October Discoveries

Here are a few things we discovered this fall.

Sunshine missed a few pea seeds when she tried to eat the cover crop seeds through August and September. No matter, she likes to eat the pea sprouts too.



This cool moss started growing on the bare dirt after the cover crop had been there for about a month. To my horror, the guys who mow our lawn raked it out last month, but it's re-appearing now. It's a cool glowy green color.



You can actually visit the stream at the bottom of the hill again. Nice.



Moe has begun his fungal manifest destiny. Here's a mushroom outpost I discoverd at the bottom of the hill today.

Before and After: Aug 08 to Oct 08

Two months after the weed genocide, we have some pretty cool before and after pics. Don't feel bad for the weeds. Many/most were noxious and/or invasive.
They're taken with 2 different cameras, and some of the after pics show a wider angle than the before pics.

NW slope in Aug. 08


NW slope in Oct. 08

NW hilltop in Aug. 08

NW hilltop in Oct. 08

SW slope in Aug. 08

SW slope in Oct. 08




NNW slope view in Aug. 08

NNW slope view in Oct. 08

Late summer preserves

Despite the suicidal plum epidemic early in the summer, we still found ourselves with plenty of plums and pears to preserve in September. We didn't want to see the food go to waste, and having gorged ourselves on more pounds of blueberries than I care to count in July, we decided that preserving might be a good idea.

To be fair, Ollie and Sunshine helped. We spotted them them sniffing, picking, and eating blueberries off the bushes, and twice I saw Ollie, who can jump 6ft straight up in the air, pick a pear and eat it.

We had never preserved anything before, so it was an adventure.
Spot can cook and I can't. Together, we peeled 9lbs of plums. I think I peeled 2 plumbs to Spot's 10. Fortunately after 16 years together, Spot knows that it's lack of aptitude and not lack of sincerity that makes me slow, so the plum peeling was a harmonious event.
9lbs of plums made 7 8oz jars of plumb sauce.

All of the pears on our pear tree made 2 24oz jars of pear sauce. Ollie ate two of our pears, and another 5 or 6 fell before we could harvest. Another two pears fed one of the local pileated woodpeckers. I got to watch him eat it while I was home in bed sick one day.

What I learned from our preserving adventures:

• You don't need to add sugar to fruit because it sweetens as it cooks.
• I love pear sauce.
• 2 24oz jars of pear sauce can be easily consumed in fewer than 7 days.

Find!

Moe has an interest in permaculture and horticulture, and he likes manual labor. We worked out a mutually beneficial agreement, and he started working on our yard in August.

The first thing he did was to pull the weeds and replace all of the bare dirt and former weed haunts with cover crop. I was looking forward to having "hairy vetch" in my yard so that I would have the opportunity to say "hairy vetch" more often, but no such luck. The cover crop is clover, rye grass, and some kind of pea.

While pulling weeds, Moe made some interesting finds.

- Two dog toys: a small rubber tire and an orange plastic satellite, now dismembered.

- Oregon grape, lurking in the shadows of the fence behind the plum tree.

- A bucket, a few plastic plant pots, and two plastic drinking cups (watering can not included). You'll need to tilt your head -- the editor won't import the photo in the correct orientation.

- A lawn furniture set that was completely covered in weeds down by the stream.

The beginning

I don't like manaul labor. I do, however, care about plants, animals, people, insects, and everything and all of the relationships in between.
After taking a class in permaculture this summer, I decided to give my northwest, zone 5 backyard a permaculture make over. Here's the story.


Cast of characters:

• Me
• Spot: My better half
• Moe: My friend who likes manual labor
• Ollie: My 14lb rat terrier
• Sunshine: My 9lb rat terrier
  

Here are a few pics of where we started in the August of 2008:

A yard full of weeds that took us 3 years to cultivate.







Prematurely fallen plums, and a fallen plum haiku that I wrote at Moe's behest.

Why do my plums fall
Premature, so sad, too soon
weary purple hearts

A rose!

An abandoned dog house and, uh, leaf storage.

The previous owners built this for their pups.

My pups sniffed it, and then trotted away from it wearing looks of confusion and disgust.

Here is my base map. Sorry, I know it's a little hard to read, but the blog space isn't big enough for a larger pic.

We're focusing on the backyard. The top of the map is north. The yard slopes down to the stream gently at first, and then steeply below the "bare dirt" patches.