early May garden walk

Spring has been different normal  this season  so the gardens are off to a rather sluggish start. Rain has been plentiful, perhaps slightly too plentiful,  but temps have been rather cool, especially at night. Low forties, and even thirties at night, makes it difficult for plants to grow well.  Tomatoes, peppers and other warm weather crops are still not  in the ground and what is in, is growing very slow with the exception of cole crops. The good side of the coolness is we should have a good crop of cabbage, peas, onions and greens of all sorts for a change.

For this video I actually wobbled around the  top  gardens for a while to catch some of the scenery and layout of the land a bit better. Pictures can only show so much of the land lay out and what we have to  work with. I was going to wander the others areas as well but there is very little growing  at this point. Hopefully spring will arrive later this week. This has  finally got to be blackberry winter we are in,  3 weeks late right on schedule. Boy, have we been spoiled the last few years!

water features

Most permaculture experts recommend 15% of land mass be in water features. Given we have 15 acres of mountain terrain we will never be able to accomplish this, but we have been  consciously increasing  water features over the last couple years. In the few permaculture classes I have taken, the instructors say it does not matter how big or small the features are as they all enhance the biodiversity and any increase in  biodiversity is beneficial.   

A couple years ago when we scrapped the trailer I used the sink, tub, and toilet as  container gardens. All homes need rearranging from time to time so  the last couple  weeks we have turned the sink and tub into water features around the gardens.

The sink is  a bird  bath. As soon as we move more rocks  around the property I will surround it  and cover up some of the plastic ugly.

 This is down in the bowl  area where there is quite a bit of run off when it rains heavy so we made an overflow down to  a swale that is also on a slope. Once  the flowers grow this summer it should  all look quite nice.   I will continue to expand the garden there and we will likely work toward a few more swales and  possibly another small water feature.