Garden, drains, water, snow, frost and other spring stuff

Spring is volatile.
It's good for earth work, earth work testing and earth building.

Only cold tolerant plants live through our weather in spring. We have them grow and freeze multiple times, we have them hit with snow, but frost is the most common. They do thaw out all right so...
Having rocks with micro climate does help. And mulch helps too.

 Rock and thermal mass micro-climates (rock, large earthenware pots with dirt)

 Smaller rocks for smaller low growing plants (and parsley weeds :)... at least that's edible)

 Large rock creates successful micro-climate for lavender and other side has perennial gladiolas...

 Mid-early tulips, they come late March when our last hard frost date is May 20-th r so

 Another large rock creates micro-climate for herbs (mint, terragon, winter savory, parsley) and day lily.

Tulips and some other spring bulbs propagation site.

 Galantiums. Froze mid-late April, again :). Thy get frozen over 10 times just in April...

 Cold hardy vegetables frozen. They do thaw out...

 Same happens with onions, that tough like nails variety comes out early March and gets full size by Mid April almost a month before last frost date...

 Frozen sorel. It does thaw out and does get sweeter... Not a bad thing in the end...

 Strawberry do not like it much but they do ok... if red robins do not help a lot with the harvest...

 Covers before the storm (2 feet of snow expected)

Caragana after several frosts. so far it does tough it out ok.

 Peas. they are small this year. Lived through several snow storms.

 Frozen strawberry :). Blooming, our spring normal is exactly that

New gardens completed

Keyhole garden description is here.
finished ready to be used gardens are like so:



Lasagna in progress (only horse poop layer pictures are missing, but who would complain about that :) )
Step 1 general shape with wood chips and manure and wood chips

 Leaves and grass materials

 Application of layers

 Continues

 Here are 3 layers how they get applied up the spiral

Wood chips go after that. Compost goes on top

And mulch is the final cover

This is how finished beds look like.
There are 3 types. Alpine-like mound. It does hide some decent concrete and is the lasagna experiment over concrete..

Keyhole: lasagna with working compost pile in the center

And the spiral: lasagna with water control.

I'm thinking do I want to set it up with ollas irrigation... clay pots based, automatic, gravity fed...
If I'll get to it this year


Now the french drains and dry creek. 
Big storm test. Some were reporting baseball size hail, did not get any of those thankfully, got smaller ones, not many either.
weeded that, on time, sort off... weeds served as temp barrier while I was cleaning that old pine bark (hate that stuff for mulch, prev owners landscapers did not know any better...) Some of it needs fixing to have it deeper  bit, but it does the job.
Main dry creek working

 Here is the new part working the flood water

 Here is the highlighted place where the french drains overflow kicks in, pretty visible

 And here s where french drain comes out to the lover pasture mulched area and overflow gets absorbed on the property bu many many woodchips. there s a foot of that at least.

Here is not all the way finished dry creek 2 at very beginning of rain and hail storm

 Temp dig to finished area.

 Here is finished area with overflow pit. The size was adequate. But the rain was not 1000 years flood either, more like a usual one, so the system does hold and did not even come close overfilling

 Temp dry creek 2 filling in

 Overflow receiver working, where water does not show that's where French drains are working and water lands into a giant rock pit

 Right here. At the side is passive irrigation bet with some weeds (to be killed) and planted sunchokes.

And result - dry road in the rain storm capable of receiving a heavy truck. So I'm ok with what was done.
This storm did not get my secondary french drain line of defense triggered. Those are more for 100 years flood kind of a case. They were triggered 3 times last year. And we did have 1000 years flood when entire property was under 2 inches of standing water. That's what started whole earth shaping and drainage project... existing system was not large enough and was dumping the water in sort of wrong places... at least it was not designed for any extensions like garden and orchard and other useful things :). Now it is.
Normal flood we can manage now easy enough.
Nothing gets anywhere near building or dirt road for now. And it's quite an improvement compared to last year when back of the property was no truck accessible till July or so. Now we yet to see the trouble bad enough for a truck to be stuck in there.

