When my little sister said maybe she could come take a tour, there was really nothing much to see. "Just a patch of hope here, and a patch of wishes there," I told her.
But as the days slowly got longer and the temperatures warmer, things began to wake up from the winter sleep.
By March 7, the cereal rye/hairy vetch cover crop had grown a couple of inches.
One of the catkins on the American Hazelnut opened and released little puffs of pollen every time the wind breathed on it.
The tiny red pom-pom female flowers, open since February, would finally be pollinated.
On March 11, the first blossom opened on the little peach tree.
On March 21, the first queen bumblebee made her appearance.
On March 22, a single bloom opened on the Bing cherry tree.
And all of the tiny pink flowers on the redbud trees were beginning to open.
The first bloom on the American plum tree opened on March 25.
And all of the flower clusters on the male sassafras tree were fully opened up.
Fuzzy shoots of Butterfly Milkweed were poking through the ground by March 29.
And by March 31, the little Gala apple was covered in pink-white sweet-smelling flowers.
And the cereal rye/hairy vetch cover crop?
The plants that were about ankle high at the beginning of March are now up to my waist, and sway back and forth in the wind.
What a beautiful thing it is to witness the arrival of spring. But a word of warning...if you blink, you'll miss it.
Sunrise at 7:26 am on Thursday, March 20, 2025. (I think I missed the first rays of sunshine peeking over the mountain by a minute or two. Last year, sunrise was at 7:27 am, but this year it was earlier and because of the clouds, I didn't realize the sun was already up by the time I started taking my pictures.)
This year, the first daffodil officially opened on February 19...in the snow.
It just feels to me like it has been a very cold winter. Maybe it has actually been closer to normal and it just seems like it's been colder because our last three winters have been relatively mild overall.
I think this past fall we had to start using our propane heater earlier and more often than we had been. We got that big snow back in January, followed by a few days of very, very cold temperatures. And yesterday, we had our second winter precipitation event of the winter...about 2" of ice/sleet/snow.
As I type this, we're bracing for the coldest weather so far this winter.
If we're lucky, it won't last very long. The high temperature is supposed to be back above freezing on Friday, and the low temperatures are supposed to be back above freezing by Monday.
But tonight? The temperature is dropping like a rock.
Snuggle up kitties...it's gonna be a cold, cold night.
As the snow melted away, I was curious to see how the cover crops in the garden were doing.
To borrow a phrase from the YouTube gardeners in the UK, they were looking pretty sorry for themselves.
Many of the fava beans are flat on the ground and the ones that aren't have been hit pretty hard by the cold. I don't know if they'll recover or not.
The Daikon radish are likely gone. I expected that though, because they are a "winter kill" cover crop and they didn't make it through the cold last year. But it makes me sad that I got them planted so late that they didn't get a chance to make any significant root before they froze. It feels like I pretty much wasted all of those seeds.
The three globe artichoke plants that survived the drought and grasshoppers last summer look really bad too. Like the fava beans, I don't know if they'll survive to spring.
The cereal rye, hairy vetch and crimson clover seem ok though.
The weather warmed up a bit this week, so I took advantage of the sunshine to get a few garden tasks taken care of.
Sunday, January 12 - pruned the blueberries and the reliance grape. I took some of the trimmed off branches and put them in cardboard tubes to see if I could get them to root. While I was on my cuttings kick (again...am I an eternal optimist, or just stupid?), I also took cuttings of American hazelnut; lavender; Ninebark; Aronia berry; coral honeysuckle; and a sassafras tree (a female tree, if I'm not mistaken).
Monday, January13 - Only after taking the sassafras cuttings, did I bother to look up whether or not they can actually be started from stem cuttings. Turns out, no. So Monday after I got off work, I went back and took some root cuttings. We'll see what happens. I also learned that some of the other plants don't root well from cuttings either, including the Aronia berry and the hazelnut. Oh well. Aronia berry is supposed to root readily from stems buried in the dirt so I'll try that this summer. The hazelnut has put out some root suckers so I'll dig one of those up this spring when the ground starts to warm up and move it.
