February sunrise

Sunrise at 7:02 am on Saturday, February 22, 2025

 January sunrise

Winter's not done just yet

Over the past few years, I've informally gauged how bad of a winter we've had by making a note of when the first daffodil blooms.

• 2022 - February 8
• 2023 - February 4
• 2024 - February 7

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.

January sunrise

 

Sunrise at 7:34 am on Monday, January 20, 2025

A week in the winter garden

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

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.

Winter sowing, indeed!!!!

Winter 2024

 

Sunrise at 7:35 am on Saturday, December 21, 2024.

In pursuit of the Blackhaw (Part 2)

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.

Patience.  I need to learn to patience.

Reflections on year three of no-till

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.  

The National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has lots of good information online, including a publication titled, "Unlock the Secrets in the Soil - Principles for High Functioning Soils."  That publication says:

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?

Mo

The little dog came to us in late winter or early spring of 2018.  

I first saw him in the field chasing cows with a pack of dogs that belonged to the Trash Trailer man and our other neighbor.  The dogs all ran back under the fence when I yelled at them, but the little brindled brown and white puppy stopped just before he went under the barbed wire and looked back at me for 30 seconds or so.  

He came back by himself later that afternoon to chase some more, and I yelled, "You're going to get yourself shot doing that!"  He stopped and looked at me for a minute or so, then turned and went back under the fence.

A few days later, he was in the yard.  "If you're going to be coming through my yard you're going to have to have some Frontline!"  I told him.  I went into the house to get some and when I came back out, he let me walk right up to him.  I bent down to see if I could put the medicine on him.  He didn't run away, and didn't act like he would bite so I put the Frontline on him and then petted him.  His fur was so incredibly soft!  His entire body wiggled with what I can only describe as "happiness" or even "joy."

Over the next few days, when RAF and I were outside, he would show up.  RAF yelled at him and told him to, "Get out of here!"  He just ducked his head down and wiggled all over.  It wasn't very long before RAF was playing with him, throwing sticks which he chased with delight, even bringing them back to be thrown again.

"He needs a name," I said.  RAF said we could call him "Mohammad" (after the late boxer Mohammad Ali) because with his underbite, the little dog looked to be part boxer.  "Mohammad Moses," RAF would call him, because he said he didn't want to sound like he was favoring one religion over another.  But I didn't like that name, so I just called him "Mo."

He started coming back when we weren't outside, and because it was still cold, he curled up into a little ball on the carport slab, shivering and shivering and shivering.  I felt sorry for him...he wasn't very old, maybe just six or seven months old?  I had an old yellow hoodie with a broken zipper so I put it out on on the front porch for him to sleep on.  

Unbeknownst to me, RAF really liked him and secretly let him in the house one night after I had gone to bed.  Of course Lola wasn't having that!  He told me that she barked in her vicious high-pitched Chihuahua voice, and RAF was afraid she would wake me up, so he put the little brindled brown and white dog back outside.  

But the sleeping outside in the cold didn't last long.  When it became obvious that he had adopted us, we adopted him.

Little Mo left us on Friday, August 23, 2024.

His passing has left a huge hole in my heart.  RAF has Lola, and I had Mo.  I told RAF it's funny, but I hadn't realized how completely Mo was intertwined in everything in our lives.  When I feed the cat, he won't be there waiting for his three or four kibbles of cat food.  When I sit down to watch TV, he won't be sleeping on his couch cushion by the window.  When we "go for a ride" he won't be in my lap trying to stick his nose out the cracked open window.  When I sit in the chair by RAF's desk, he won't be there wanting to be picked up and held in my lap like a little puppy.  When RAF plays certain songs, he won't be there howling along.  When I see a rabbit, or the groundhog, or turtles at the pond, or a mole hill in the yard, he won't be there ready for the chase.  When I cut up chicken for supper, or thaw out the hamburger, he won't be there ready to clean up any "scraps" that "accidentally" get left.  He won't be sleeping on the laundry, or following me into the bathroom, or standing there ready to be picked up and put on the bed at 9 pm.  He won't be dancing back and forth with excitement when I pick up his orange walking vest, my camera and walking stick.  He won't be sitting in on the porch with RAF when I come home from town and won't greet me wiggling his entire body when RAF declares, "MOMMY'S HOME!"

It's going to take a while.

