Uncategorized – Page 3 – For I am the beauty of the green earth…

As I look forward to a new year of trying to get things to grow on my land, I thought it would be interesting to feature here some of the highlights of 2012. With that in mind, I’ve just spent the last couple of hours reliving the year, going through all the photos I took, and picking out candidates to showcase in this post. Some months yielded three or four pictures that I really wanted to include, but I’ve finally narrowed it down to twelve images that, in their various ways, highlight what was achieved (if only fleetingly!) as well as the shifting beauty of the seasons. And it’s especially lovely to be gazing at sunny summer pictures on a cold dark freezing-rainy night in January.

I have so many plans for 2013 — I’m already firing up the online vegetable garden planner and I know what I want from the seed catalogues — but everything I do next year will be built on what I learned in 2012 from my very first attempt at growing a vegetable garden.

January

I love seeing these emerge long before spring, and can’t help wondering who planted them and when… Nothing seems to eat them, which is wonderful (see below for wildlife appreciation of just about everything I planted). They seemed to bloom extra early in 2012. This photo was taken in late January!

February

My woodland in winter. Love the light catching on those dead leaves. There were so many jobs to do in the “homestead” area last year that forest projects (and most of my 19 acres is woodland much like this) were neglected. I haven’t made a trail yet, but clearing away more of the old farm trash (barbed wire, rusting corrugated metal, the remains of old electric fences…) at the edges of the homestead site is still a top priority. I made a start on that in Jan/Feb 2012 and will continue to work away at it in the coming year.

March

The really big news of 2012! I got me a deer fence!! It wouldn’t have been possible without my parents’ help, and also the groundwork laid by friends — Bin and Dave — who visited me in Summer 2011. I have a whole blog post on achieving this fence, but I’m including a pic that shows here the beginning of the work, measuring out the area. And there’s my trusty strimmer (trimmer for those Stateside of the Pond)… the tick situation has already improved thanks to regular mowing of the grass and weeds.

April

A picture taken not long after we’d put up the deer fence from the vantage point of the hugelbeet-in-progress (see its own blog post). Everything is strimmed, the veggie bed is calm and waiting for transplants, and the bee garden in the foreground is not yet out of control. That’s my mum in the background working on something, and you can also see the old hunter’s ladder leaning against The Old Man.

May

Gaze on these little seedlings and admire! They did not last long. At least not the ones in the foreground, which include marigold and fennel and various herbs. Towards the back of the bed are the basils (Genovese and Thai) and my tomato plants. A different and more jungle-like future lay in store for them.

Flaming June

Very pretty with lots of spectacular insects. I’m not going to feature the tobacco hornworms here. The less said about them the better. Now I know I’ve got them, I’m going to look out for them much earlier and maybe my larger tomato varieties will make it to maturity. Here is the wild bergamot of my bee garden attracting (what I think is) a Great Spangled Fritillary (Speyeria Cybele). With thanks to Jeff’s North Carolina Butterfly Page for helping me ID the butterfly!

July

Jungle! Matt’s Wild Cherry tomatoes went crazy and took over not just their bed but surrounding areas. This is what they do, apparently, and I just let them. By the end of the season (November) I was harvesting tomatoes from runners in the long grass as if I were picking wild berries. I fully expect to have volunteer tomato plants in 2013… One comment on the wild cherries, apart from the fact that nothing could stop them: the first ones harvested weren’t that sweet, but as the summer wore on they just got sweeter and sweeter. Amazing plants!

August

The bounty of the woodland! And this is why I need to make time to walk through the forest more often: Horns of Plenty carpeting sloping areas of my woodland. (There were also chanterelles, but I missed picking them at their prime). After I’d confirmed with my dad that these are indeed Craterellus cornucopioides aka black chanterelles or trompettes de la mort, (hilarious emailed “conversation” which went something like: Dad: I’m almost certain that’s what they are. Me: Almost certain isn’t certain enough. Would you eat them? Dad: Yes! We’d eat them!) I picked a small basket load and cooked them up. Delicious. Dried what was left and gave them to my parents as a Christmas present. Apparently the flavour (which is lovely enough fresh) improves when dried to be almost like a black truffle, so I can’t wait to hear what they think of them. They have never been able to find them in the UK.

September

One of my favourite views, looking towards the old cow barn, almost hidden now by foliage and those yellow-flowered weeds. This is precisely what the land looked like when I first visited it with the agent in September 2010 (except that a tree hadn’t fallen on the cow barn at that point). Lovely. Nuff said.

October

Still harvesting the success stories of this year. And OK, tomatoes and basil are the easiest things to grow, but I’m still pleased to have eaten stuff I’ve grown from seed.

November

I picked out so many images for November, and changed my mind so many times about the one I’d use, but here it is. A kind of self portrait in shadow over my favourite woodland pool. It never dries up. Is it a spring?? It needs clearing up a bit, though — lots of dead leaves and wood fall, especially in the creek that runs out of it. But I’ve seen frogs here (or were they toads?), so I suppose I’d better be careful not to ruin whatever ecosystem supports them in any clean-up operation.

December

Waiting to begin all over again… Wishing everyone a happy and productive 2013!!

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.

veggie bed clearance — beginnings of a vegetable bed

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…

the mess before — before: the dangerous mess

And I’ve refilled the bird feeder too!

Here’s all the debris…

… 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.

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?

Category: Uncategorized

2012: the year in pictures

cleaning up, and garden expansion part 1