Tuesday, January 14 - Pruned the apple trees and the concord grape. This year, the apple trees only needed minimal pruning, just removal of a few branches that were pointing down or growing into the center of the tree, as well as a few on the Gala tree that were competing with the new central leader.
Wednesday, January 15 - With more cold weather on the way (maybe the coldest we've had this winter) I decided I wasn't going to take a chance of busting the valve on the IBC tanks. I hooked a garden hose to one of the tanks at noon on my lunch break and started draining the water out into the garden. By the time I got off work, it was empty. I moved the hose to the second tank and had it down to only 3/4 full by dark.
Thursday, January 16 - The second IBC tank was drained. I've decided I am going to move them over to the west side of the shop so they'll be closer to the garden. I hope to build a lean-to greenhouse onto the shop someday, but until then, I'll just rig up something with a gutter to catch the water coming off the shop to fill the tanks.
As for the snow, it had pretty much melted except where it was in the shade (north side of the house and shop, north sides of the raised rows, etc.)
Saturday, January 18 - Saturday was a fine winter day. It was a bit chilly and the wind made the chill worse. But what better way to warm up than to take the little cart out into the field and haul in loads of waste straw! Some of the hay my dad fed earlier on in the winter was very "stemmy" and the cows just picked through it, eating the good stuff, but leaving all the stems. Since that hay had been put out a couple of weeks before the snow, I don't think the cows ever plan on coming back to eat the stems. (Do cows plan??? Hmmmm....) So I carted in about seven loads of that waste straw from the field, which was enough to cover the ground west of last year's potato rows, mulch around the grapes and mulch around almost all of the blackberries.
Now that the concord grape was pruned, I finally got rid of the old synthetic hay string that I had used to tie up the cordons, replacing it with natural jute string. I feel better about using the jute rather then the plastic string, because the plastic pretty quickly breaks down in the sun and starts to shed little pieces of plastic onto the ground.
And while I didn't get a chance to cut any privet in the woods, I did make it down there on Saturday to set out a black cherry tree and a willow oak tree that had languished in small pots all through last summer. I piled branches and sticks all around them to try to keep the cows from stepping on them. I think they'll both be Ok.
The two little redbud trees? I'm pretty sure they are dead, but I set them out anyway. Maybe they'll surprise me. In case not, I scattered several handfuls of redbud seed pods down there too. I also had a BUNCH of Sweet Joe Pye weed seeds that I saved from the one I started from a plant down on the creek. I say a bunch...maybe thousands! Hopefully at least a few of them will make it. It's a perfect spot for them, I must say.
Sunday, January 19 - The bitter cold is here, and since I couldn't be outside, I couldn't help myself...I went ahead and planted several different types of cold hardy plant seeds:
Early Texas Grano onion (of the onion seeds from that packet that I planted on January 5, only ONE has come up, so those seeds may not even be any good anymore)
Red Burgandy onion
Nebuka Evergreen bunching onion
American Flag leeks
Green Calabrese broccoli
Purple calabrese broccoli
Long Island Improved Brussel's sprouts
Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage
Red Acre cabbage
Waltham 29 broccoli
Snowball self-blanching cauliflower
Lacitino Kale
Tendercrisp celery
According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, the last frost for our area is April 1. That's just a little over 10 weeks away! I've planted my brassicas too early by at least a couple of weeks based on what the almanac says, but I kind of think it's a gamble either way. If you plant them too early, they have to be protected from late freezes, but if you plant them too late, the weather gets too hot before they can produce anything. So this year, I'm gambling on planting them earlier rather than later.
[Assuming I can get any of the brassicas to come up,] I think I'll put them at the south ends of the rows where the potatoes were last year. They'll get morning and late afternoon sun, but will be shaded by the pecan tree during the afternoon. Those rows were topped up with more cow manure/spent hay/straw in the fall, so they should be nice and rich by time to set out the plants. I need to try something different because my brassicas have just not done well in other parts of the garden.
