cleaning up, and garden expansion part 1

Two visits’ worth of news to impart tonight. A week ago, after reading some books about gardening in North Carolina (why didn’t I think to get these in the Spring?) I decided I should make a start on clearing more land for a vegetable bed. When my seedlings are ready to go next year, I might actually have somewhere to put them. No more harvesting my first tomatoes in October, delicious though they have been.

I started clearing a strip of land to the left of the wildflower garden, improvising some sides for my growing compost pile with salvaged bits of wood. It’s certainly easier to do this kind of thing in October (rather than June), but frequent tea breaks were necessary all the same. During one of them, I decided that this vegetable bed should be in memory of my grandfathers. If they were still alive, they’d have helped me dig it, I’m sure – or at least supported the cause from a distance! I’ve covered the cleared patch with a weed barrier cloth for now.

beginnings of a vegetable bed
containing the compost

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday I went back up there, maybe to make more progress on the new vegetable bed, but mostly to walk over the homestead site and pick up any last remaining pieces of old metal and dangerous debris, including some coils of barbed wire. Reason for the clean-up? A Hallowe’en party next weekend! There’ll be two children visiting, so I needed to make sure that as much of the homestead site as possible is clear of hazards. Well, forget the veggie bed, although I did measure the width of what I’ve cleared so far, and it’s almost exactly – and completely by accident – 4 feet, which is apparently the optimal width for a raised bed. I also discovered some solid-looking, longish pieces of wood in one of the tumbledown buildings that would make great sides for a raised bed… but that’s for another time. It took me all afternoon yesterday just to do the clearance work.

The worst spot was around the base of one of my trees. Lots of debris, nearly all of it parts of an old electrified fence. The part that wasn’t might have belonged to a bed frame with mattress springs. It’s deeply embedded, and I’ll need to dig it out, but at least it’s easy to see, and doesn’t have sharp edges.

Here are before and after pictures of the clean-up site. Note the barbed wire. It had been there so long that plant and tree roots were holding it in place. I managed to free it all (not without suffering a few scratches – just glad I was wearing safety glasses!) and have relocated it for now to an out-of-the-way spot in one of the tumbledown buildings. Those will be out of bounds for youngsters – and probably best if adults don’t walk over them either. I had another chat with the agent who sold me the land, and he seems fairly sure that there will be a well, possibly nothing more than a deep hole in the ground, somewhere…

after: all clean
before: the dangerous mess

And I’ve refilled the bird feeder too!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s all the debris…

nasty metal bits

 

… not including the barbed wire coils. The soil looked very rich underneath that circular piece – possibly the top of an old metal drum or container. The pile of sticks is only a fraction of the wood that was littering the area where we’ll camp next week. We’ll have a good fire with it all – let’s hope it doesn’t rain…

And something else… Lots of red bugs gathering and sunning themselves on a couple of the trees, including the Old Man. They’re boxelder bugs, and this is what they do in October/November, before finding themselves somewhere warmer to spend the winter.

boxelder bugs (click on photo to see them better)

Their presence on the tree with all the debris as well as the Old Man not only help identify those trees as boxelders (the leaves, the bark check out too), but *female* boxelders. Oops. The Old Lady from now on, I guess. The bugs feed on the leaves and seedpods of the trees, but don’t otherwise damage them. I could leave them alone to do their thing, or I could help the trees out (the leaves look very nibbled, I have to say), and try to decrease their numbers a little. Diluted laundry detergent works well, apparently. Thoughts, anyone? Leave the bugs or help the trees?

 

water in the barrel

It works!!

Which isn’t quite the same thing as whiskey in the jar, but made me very happy anyway. All the water in it now is from storms in the last week or two. Hurricane Irene (mercifully) must not have visited my land. (Compare with coastal NC which was badly hit, and whose communities are still trying to recover. There’s recent coverage of that here.)

Sunday’s visit was supposed to be quick: deposit veggie kitchen waste in the compost bin, and then come home. But as soon as I walk off the road and onto the trail to the homestead site, I’m blown away by the beauty and peace of the place. There’s a mosaic of lichens and mosses on part of the trail. Toadstools have bloomed in the last week, although the heavy rains have rotted most of them. I need to walk through the forest soon and look for mushrooms. My dad’s an expert on edible fungi in Britain, but I need to do what he did starting out, and collect what’s growing to identify it properly. I’m hoping there’ll be porcini and chanterelles (I’ve seen forests carpeted with these in Georgia), and will those wild boar lead me to truffles?

Anyway, what else has changed? The “crop” – the plants I and my friends spent so much time trying to control in early August – are now, what’s left of them, in full yellow flower. If anyone knows what this is, I’d love to hear from you:

crop/weed in flower

The flowers were swarming with bees, which made me feel a little guilty for chopping so much of it down. They have probably enjoyed this late summer food for years now. I’ll leave some clumps of it alone. As for their own bee garden… Not too bad, I reckon. I did a bit of weeding round the edges, but the paper weed barrier, or more probably the mulch, are holding up. The lavender hyssop is doing very well, but another five or so types of plant have made it too, just in slightly smaller numbers (i.e. only one plant in some cases). You can make out most of them in the next photo:

lavender hyssop rules!

To do next: rescue the Cow Barn from the dead wood that’s fallen on it this summer. Some of it might be dry and seasoned enough to use in my wood-burning stove over winter.

And camp on the land again! No ticks – yay!! Fall Break is coming soon…

the Old Man in early autumn