Planting the camp garden

The last update on the camp garden showed that we had it ready for soil to arrive. Here are a few reminders of what it looks like before all the hard work:

Lots of potential?

A well stacked corner

The stairs and cardboard underlayment

So we were ready to fill in all that lovely space with topsoil and get planting! Except the dirt got delayed. There I am, seedlings ready to go into the ground, and I can't plant for another 10 days. Argh.

Chris, of course, used the time wisely, and dug up some of our more annoying semi-buried boulders. They made it impossible to easily mow and keep up the cherry grove.

That's actually a huge hole

The plan was to dump the dirt in the hole, pull out enough to fill the garden, and then smooth anything left. Good plan.

Ten yards of topsoil just disappeared 

Carefully coating the garden area 

Dumped and hand raked 

The fresh dirt is coolest 

Wild roses left in the garden wall

We used the full 10 yards between the hole and the garden and realized that we really should have gotten 20. Darn.

Tomato cages add color

 I planted lots of stuff:

Marigolds, tomatoes, kohlrabi 

Sunflowers, cauliflower, tomatillos, jalapeno

Marigolds and dill bed 

Cokes, Zukes, summer squash

Hubbard squash

 I ran the soaker hoses and left a lot of room for squash plants to run and I'll have space to succession plant.

Basil and another dill bed, tomatoes

 But a couple weeks later, everything is starting to fill in (this was taken mid-June).

Homemade tomato cage

And now that we're into July, well, I've got flowers on everything and squash is starting to form. Really looking forward to some harvesting later this month.

We're continuing to make improvements. The shed is now up here, the water line has been run, and I've successfully identified what has been stealing marigolds and tomato plants (I mean, come on, what eats marigolds???). More on that later...

The Chicken Pasture

After losing four chickens to marauders last year I decided I needed to stop free-ranging and start pasturing my birds. In deciding how large an area to allow them I realized that the easiest thing was to simply enclose the fruit trees in a fence that would do double duty - protect the birds from snatch & grab foxes and the trees from deer. So we cut some pine trees to act as posts and planted them around the orchard.

Planting the posts

We didn't skimp on height figuring we could always chainsaw them shorter later on. I hadn't decided on what fencing I was going to use yet so didn't want to make the mistake of having the posts be too short.

I needn't have worried about height...

We scraped the ground in between the posts to make it easier to bury fencing later on and then did a bit of scorching on a couple posts to kill bugs and season it a bit. Just an experiment to see if it helps the poles last longer.

Adding flame

I ended up going with a poly fencing that's sold as deer protection. It's seven feet high and comes in 100 foot rolls for around $30. Nice price! And although it won't stop something chewing through it, it will stop something running through it (it's not deer netting which tears if you look at it funny, it's heavier than that). And remember - the chickens are safely in the coop at night; this is day-time protection from stuff that snatches them on the run (fox!). Anything that climbs can obviously get in, but that's not as likely when we, and Cooper, are running around outside.

I buried a foot of fencing and stapled the rest to the poles. I'll add cross braces soon.

Stomping down the buried fence

It took a lot of dirt to bury the fence

Cooper keeping cool

Here's a decent picture of the fencing. And the chickens hanging out with me inside the protected area. They love the space and the grass.

Heavy gauge poly fence

The first night the fence was in place something tried to dig under it and failed. Whatever it was did manage to chew a small hole that I fixed by weaving in wire. It didn't get in though, so that's good news.

The new cats

Cole and Satchmo have officially settled in. The ringworm nightmare appears to be over although we're in the second pulse treatment period. But Cooper never did catch it which I consider a very good sign.

So here are the new boys.

Cole in bed attempt #1

Satchmo hunting in the flower garden

Satchmo watching Cooper trying to find the chippie

Taking over Cooper's chair

I may not be able to keep calling it "Cooper's Chair"

Can you believe how big Cole is???

Jungle cat

"Who goosed me?"

"Not me!"

The better bed option

Pruning the apple trees

Have you ever pruned a fruit tree? I haven't. Okay, hadn't because I can no longer say I've never done it. Previously I was too afraid to do it. You bring home a tree, carefully plant it, water the hell out of it  despite the fact that you have to carry the water by the bucket since you have no garden hose up there, and then hope that it makes it through the first year. 