The bed where I tried to grow broccoli last year...I think I'll top it off with another load of cow manure/spent hay/straw and maybe grow my potatoes there this year. But I'll need to wait until the weather warms back up before I'm out in the field with my cart again! After a morning low of 18.9° F, our high today was only 29.1° F with wind gusts as high as 16 mph...it was COLD out there! It's going to be even colder in the morning. The lows may be in the single digits. BRRRR!!!
But warmer weather will get here eventually. Unless the forecast changes again, by this time next week we should be back to highs in the upper 40s/low 50s, with lows right at, or above freezing. So what do I want to do in the garden next weekend if it does warm up a bit?
As suggested by Angela from Parkrose Permaculture, I want to get back down in the woods where I've been cutting privet and bring back some of the rotted pine logs to bury in the ground where I'm going to plant my new blueberry plants. I have noticed how water-logged (no pun intended!) the rotting pine logs are, and I think it will be a perfect way to help keep the blueberry plants happy during the hot dry summer.
I want to put some logs around the existing blueberry plants, but I don't think I can bury them without disturbing their roots. I guess I can just try sort of squishing the logs down in the dirt around the plants then mulch around and over them. Maybe I can use the logs to make a "moat" around the plants so when I water them, the water doesn't run off, but instead is held back by the logs so it can soak into the ground and into the logs. We'll see if that helps. Last year, the blueberries got very, very dry a couple of times and I'm pretty sure that's why they're not going to make any berries this year. Bummer. I do so love blueberries.
I might also try burying some of those logs at the west end of one of the blackberry rows for a new fruit bush I'm going to try. A couple of weeks ago I ordered a pink champagne current. Why? I have no idea! But I'm looking forward to giving it a go. A pink current needs to be somewhere where it will get sun, but not too much sun and where it has rich, well-draining soil. The light should be good there because the plant will be shaded by the big pecan tree during the heat of the day. The soil isn't very good though, so I may be making a mistake. I'll probably need to work some organic matter into the soil there because it's pretty silty right now. But I think that's where I'll start it, and if it doesn't do well, I'll try to start some more from cuttings and/or move the plant next winter. They're supposed to be easy to start. Both of those fallback plans are assuming I don't kill the plant first....
I may bury another log by the wellhouse. That's where I'm planning to put the single Jostaberry cutting that survived last year's disaster with the old carpet. Again, if it doesn't like it there, I should be able to start another one from cuttings. Jostaberries are a cross between a gooseberry and a current, so they're supposed to root easily just like those two plants do. And if I can't get any cuttings of the Jostaberry or pink current to root, then I will probably have to admit defeat in my quest to propagate things by cuttings and finally, once and for all, GIVE UP!
To end the week, a confession...I was bad this afternoon. I ordered some new seed trays from All About the Garden (allaboutthegarden.com). I spent $35.22 ($11.24 of that was shipping!) for two 28-cell seed propagation trays. They have a volume of 7 cubic inches, so they should be really good for the brassicas. I hope I like them.
Hope - it springs eternal for people hooked on gardening, doesn't it.
Winter Sowing (USDA definition): A propagation method used throughout the winter where temperate climate
seeds are sown into vented containers and
placed outdoors to foster naturally timed, high
percentage germination of climate-tolerant
seedlings.
I had collected quite a few native seeds last fall and in previous years. In the past, I've mostly tried cold/moist stratification in the refrigerator, but I've not had the best of luck with that. So after my little sister sent me a link to a video about winter sowing, I decided to try that to see if I could have better luck getting my native seeds to germinate.
While I didn't make a list of the things I planted, I know there were some Pale Purple Coneflower (Echinacea pallida) seeds I collected in eastern Johnson County, AR; Joe Pye Weed (Eutrochium purpureum) seeds I purchased from Sow True Seed, in Asheville, NC; and Possumhaw (Ilex decidua) seeds I collected in the east fence of the Carey field. I forget what else.
I did put labels inside the jugs - I just forgot to make a list to refer back to. Bad winter sower...bad winter sower.
