KiwiGrower

We Have Moved

2011-10-02T17:40:00.000-04:00

We decide to close the nursery and just grow stuff for ourselves. Probably the main reason was the high cost in both time and materials to ship plants (in boxes by UPS) and to keep all the plants thriving (in pots, poor things) while waiting for a permanent home.

All the content from this site has been copied to the new site where all new posts will be made.

But for now, I'm keeping the kiwigrower blogspot name and archived content as it is here.

Summer Protection for Young Kiwi Plants.

2010-07-17T08:53:00.013-04:00

There seems to be a high mortality rate for young kiwi plants, so here are a couple of techniques to increase their survival rate. In the wild, they are naturally protected from the extremes of late frost and hot sun by the forest edge micro climate they are used to. However, in your yard they need some tender loving care so here is a picture of what I do for each of them that first summer.

Any sort of shade cloth will work, but it should block at least 50% of the sun from June through September (in the northern hemisphere). This cage doubles as a frame for a frost protection sheet the following spring, but should be removed before the vine gets too entangled on it. Since they need to get established the first year and grow as much as possible, they should not be pruned much. The leaves capture energy which is stored in the crown, roots and stem. Then during their second year, a very strong vertical shoot will appear from the crown and become your main stem.

Also, notice the heavy mulch to keep the soil cooler, preserve moisture and help prevent weeds. The weeds can be totally blocked quite easily for a couple of feet around it by putting down a continuous layer of corrugated cardboard under the mulch.

They should never be allowed to get dry either, so if you don't have a drip irrigation system set up, you can use a 5 gallon bucket with one nail hole close to an outside edge.

Rainwater is obviously better, but if it has not rained for a week, set the bucket near the plant, and fill it with water so it will drip for the next hour or two and soak the root zone.

The plant in the picture above is in its 3rd summer, but I'm still using this bucket irrigation system until I can design a proper one. For this picture, I pulled back some of the mulch to reveal the cardboard weed barrier.

Good luck this summer, and please let me know how your plants are doing. Photos are welcome!

Overwintering Kiwi Cuttings

2010-04-25T11:00:00.010-04:00

It's been busy here (as you might guess from the absence of posts). But I've pretty much brought you up to the present time and laid out all the projects we have going on here. You have the background on how we got to this point, so now you can expect more current happenings and observations in starting a backyard nursery.

Creating new plants from cuttings is a very unnatural process. In the wild, new roots can form on a section of buried stem which is still attached to and fed by the mother plant. This propagation can be done artificially on a small scale with a method called layering. However, I'm attempting to create many new plants by encouraging root formation on sections of severed stems. These poor things have at most one growing season to form roots, produce new shoots and synthesize enough stored energy to supply a flush of new growth the following spring. Nurturing that tiny spark of life is like trying to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. You must catch a glowing ember in a nest of fine tinder, then fan it until it bursts into flame and starts feeding itself. There's a period of time where it can get snuffed out very easily.

Of the 187 young plants that were green and growing in the fall, only about 40 of them showed any new growth this spring and even a few of those sort of wilted. That was the main reason for the premature "sold out" sign going up on the store website. So that's the bad news which is only slightly discouraging because I'm committed to this project for the long term and welcome the challenge.

So how can I improve the overwintering process and success rate? Well, it starts with developing a stronger new plant the summer before. I'll go into this more in a later post but briefly I should select only the best cuttings and give them optimal conditions to form roots sooner and have a long initial growing season.

The biggest concern over winter was providing the right environment for young, apparently well rooted cuttings in small pots. They need to survive freezing temps and possible drying without become too wet or freezing solid. Apparently I have not yet been able to produce that ideal environment.

I am reading the highly recommended book "So You Want to Start a Nursery" by Tony Avent, and trying to put as much of the relevant advice into practice without over committing to structures or expense. What I know is that plants in pots above ground are subject to the same winter extremes as anything else above ground. However, normally the roots of any plant are in the ground and experience relatively gradual changes in temperature and moisture. The ground even a few inches down is much warmer and humid than the air.

Kiwis are deciduous and will naturally lose their leaves in the fall and go dormant. A mature plant needs significant "chilling hours" but that is not relevant to a tiny plant struggling for mere survival. I'm pretty sure that a new plant would grow continuously through the winter if kept warm, moist and well lit. This would be possible in a temperature controlled green house which I don't have. Last winter I let them go dormant and when an ice storm threatened, I put them all in the crawlspace under my house for the entire winter. The good part of that was they never got frozen, but the bad part is they never got any light or very good air circulation. I'm not sure what growing they normally do over the winter (if any ), but I know mine didn't do anything for several months. That may have hurt them too.

