Normally, the first part of the year is a very quiet time around the studio. I’m generally left alone and have a lot of concentrated time to just work on the sculpture of my choosing. This year, so far, has not been normal. The reasons have all been rather good, but even good can be […]
Last fall I stumbled onto a bunch of black and white walnuts (isn’t Craigslist great?) and quickly cleaned them up and planted them in. I simply walked along my existing rows of trees with a hoe and a bucket of seeds, scraped a small hole, dropped in a nut, and covered it back up. I’d […]
There are still a few days to get in on backing these Permaculture Playing Cards on Kickstarter. I don’t even play cards, and I’m in for a couple. They’re beautiful and informative, what more could you want?!
This strange weather did its best to hold me back, but I finally got all the trees in the ground. I still need to mulch around 250 of them, but the important part is done. Already I have a lot of buds breaking… very exciting! A friend of mine just asked how I could possibly […]
Spring is (very nearly) in the air – it’s time to start getting ready. I’ve had my trees ordered for months now but still have work to do on making “tree mats,” accumulating wood chips and fixing/building more water tanks. Initially, I had planned to scale planting back a bit after last year. Obviously that […]
Happy (somewhat belated) New Year to everyone out there! Personally, I’ve been waiting for 2013 for some time now. See those two shriveled up and dying gooseberry cuttings on the left that didn’t take? Yeah, those are 2012. See those healthy two in the cup on the right, thrusting out new branches and threatening to […]
Still rather disgruntled (to put it mildly) after the theft of a sculpture two weekend back, I decided I would spend the last several days moving heavy rocks around to burn up some energy. The terraced walls are all dry-stacked stone collected on the property. Eventually, I’ll continue all the way around the side of […]
The trees are in (all 900) and mother nature has been doing her part by raining steadily to help get them off to a good start. All in all it went quite well. I was concerned that by more than doubling the number I’d planted from the previous year I was biting off more than […]
I’ve been back for a week and a half or so now but I’ve been consumed by planting trees. I have approximately 800 in the ground with only 100 or so to go. A full update on that project, along with drawings and images of the broad landscape design, will come later. Right now it’s […]
Walking through my orchard, I noticed a most peculiar thing. There, in a small apple tree, was a frog impaled on a short spike of a branch. But what was a frog doing in a tree? An incredibly curious thing, I was momentarily confused as my mind tried to find an explanation. But soon enough […]
Spring is definitely on its way. Even though it was an unnervingly mild winter, it’s still a pleasure to see the landscape awaken from dormancy. I just thought I’d share a couple pictures as a nice diversion from the incessant grinding/digging. My Nanking Bush Cherries are getting their first blooms. One of my Scout Apricot […]
In other words, our new chicken coop. I wanted something I could move around and through the orchard/yard as needed and as food was available, so as you can see it’s on wheels. By no means did I come up with the idea, there are some incredible resources on the web these days of people […]
If you’ve ever browsed a local nursery, you know that trees can be incredibly expensive. So if you have a large-scale landscape design requiring an enormous number of trees for windbreaks, shelterbelts and wildlife areas, how can you possibly afford enough? The answer is planting bare root trees instead of the potted varieties you’re local […]
I meant to post this earlier, but I think there may still be time yet this year if you want to try some wintersowing yourself. What is wintersowing you ask? It’s using the natural freezing/thawing cycles of the weather to break seed dormancy and induce germination in a (more or less) controlled environment. I […]
Listening to an interview with Joel Salatin recently, he wrapped it up with some words of advice: Your grandma used to always say, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” But that isn’t correct. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly… at first. Anything worth doing has to be started somewhere, and when […]
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