Anyway, I planted these things on Christmas Eve and set them out on the well house.
Here's how they looked on December 24.
And here's how the jugs looked yesterday morning!
This was unusual for us. Most winters we don't see much more than an inch or two of snow, but all week the weather forecast was calling for snow to move up from Texas. As the week went by, the snowfall amounts kept going up, and I guess when all was said and done, we were among the places that had the highest snowfall totals.
It started snowing around 2 pm on Thursday (January 9) and by 3:06 pm, we already had a pretty good coating on the ground.
By 4:16 pm, the grass was completely covered.
And when we got up the next morning, Friday, January 10, it was still snowing. What a sight to see!
Poor ol' Charlie with his sore foot...he just hung out by the hay ring and toughed it out. What else could he do?
The garden looked like a winter wonder-land...so beautiful!
I couldn't find my ruler, so I just measured with a paint stir stick. I stuck it in the snow and made a little mark where the snow came up to, then measured how far the mark came to with a tape measure.
It measured 9.5" (my little sister measured 10" at her house).
That night, we had freezing fog. The next morning (today), every single twig was coated with tiny needles of ice.
By mid-morning, the fog burned away and we were treated to a dazzling blue sky. The frost had melted, and most of the snow was gone from the tree limbs. But it was still very beautiful outside.
It's been almost two years since Mo and I cleared the honeysuckle and briars from the blackhaw bushes (Viburnum prunifolium) growing at the end of The Twelve Acres (January 22, 2023).
The batch of cuttings I took that day didn't make it either (well, there is one that might have put out a root, but it's still pretty "iffy" whether or not it has). So with no luck on the cuttings, I thought I would try starting some from seed. But to start them from seeds, I first had to get some seeds!
I walked down to check on them in late May, but there wasn't a single bloom. There wouldn't be any seeds in 2023.
A year passed, and with one thing and another, I didn't make it down there in the spring to see if they had bloomed this year.
But in mid-July, I needed to get out for a walk, and decided I'd go ahead and check on them. I wasn't really very optimistic that there would be anything this time either. But to my absolute delight, a couple of them actually had berries!
I bagged up several clusters to protect them from the birds and to catch them if they got ripe and fell off the plant. I made plans to go back in late summer to collect the ripe berries.
I walked down to check on them a couple of times in late summer, but was surprised to find that they still weren't ripe, even in late September. I learned something...I thought they would turn purple within a couple of months but they didn't.
It was late October before the berries were finally ripe.
I collected the little bags and thanked the plants for allowing me to have some berries.
When I got them home, I squeezed some of the seeds out of their berries, but left other berries whole. I've read that the berries have a good flavor, but after having actually seen them in person, I'm not sure if they're worth trying to eat because the seeds are so big - they take up almost the entire berry!
Whole blackhaw berries (the blackish purplish wrinkly things) and some very large seeds.
I ended up with about 50 seeds. Now...how to plant them?
I figured they'd be like other fall-ripening wild fruits where they just needed a period of cold moist stratification in order to germinate. I couldn't find much at all online, but finally came across a post where someone who had started some Viburnum plants from seed said they first needed warm moist stratification then cold moist stratification.
So I have them in some potting mix in a couple of flower pots sitting on the dish receiver in the living room. This is their warm moist stratification period. In January, I'll move them into an unheated room for their cold moist stratification, and then hope they'll come up in the spring.
After about a month and a half, I couldn't help but dig around in the pots to see if anything was going on, and I think one of the berries had a tiny root coming out of it. Of course it could just have been a bit of mold or something.
But knowing the way things go for me, they probably all had little roots and I broke them off digging around in the pot.
It's been three summers since I last rototilled the soil in my garden it into a fine powder. As the third no-till growing season came to an end, I found myself thinking a lot about why I switched, and wondering, "Has it made a difference?"
After quite a bit of thought, I can unequivocally say, "......maybe?"
It does seem like maybe there's more organic matter on the surface - but only on those rows where I left cover crop residue or put down mulch. And it does seem that maybe the water soaks in better than it used to - but again, only on the rows where I left the residue from last year's cover crops.
