, pawpaw, plum, cherry, almond, hazelnut, serviceberry, mulberry, che, josta and currant.
  
• A better kitchen garden which can produce many of the greens, herbs and fresh vegetables we need, all year round. It is nowhere near its full capacity or efficient flow.
  
• A couple of other annual beds for bigger things like tomatoes, peas, beans, okra, potatoes, broccoli, cabbage and onions.
  
• Several small and medium beds (some still in the planning stage) dedicated to strawberries, asparagus, horseradish, blueberries and future experiments and discoveries.
  
• Wire support structures for table grapes, muscadine grapes and raspberries.
  
• A moist, shady area under the pine trees for shiitake and reishi mushrooms.
  

Above is a summer view of some of the young plants in our mini-orchard. You can see blueberry bushes in the foreground, a fig tree beyond them and two pawpaws and a peach on the right.

Future plans include:

• The backyard borders and the frontyard are only half developed and there will be many more perennial flowers and herbs, both culinary and medicinal.
  
• I'll be constantly refining the flow of my hardy kiwi propagating operation and possibly build a screen/green house. Stay tuned for that development which will certainly be documented on this blog.
  
• The enlargement of our back porch to accommodate family gatherings overlooking our garden, orchard, vineyard. That's also where we'll be having our kiwi berry taste testing :-)
  
• Not sure where they will go or what exactly they need yet, but egg-laying chickens are definitely in our near future.
  
• Possibly honey bees, but the investment in knowledge and equipment may not be worth it since with all the flowers and herbs around, we already attract our share of pollinators and parasitic wasps. We can also buy a quart of local honey for only $12.
  

Above is a closeup of the well developed roots of a young kiwi vine, when it was being transplanted to its larger shipping pot.

The most relevant part of the yard in the context of this blog is the kiwi vineyard and propagation/growing areas. This is THE long term project in our yard and is the part of our world that I am sharing with you.


Above is another picture taken during transplanting this fall. A bale of Promix was rehydrated and mixed in the big wheelbarrow with a box of E.B.Stone organic fertilizer and the freshly potted up plants set on the bench to get the last full sun of the season before going dormant. I currently have 187 plants which will be offered for sale in the spring and shipped anywhere in the USA. They should all survive the winter.