Garden season retrospective. Part 5 of N

For the new season starting ... Here are some old world ways in BTE (back to Eden) permaculture, lasagna etc garden.
Why do we have seed tray here filled with garden soil? would not bugs damage the seedlings, would not it be better to buy soil only because it was specially made?
As a matter of fact this is the old way of avoiding soil transplant shock. The baby plant does not 'know' it is going to be transplanted...

From here

to the garden. Store bought soil is not going to be alkaline like what we have here. Young plants in our case need to be trained and helped and form symbiotic relationship with bacteria, fungi, protozoa etc life forms of the soil so they can put proper foods through the roots, if they are in stero soil they put out one thing and that's ok for growing seedling trees on large commercial scale.
In home garden one gets stunted transplants here not only because sun is aggressive in high altitude desert but also because garden centers will sell 6.0 soil, and 7.5+ or 8.5+ is a big difference.
If garden soil was replaced it's not a bad idea to use that in your seedlings potting mix.
What that's going to do is to teach the baby plant what live forms are coming with it.
when it comes to seedlings one does not need expensive grow lights.
These are shop lights and cinder blocks.  as plants get a bit bigger lights go more up

One needs to keep the lights close and move them up as plants grow. These are full spectrum shop lights. thenit;s time to turn cinder block on it's side from horizontal to vertical. and we keep growing.

And tarp is underneath. all that cal live under your dining room table :) or in basement, or where ever there is a spot when one does not have a green house.
This is double tarp (new one) above expensive solid hardwood. No floors were ever damaged with that method, because I do not like replacing those either :).
It does save a lot to start from seeds. We are talking $2+ per tomato plant.


The garden succession retrospective. Experiments with peas continued.

to gardens we go...
This is early spring, peas go in in March or earlier depending on the weather, they are not going to come up if to cold, they do fine with snow, or hail. We  get snow in mid May or there were years even in June.

This is 2014 04. Lettuces are in., they are succeeded by cucumbers and onions and melons. Trelluses went up, stronger ones.

and 2016 04 hail storm

 and month later it is all fine. 2016 05


Spring radish
these can go in in February under row covers or even can overwinter, daicon sure did.

Peas were planted like above in rows (outer side of it I liked better)

I also liked these planted before peppers go in.

Some ended up having last season potatoes... how did that happen....

Anyways, peppers were planted into this bed and did fine.

So we start like this with peas, tomatoes gets planted towards the support and trained on that later in season, peas go in March (last frost/snow is May 20 something ...)

But last year I took it and had enough plastic containers for mini green houses and tomatoes-peppers went in May 15-th week in 2016 , this year I'm armed with wall-o-water things :)

So because the tomatoes was trained to go in trellises peas are outside we end up with something like this in mid succession. They do not compete much, tomatoes during transplant were part shaded by peas so they did not get too bad of a sun hit (human can get a decent sun burn here in our high altitude in 15 min)

 Here is another

 Peas...

 Later weeks are like so, peas get folded and fully dry in 07.

 or pushed out

 Here is another perspective of folded peas from another year about 06 or so. These peas did produce, now they are shielding the ground and cooling it as living mulch. We are looking at dead heat waves in 85+F when things... do not grow, they dry out, also dry winds come this time of the year.

 Size of peas pulled out for seeds.

It all end up all right so. All plants form symbiotic relationships and are happy.

And chickens help to clean seeds I did not.

 Borrage helps to attract bees and self seeds, I have plenty of that now and started with tiny $2 seed pack. I'd say this was successful pollinator plant.

Hive bees love it, wild midwest beet love it, it's overall a good plant.

It comes with additional benefit when grown on outer side of the fence and protects grapes from over hungry chickens. One has to cover and mulch it... or have a rocks mulch a bit. Chickens seem to like borrage seeds and go dig for them. I do not worry, I have enough volunteers I can transplant from garden beds to outer perimeter.

I do keep some borrage in garden as one can see. I keep ones that sort of spill into between the rows area.