Blue, honey, and lingon berries

My blueberries, honeyberries, and lingonberries arrived this week and I planted them. Now if the evergreen woodchips would show up so I don't have to water them so often.

Blue berries (the larger pots) and honeyberries

Blue berries

One of the lingon berries. They are related to the blueberry, are more tart like a cranberry, but spread via rhizome so I can split them and get them growing like a tall ground cover all over the yard.

Chimichangas and buses

Jillian's homemade chimichangas...Quinton was digging in.

My dad drives school bus now that he sold the cows. He brought the Bear Lake High School softball teams to play Mountain Crest (the high school our children would go to if they went to public school). We went down to meet him and take him a load of supplies for my mom's skin cream business. Quinton wanted to drive the bus, but not get his picture taken doing it. Zachary is in the background shutting off the alarm. Now every time a bus drives down our road (and there are 4 of them), Quinton tries chasing down his grandpa.

The girls on the bus

We have been killing grass using newspaper and mulch. Zachary and Chayce discovered that if they dunked the paper in water first, it wouldn't shift in the wind before I could weight it down with wood chips. 

Payge and Quinton are inspecting a sprinkler head that became buried when tilling up the grass in the chicken run. We had to dig it up and put it on risers.

Quinton planted one on Jillian...I wonder where he learned that.

Zachary, reading.

Payge, vacuuming under the table.

Chayce doing dishes.

More beehives

Last year we started a bee colony in a top bar hive and were able to harvest honey their first year, and they still have an excess of honey this spring. This encouraged us to get more hives, and we built them (thanks to Zachary and Steven Knight's help and the use of Bryan Carlon's shop)

Zachary is a bit taller than the hive is long.

Plexiglass windows took several attempts to cut and install. I knew it would be a challenge when I asked for cutting advice from the Home Depot employee and he said he had never done it successfully. 

Back in my garage, I finished building the lids by adding the tin. Quinton and I also built the stands here.

I rolled the hives to the back of the yard. Zachary and Payge are in the background setting up the stands.

Approximate final location of the hives. They arent leveled yet in this picture, though at writing, two of three are leveled. In the upper left the original hive sits. I should probably turn it so it faces East with the rest of them so I'm not in the flight path of that hive when working on the other hives.

hugelkultur blueberry beds

Rather than hauling pruned branches to the dump or burning them, I decided to try hugelkultur beds for my blueberries. I didn't have enough branches to make mounds.  

Quinton helped me by inspecting the 2 foot deep trenches.

He was not pleased that I filled them in. 

The remains of trimming the half dead maple tree out front on top of the wisteria that winter killed last year (though it looks like it may be coming back!) 

For each row, I filled the branches in with the dug soil, topped with peat moss (which should help acidify the soil), and topped that with compost. I will top it all with newspaper and evergreen tree chips to control any grass from coming through.

Seed starting and the herb garden

Jillian wants to expand our little culinary herb garden to include medicinal and tea plants. These include comfrey, stevia, ephedra, mullein, echinacea, mugwort, borage, hyssop, saffron, cumin, fennel, licorice, white lavender, lovage, peppermint, spearmint, lemon balm, penny royal, sweet basil, cinnamon basil, lemon basil, kapoor tulsi basil, rama tulsi basil, vana tulsi basil, krishna tulsi basil, and chamomile. 

Seed starting rack

Spinach, purple orach, and cabbage.

Baby cabbages. We put them out too early and many of them froze, but several have survived and are starting to grow larger.

Transplanting pepper seedlings from sand to a potting mix. I have been starting most seed on shallow (.25 inch) bed of sand covered with plastic food wrap film, opened twice per day to spray with 1.5%-3% hydrogen peroxide (this helps keep any fungi dormant on the seeds from spreading). It has worked for most types of seed, though some smaller seed transplant poorly (hyssop and lilac have been abysmal failures,  mint has been ok though mint started in potting mix does better). Garlic chives won't even sprout on the sand. 

Many pepper plants!

Comfrey bloom

Tomatoes started in January. I don't think I will start them that early next year, these were just a germination experiment...but I couldn't bring myself dispose of them when the soil experiment ended. With the children, we tried sterilized and unsterilized potting mix, tap and distilled water, and three fungi treatments for the unsanitized soil: cinnamon, hydrogen peroxide, and chamomile tea. Distilled water was no good, all those plants died. Only peroxide did anything for the controlling (but not eliminating the fungi). Transplanting from fungi infested soil to clean soil helps drastically reduce or even eliminate the fungus on a given plant. 

A product euphemistically marketed as 'aged dairy compost'. We have been using this in our garden beds, either tilling it in or top dressing with it.

I started the elimination of grass for the herb garden by cutting an outline in the grass. The sod was piled to create topographical features in the beds. The little tree in the center is a double flowering pink weeping cherry.

A close up of the blooms on the weeping cherry (thanks uncle Rao for the gift card!)

More bed outlines

The bed outline, this time covered with several layers (10+) of newspaper topped with a couple inches of the compost. This week we'll add several inches of chipped evergreen wood. In the upper right, there are three five-gallon buckets sunk into the ground. Peppermint and spearmint will go into these to control them from taking over the yard. The tree in the center is a peach that was here when we bought the property.

The three beds (with more sunk buckets) with the remaining grass paths. The tree in the right is another peach.

The cherry with the sod mound covered in newspaper. 

A friend connected us with leftover newspaper that I went and retrieved as deliverers prepped their routes at 2 in the morning. I think I exceeded my van's weight limit, but made it home. Lots of grass to smother this summer.

March 2014

Stephen's cute wife, reading (likely something about martial arts or herbs). It must have been a Sunday morning or afternoon, as the Sunday paper is still on the floor. We have been saving our newspapers to smother grass with for the large herb garden Jillian has planned (more on that in another post).

Quinton, on his bike, pulling his  frog from Babci* Browning, holding the giraffe the Home Depot employee gave him when he became board with the woodcraft project his siblings were working on.

*Babci is Polish for grandmother

Zachary and his friend Logan at their pack meeting. 

Quinton at pack meeting, who would not leave until he got his picture despite the meeting having convened and everyone trying to be quiet and attentive.

Zachary and Steven Knight (my sister, Amy's husband) helped me build three new top bar bee hives. Zachary and I spent most of a Saturday getting the boxes and bars finished. He was fantastic help as we ripped triangle shaped pieces to attach to the 110+ top bars we made. I'll post more on this later.

Zachary at the pinewood derby race. I was recruited to run the release mechanism on the track. Quinton help well for a while, but I had to find a replacement (Jillian was at her Karate class).

Chayce, Payge, and Quinton cheering. Not sure what Zachary was looking at. 

Quinton helped me dig a hugelkulture bed for our new blueberries. Our 2-year old plants produced a few fantastic berries last year, which was sufficient encouragement to double our patch size.

Chayce has taken primary responsibility for the chickens this spring, including cleaning, feed, water, and egg collection. One of our older hens produced the giant egg on the left. The egg on the right is a standard store large egg.

The morning of general conference, Chayce and Payge wanted to climb the mountain behind our house. We made it about 2/3 of the way to the first saddle point. It was snowing lightly the whole trip. 

Chayce and Payge on the way back down the mountain with a view of USU in the background (upper left).

Jillian took the children to the park during spring 'break'. We didn't ask them to do any school work that week, but it took two trips to the library to keep them satisfied.

Jillian and Rosie, just past half way done.

Tree Pruning

Today I taught my children the principles behind fruit tree pruning and had them come help

 me with the peach and cherry trees. They each took a turn selecting and discussing candidate cuts, making cuts, and placing pruning tar over the cuts.