When it got warm and sunny, I took them out and set them on the large outdoor growing table in full spring sunlight where they could be watered as needed. I was prepared to cover them with a frost blanket and place a heater underneath the table in case of killing frost (which never came this year).

After all that, the ones that still had a spark of life in them took off with great vigor as expected. The amount of first flush spring foliage produced was proportional to their size. However, none of them became big enough to be worth full price. What I think is happening now with the few females I have left is that the small amount of foliage is feeding the root system which will in turn enable a second flush of summer growth.

My plan this coming winter is to have a protected growing area on (or in) the ground with perfect drainage (sand) that can be covered in sections for partial shade during the summer and for frost protection in the spring without having to move the plants.

The good news is that I did sell several plants all over the country and even a few locally. I also have all the papers to make KiwiGrower, a bona-fide Live Plant Nursery, complete with a fully functional on-line store.

Our Place In The World

2009-12-04T20:06:00.018-05:00

It takes a while to really understand something. The first time you do anything it is difficult or confusing but after a bit of experience and repetition, patterns emerge and the strange becomes familiar. In our case, even though we had grown lots of things in our yard, it was more like we were just using it or working on it rather than nurturing and enjoying the abundance of our garden. We only started to feel connected to this place when we decided to stay and make some long term plans for its development.

We are very fortunate to have a sunny, south sloping yard in a climate with plenty of rain and a long growing season. There are also lots of trees in the neighborhood to protect from wind. The high humidity and lack of a hard winter probably encourages bacteria, fungus and viruses and different kinds of bugs so the fun now is to discover more food producing plants that do well naturally in our environment. We realized that even without special season extending efforts, we already have "four season gardening". By observing the seasons, lifecycles and interactions among the living things in our garden, we learn that timing matters and sometimes they produce more with less effort. Often the right thing to do is no-thing. At the very least, the products of a failed experiment will make excellent compost to feed the next, hopefully more successful one .

And after deciding we didn't need to produce as much as possible to sell from every square inch of garden, we saw that we actually had a LOT of room. We had worked hard for that, and now we had the luxury of remapping the blank canvas and allocating beds for what we really wanted. Crop rotation is not as important as we previously thought because regular application of compost and the intentional interplanting of different types of plants prevents malnourishment, imbalance and disease and confuses the pests. I'm describing something like a managed permaculture, but we're not into labels. We have no expectation of becoming self sufficient so that takes the pressure off and makes almost every day in the garden pure pleasure.

Above is a recent picture of a section of the kitchen garden raised bed with dill, red kale and collards.

So here are some of the things we are doing now:

Replacing the upper and front garden with an expanded fruit/nut orchard, including (so far) just one or two of each of apple, pear, fig, jujube, persimmon, peach, apricot, pawpaw, plum, cherry, almond, hazelnut, serviceberry, mulberry, che, josta and currant.
A better kitchen garden which can produce many of the greens, herbs and fresh vegetables we need, all year round. It is nowhere near its full capacity or efficient flow.
A couple of other annual beds for bigger things like tomatoes, peas, beans, okra, potatoes, broccoli, cabbage and onions.
Several small and medium beds (some still in the planning stage) dedicated to strawberries, asparagus, horseradish, blueberries and future experiments and discoveries.
Wire support structures for table grapes, muscadine grapes and raspberries.
A moist, shady area under the pine trees for shiitake and reishi mushrooms.

Above is a summer view of some of the young plants in our mini-orchard. You can see blueberry bushes in the foreground, a fig tree beyond them and two pawpaws and a peach on the right.

Future plans include:

The backyard borders and the frontyard are only half developed and there will be many more perennial flowers and herbs, both culinary and medicinal.
I'll be constantly refining the flow of my hardy kiwi propagating operation and possibly build a screen/green house. Stay tuned for that development which will certainly be documented on this blog.
The enlargement of our back porch to accommodate family gatherings overlooking our garden, orchard, vineyard. That's also where we'll be having our kiwi berry taste testing :-)
Not sure where they will go or what exactly they need yet, but egg-laying chickens are definitely in our near future.
Possibly honey bees, but the investment in knowledge and equipment may not be worth it since with all the flowers and herbs around, we already attract our share of pollinators and parasitic wasps. We can also buy a quart of local honey for only $12.

Above is a closeup of the well developed roots of a young kiwi vine, when it was being transplanted to its larger shipping pot.

The most relevant part of the yard in the context of this blog is the kiwi vineyard and propagation/growing areas. This is THE long term project in our yard and is the part of our world that I am sharing with you.