Mo on April 30, 2019, sitting and waiting for me to catch up on one of our walks down to the creek.

Mo working at RAF's desk.

Mo sleeping in RAF's lap.

Mo wearing his new orange walking vest on November 25, 2020.  He wasn't too sure
what it was for but it didn't take him long to understand that it meant
 we are going for a walk!

Fixing my mistake

Many years ago, I decided I wanted to try to grow watermelons in the south part of the garden.  The problem was that the area still had lots of grass in it, and my thinking was that because I wouldn't be able to run the tiller through there once the vines started growing I should put something down to block the grass and keep the area looking "nice."

We had some old carpet that we had pulled up from the inside porch and I thought it would be perfect to block the grass.  So I dragged it out to the garden and spread it out by the watermelons.

It was a nice concept, but it didn't really work out (for reasons to be explained later).  

The watermelons didn't grow very well, and I ended up having grass growing there anyway - not through the carpet, but on top of it.  

If I had been smart (sadly, I'm never smart on the front end), I would have pulled the carpet up that fall and taken it to the landfill.  

But I didn't do it.  

And I didn't do it the next year, or the next year, or the next....  It doesn't seem possible that it was that long ago, but I want to say that it may have been there for close to 20 years!

I never forgot forgot that it was there, but after the Bermuda grass grew up over it, it became one of those "out of sight, out of mind" things. 

And that's how it was until about two or three years ago when I decided to plant some blackberry plants my sister gave me there in the south side of the garden.  I planted a couple of them, but when I tried digging a hole for the third plant, I was perplexed when I couldn't sink the shovel (really a spade) down into the dirt.  I stomped on the shovel really hard...nope, not going in.  

I dropped to my knees and started pulling grass to see what was going on.  That's when I found it...the old carpet from many years ago.  I mentally kicked myself...several times.

I don't think I really believed the carpet would break down and turn into dirt.  I knew it was made out of synthetic fibers.  I guess it was just something that was in that category of "so long as it's not bothering me right now, it's not bothering me."  

I ended up using my box cutter to just cut slits in the carpet where I wanted the blackberries to go.  Later when I planted the Jostaberry and my raspberries I did the same thing...I just cut through the carpet so I could dig the planting holes and said to myself, "I really need to get that carpet out of here."

But I didn't do it.

The blackberries did Ok, but I just couldn't seem to keep them watered.  It was the same with the Jostaberry.  It grew a lot in the spring, but once summer came, it started to look quite ill, and eventually almost every single branch on it died.  The raspberry that was planted into the carpet also died.

I thought I had lost the Jostaberry, but this spring, it put out one small branch.  I cut off all the dead parts, hoping that it would survive.

I had ordered an Aronia berry from Food Forest Nursery, and when it arrived, I planted it between the blackberries and the Jostaberry.  Again, I had to cut through the carpet to dig the planting hole, and again, I said to myself, "I really need to get that carpet out of here."

But I didn't do it.

The single branch on the Jostaberry grew quite a bit, but not as much as I had hoped it would.  And when hurricane Beryl came through in early July, the wind broke off the single branch.  I cut it into four sections to see if I can get one to root.  But that was that.  The plant did not put out any more branches.  I had lost it.

It has been so dry this summer that I was also starting to worry about the Aronia berry.  It hadn't grown much at all, even though I had been carrying water to it and had put mulch around it.  

Something just wasn't right.

One evening, I decided to pull the mulch back from the Aronia berry so I could make sure the water soaked in all the way around.  And that's when I did a literal "forehead smack" because I knew then what was wrong.

It was the carpet.

I tugged on it to try to peel it back so I could water the plant, and to my dismay, I discovered roots growing on top of the carpet in a thin layer of decomposed grass and leaves that was only about 1/2" thick.  The roots were very dry.

I pulled and tugged, and tugged and pulled, carefully working the Aronia berry roots loose.  Some of them broke off because they had embedded themselves into the carpet.  But little by little I managed to free the little plant's roots from the horrible synthetic fibers of the carpet.

An orange root from the Aronia berry, broken on the end, but free from carpet.

And once I had pulled the carpet away from the Aronia berry, I decided it was finally time for me to fix my mistake once and for all.

So I pulled and tugged, and tugged and pulled (and mentally kicked myself several times) and little by little, I was able to peel the carpet back.

Underneath, the ground was like concrete.

Hard packed dry dirt under the carpet.