And if it does, you're now supposed to cut it. And the advice on how to do that is extensive, full of dire warnings, and often contradictory. 

Getting stressed. Need a minute. Let's look at a tree in bloom.

My sour cherry in bloom. Ahhh.

Okay, so I found this advice and decided to follow it. Why? Because. So there.

It's based on the book "Grow a Little Tree" by Ann Ralph. Sounds good - I mean, I want little trees that produce good quantities of fruit, right? So I get the book from the library, see that she's based her pruning technique on lots of research, extensive field testing, and successful results. Great! And then she tells me to cut the tree off at the knees. My knees. I'm 5'2". That's quite a cut.

Need another break!

Oooh, butterfly!

So I girded my loins, grabbed my pruning shears and loppers, and did it.

Before

OMG. OMG. After.

Before

After

Before

You guessed it: after.

The most dramatic (and traumatic) cut was the first one on the Golden Delicious. This is the tree that actually produced an apple last year. The only fruitful tree and I've now hacked it in half. But, if this actually works, I'll have trees that I can harvest without needing a ladder. Trees that are manageable, have fewer but larger apples, and that I can take care of by following some pretty simple guidelines. 

Assuming I haven't just killed them of course.

And since I really don't want to end on such a solemn note, here's Cooper and the new chickens, getting to know each other through the safety of the (new!) fence. Updates on the fence soon.

Hi!

Bringing home cats

When we lost T'bd to a predator last summer we really struggled with the idea of getting another cat. But she was more than just a pet - she was an important part of the homestead. Specifically, she was an excellent mouser (and moler, and chipmunker, and unfortunately, birder). But since we didn't want to risk losing another cat, we held off. And then the mice moved in. Now, Cooper is an excellent mouse killer. But she doesn't have the patience of a cat. She's more a "see it move and kill it quick" kind of hunter. So we decided to get a couple kittens and have them be indoor only cats. Solve the mouse problem and solve the predator problem, right? Nope. Turns out Chris's allergies, which are fine with the indoor/outdoor variety of cat, went into hyper drive with permanently indoor cats. So we needed cats that were familiar with outdoor life but that we could train to come in at night. Enter a local shelter's barn cat program. 

After some discussion, two cats - a 1-year old gray male and a 3-year old spotted male - came to the house. Chris immediately renamed them.

Meet Cat King Kole

And Satchmo (and notice Cole in the background)

After a week of separation and gradual introduction to the dog (see the baby gate?) we integrated them into the household. This method worked beautifully. Of course, it helps enormously that Cooper is just a great dog.

Curiosity...

After a couple weeks of being indoors so that they would imprint on us, we let them into the great outdoors.

On the porch, under the bed 

"It's scary out there"

It didn't take long for Satchmo to fully embrace the wild.

He's right in the middle of the photo.

And he also embraced the dog. He looks scared in the photo below, doesn't he? Nope, two seconds after the shutter clicked he was running full tilt after the dog. They play chase, and Satchmo is typically the one doing the chasing.

Fast dog

Cole, the older cat, isn't as sure about this whole "outdoor" thing. Best guess is that he was a city cat, not a woods cat. He was very offended by the grass and spent a lot of energy making sure none of it touched his paws. Porch to rock patio to rock path to landscape timbers, okay. Grass, no.

Their favorite place is definitely inside though. And they play with anything. Including baseballs and softballs. These are big cats! Cole weighs in at 13 pounds and Satchmo is nearly 11 (admittedly, his weight is a bit of fat). 

Killing slippers and baseballs, of course

 They are kings of all they survey.

I'm extremely happy to report that it has been easy to get them in at night (so far). They come in on their own around 7:30, have their 8 o'clock freak out, and go to bed at 9. They sleep in the laundry room and get a final meal to put them to bed each night. I'd had doubts that we'd be able to get them to come inside easily, but I'm hopeful this trend will continue. Oh! and I'm also happy to say that Satchmo is fulfilling expectations on the hunting front - he's already killed two chipmunks. And he and Cooper show signs of being willing to hunt together. Nice!