Does the soil hold that moisture longer? It didn't seem to...not really. Even on the rows that were cover cropped, once the rains stopped, the soil dried seemed to dry out just as always. I guess there still aren't enough soil aggregates - enough humus - to retain the moisture for very long.
So I think to answer the question, "Has it made a difference," I guess it depends on where in the garden you look.
In some places, the soil was so poor to begin with, I think it has to have gotten at least a little better.
Take the Hügelkultur row for example. When I compare the production in that row this year to the pitiful results from last year, there was a huge difference. The San Marzano tomatoes did amazingly well this year, in spite of me and an early summer drought.
Was this because the soil had more nitrogen because of last winter's cereal rye/lentil cover crop? Had the buried logs rotted down more, holding more moisture? Was it just dumb luck - a fluke? I'm not sure. All I know is that I had more tomatoes in that row than I knew what to do with.
The San Marzano tomatoes were absolutely loaded down with beautiful tomatoes in spite of their rough start and the dry spell we had during the early part of the summer.
The rows that were cover cropped with crimson clover last year seemed to do really well too until the drought and the grasshoppers came. The crimson clover residue doesn't last long at all, and because those rows weren't mulched with anything after that, the soil just dried out in spite of all the trips I made with my little green water can.
Lush growth of basil, carrots, parsnips and petunias in the month of June. Unfortunately, I didn't get to harvest a single thing from this row.
One of the supposed benefits of no-till is a reduction in the number of weeds. I remember feeling panicked last spring with all the winter annuals that came up everywhere. But I left them, and after they died back, it seemed like overall there were fewer weeds in the garden this year - mainly just low-growing annuals like Common Yellow Wood Sorrel (Oxalis stricta) and Ground Spurge (Euphorbia prostrata) (both of which are considered by many to be undesirable garden weeds) and some grasses like Goosegrass (Eleusine indica) and Hairy Crabgrass (Digitaria sanguinalis) (both of which I consider to be extremely undesirable garden weeds!).
But the more I learn, the less bothered I am about having some weeds in the garden. I recently listened to Huw Richards interview Joshua Sparkes on Substack, and when I searched for "Joshua Sparkes" on YouTube, I found a presentation he did on the "Old Tree Soil" YouTube Channel for the Mycelium Presentation webinar. It was a LONG presentation, but I thought well worth the time!
Now I'm not ready to go all in on leaving all of the weeds and on growing weed/crop polycultures like they do on that farm, but a lot of what he had to say really made sense. In his view, weeds aren't necessarily a problem - they're a free resource - an opportunity.
A couple of "opportunity" plants growing in one of my rows...curly dock (Rumex crispus). This plant is supposed to be a dynamic accumulator making it great for "chop and drop" mulch. I'm not going to try to dig it up again (I've failed at that several times already). So long as I don't let it make seeds....
I'm slowly coming to understand that having healthy soil means sometimes stepping back and just allowing nature do its thing - letting things grow, letting things share space, letting things decompose on the ground in the rows. It means acknowledging that I don't have to have my thumb on every single thing that happens in the garden and it doesn't have to be so neat and orderly like the garden Charles Dowding grows to be considered a successful garden.
Having grown up working in a garden that was plowed and hoed, that's a big adjustment for me to make.
At the end of year three, I have learned that I still have a lot to learn about how going no-till can make my garden better.
Soil health is the continued capacity of a soil to function
as a vital, living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals,
and humans. Only living things can have “health,” so
viewing soil as a living, breathing ecosystem reflects a
shift in the way we view and manage our nation’s soils.
Key soil health management principles:
Minimize disturbance
Maximize soil cover
Maximize biodiversity
Maximize presence of living roots
I think I've done Ok at "minimizing disturbance" after last fall's re-work of my raised rows. I've actually not disturbed the soil much at all since then (other than pulling the goosegrass and crab grass).
But in my fourth year of no-till, I really want to focus on the last three soil health management principles. And based on my experiences from the first three years, I think the key is going to be using cover crops.