It was bone dry and so hard that I couldn't even drive the pitch fork into it.  The carpet was intended to block weeds and grass from coming up, but what it ended up doing was actually blocking water from going down!

In hindsight, it's really amazing to me that ANYTHING was able to survive where that carpet was.  I think the blackberries did Ok only because they are planted in a low spot that is shaded in the afternoon by the big pecan tree, so there might have been more moisture in the ground there.  

But it's no wonder that the Jostaberry and the one raspberry planted into the carpet died.  

Pulling the carpet up wasn't easy because while the carpet hadn't broken down, the sharp pointed rhizomes of the Bermuda grass did manage to pierce it and had intertwined themselves all through it and anchored it to the ground everywhere it has put down roots.

The carpet was only about 6' wide, but it ran all the way from the third blackberry plant down to the first raspberry plant, a distance of about 20''.

(Incidentally, as I was pulling the carpet out, I also found the remnants of a colored cardboard box that I had put down to block the Bermuda grass.  The corrugated cardboard of the box was gone, but the colored layer on the outside was like a thin film of plastic.  That's why they say don't use colored cardboard like that in the garden.)

It took a couple of evenings for me to finally get it all pulled out. 

So now I have a pile of dirty old carpet to take to the landfill (what a shame), and I have learned a couple of valuable lessons about trying to block weeds.

First, and most obvious, don't use something that won't decompose.  That's just asking for trouble.

Second, things that block grass and weeds from coming up also block water from going down.  If it's being used around trees or shrubs, it needs to be pulled back when I water so the water will actually go down into the ground and not just run off the top of the weed barrier. That's what was happening when I watered last summer.  I just didn't realize it.

I'm still a big believer in using cardboard or newspaper to block weeds and grass, but I'll never again make the mistake of using something that won't rot in a few years.  Twenty years - that's a long time for that carpet to lay there and still be mostly intact.  I am pretty positive that my mistake would have outlasted me...I think had I not finally pulled it out, that carpet would have still been there long after I've died and decomposed.  

A story of seven little apples...

When the little Gala apple tree bloomed this spring, it was absolutely covered with flowers.

And in spite of the cool weather and there not appearing to be very many pollinating insects about, it looked like almost every bloom out of probably a hundred or more set a little apple.

But there was no need to worry about thinning them.  Mother Nature took care of that on her own.

The little tree ended up with seven apples.

By early May, the baby apples were starting to look like teenage apples.

And as the season turned from spring to summer, the apples grew larger and finally started to take on a bit of red.  

One morning I discovered a worm hole and a rotten spot on the reddest one.  I went ahead and picked it, cut the bad part out and ate it anyway.  It was a bit green but it was still a pretty good apple.

A week or so later, something (maybe a bird, a grasshopper or a June bug) ate a hole in the top of another one.  I picked it, cut out the bad part, and ate it too. 

I noticed a rotten spot on apples three and four, so I picked them, cut off the bad spots, and ate them too.

Apple five was a beauty.  It was almost entirely red and I could hardly wait to try it.  But one afternoon as I stopped to admire the three little apples that were left, I discovered a June bug burrowed down at the top of apple five, with a large rotten spot all around it.  So I picked it, cut off the bad spot, and ate it too.

That left only two...apple six was right by the main trunk and apple seven was much smaller out on the end of a branch.

Today I picked apple six when I found a June bug on it.  Luckily, there wasn't any damage yet.

What an absolute beauty.  Hardly any blemishes on it, nice size, shape and color...and the smell!  Ah, you couldn't make a perfume that smelled that sweet and wonderful!

I haven't eaten it yet.  But if it's anything like apples four and five, I'm positive it's going to be the best apple I've ever eaten.

Apple seven is still on the tree and is starting to turn a bit red.  It will be much smaller, but I hope it turns out just as nice as apple six.

So all in all, not a bad crop for the little tree's third year.  Even though there was only one that was sort of market quality, I enjoyed every bite of every one of them and I'm hoping the little Gala tree (and the Enterprise) makes more next summer.

Update (7/26/2024):  Yesterday afternoon I discovered that something had eaten a hole in the top of apple seven.  So far, it's not starting to rot, so I'm going to leave it to ripen as long as I can.

As for apple six?  RAF and I split it last night after supper.  It was delicious...and yes, maybe was the best apple I've ever eaten.