I had what I'd consider pretty good success with my cover crops over the last two winters, but the problem was I didn't plant enough of them. Other than the rows where I grew the hairy vetch/cereal rye and some crimson clover, the rest of the garden was pretty much bare all winter, with maybe only a light layer of half-rotted straw to cover the rows. So that was definitely a fail - I didn't "maximize soil cover" over the winter months very well at all.
And even though I did manage to grow some Sorghum Sudan grass to harvest for mulch this summer, I only planted 2/3rds of a row, which in each of the two cuttings I did only made enough to put a thin layer of mulch over about 2/3rds of another row. I didn't get a third cutting from it this year because of the drought. So many of the rows that were left bare during the winter were also bare during the summer, when the temperature on the soil surface pegged out my thermometer at over 120° F.
I've made up my mind to fix that mistake starting this fall. I'm going to do my best to maximize soil cover, biodiversity and living roots by planting a mix of cover crops over most of the garden this winter. But then I also want to try again to grow my own mulch next summer and test out some diverse cover crop mixes - maybe a mixture of things that are pretty drought and heat tolerant like the sorghum Sudan grass, sunflowers, purple hull peas, okra, zinnias, and sun hemp.
My plan is to keep a thick layer of mulch or a good "polyculture" of food crops and/or cover crops in every growing space I can.
But to put that plan into action, I had to get those fall covers planted. They needed at least a little time to grow before the weather turns cold.
By mid-October, I was starting to get really anxious. The drought that started in August had gotten even worse and I knew anything I planted wasn't going to germinate.
I was afraid I was running out of time.
On Saturday, October 19, I decided I couldn't wait any longer. I planted different cover crop mixtures that included: cereal rye; winter wheat; lentils; hairy vetch; crimson clover; daikon radish; lacy phacelia; cilantro; dill; and fava beans.
Watering the parched rows at the west end of the garden. Notice the few pitiful little withered stalks of Sorghum Sudan grass...the grasshoppers ate all of the other cover crops I had previously planted in that row, but apparently didn't care for the Sorghum Sudan grass?
And as much as it pained me to do it, I spent probably five hours dragging the garden hose (hooked up to city water) up and down the rows, trying to give every row a good deep soak, watering slowly enough that the water would soak in and not run off into the walking rows. I told RAF there was no telling how much water I used. I guess I'll find out when I see the water bill!
Giving the Hügelkultur row a good soak.
Apparently the watering paid off because five days later, little shoots of cereal rye were poking up through the straw.
And in other rows, little crimson clover seedlings....
Crimson clover seedlings with a few volunteer zinnias (left).
The rows all got a second good soaking about a week after they were planted, but that was the last time I had to water them.
On October 30/31 we finally got some rain!
That wonderful, wonderful rainy spell gave us 1.08". It didn't rain on November 1, but all combined, on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th, we got another 7.58"! It's amazing how much things grew after that!
Beautiful green rows of crops on November 14, just under a month after planting. Notice the Sorghum Sudan grass that looked so pitiful the the previous picture...between the water I put on the row and the rain, it has put on lots of new growth.
Mix of daikon radish, crimson clover, lentils, common wood sorrel, and miscellaneous weeds.
It's now mid-November and the winter cover crops are looking really good. So long as it doesn't immediately turn off cold, I think they'll be able to put on enough growth to survive the winter. There are a few "blank spots" in some of the rows where the seeds didn't germinate very well, or the rabbits ate the seedlings, but overall, I'm happy with how they're doing.
So now I wait. It will be about five months before the cover crops are ready to terminate. It gives me plenty of time to get my sickle sharp. I'm going to be doing lots of crawling on my hands and knees cutting things down!
I was pretty disgusted and burned out by the end of this year's growing season. The drought and the grasshoppers just made gardening, "no fun" for me. But I'm already starting to feel a bit of anticipation, anxious to see what happens next year.
When I write my post, "Reflections on year four of no-till," I wonder what I'll have to say?