Above is another picture taken during transplanting this fall. A bale of Promix was rehydrated and mixed in the big wheelbarrow with a box of E.B.Stone organic fertilizer and the freshly potted up plants set on the bench to get the last full sun of the season before going dormant. I currently have 187 plants which will be offered for sale in the spring and shipped anywhere in the USA. They should all survive the winter.

Farmer-less Markets

2009-09-21T19:59:00.002-04:00

In the modern American context, "Farmers Market" means various things. Books have been written on this subject which really is about one of our basic needs and goes back to ... uh... forever: the business of obtaining food.

The "Market" part is easy to comprehend as a meeting of buyers and sellers at a mutually convenient time and place to exchange resources, as in money for food. However, the "Farmers" part is a little less clear. Strictly speaking, the farmer is the one who grows edible produce in large enough quantities to make it worthwhile for them to transport it to and sell it at the market.

The fuel for the market is the money that people are willing to spend for items they want. The levels of supply and the demand evolve together and may eventually stabilize into a long term part of the local economy as long as everybody's expectations and needs are met. The diversification of human activities is enabled (at least partly) by specialization of an agricultural class who supplies the other professions that drive human "progress". But I digress ...

There is a another essential factor involved that will determine the success or failure of the market. There seems to always be an individual or more likely a small group that defines "success". These administrators publish the rules, contact the farmers, make arrangements with the civil authorities and market the event to the community. That is not an easy job, so something must motivate them highly. They may be suburbanite moms wanting higher quality, local produce for their children. They may be a politician wanting to revitalize a neighborhood (and get famous in the process). Or they may even be a farmer (or relative) needing a good place to sell more (and grow more) of their produce. Whatever the administrators' motivation is, they have to persuade all parties to stick with it long enough for the market to reach critical mass.

Back to the definition of "Farmer". Do not confuse this with "Vendor". Farmers who grow the produce (sometimes organically) have a very high commitment of property, time and labor and cannot compete with someone who buys truckloads of produce from a bulk wholesaler and simply resells them at the same place as the small grower, and usually for a much lower price. There's nothing wrong or unethical about reselling produce. The grocery stores do that, just on a larger scale. Some vendors justifiably take great pride in their abundant displays as exemplified in these two photos:

The problem lies in poorly defined or changing rules that attract them both. Also, if the market administrators define success as "growth" and "popularity" they will do whatever it takes to achieve that. Allowing too many non-farm crafts people and special interest groups into the market further squeezes out the farmer-growers who end up taking a larger proportion of their produce home. They will not be encouraged to grow more vegetables or plant more trees next year. That in a nutshell is what happened to us and the meaning of the title of this post. Within driving distance of our property, there are no mature Farmers Markets, and we are not the kind of managers with the motivation to make one happen.

The good news is that there are better ways of obtaining good food:
- Growers Markets: where all or most of the items for sale are fresh, locally grown produce or products made from it. These require the vendors to be the actual growers who set up in a city or town.
- Farm Stands: ranging from an open structure set up on the side of a well travelled country road selling seasonal produce to a large air conditioned building with a mix of bulk, local, regional and preserved products. You have to travel out of the city to find these.
- Community Supported Agriculture (CSA): where the consumers pay for their "share" of the food up front so the farmer can better plan the growing. Sometimes these organizations require their members to help with some of the labor of harvesting, sorting and packaging. The weekly packages are distributed at specific places and times which also saves cost and means fresher food.
- U-Pick: where the consumer goes out to the farm and harvests their own produce. Usually this is with fruit, but the grower may have other locally grown food to sell when you get there.
- Grow Your Own: where the grower is the consumer and small amounts of food (and much greater variety) are grown and harvested as needed. This is the shortest possible supply chain with the highest quality food and many other benefits. Those benefits will be the subject of a future post. Also, when you get good at growing something, its easy to grow some extra for gifts or bartering or even selling at a local market.

We are continuing to grow and use more of our own food and do keep in touch with some of the grower-friends we met during those market years. I'm working full-time as a computer programmer while developing the hardy kiwi plant nursery in my spare time. Patty is doing research on nutrition, gardening and cooking while developing her writing skills and looking after a million things that keep our home running smoothly. Good things ARE happening.

By the way, in case you haven't run across it yet, here is a good link to help you find local growers and markets: Local Harvest

The Tomato Days

2009-08-10T20:38:00.000-04:00

Pretty much everything we grew for about three years was for selling. "Farmers Market" has many interpretations ... (a bit more on that later). For now, enjoy a few pictures of some of our produce and displays from various markets during our last year (2006). A short comment is below each picture.

Zinnias make people happy, they can be sold as cut flowers, and are easy to grow.
We still have random Zinnias coming up in our yard now, but they are a welcome "weed".

In the spring, the crops were lettuce and other greens, garlic scapes and shallots.

A table full of a huge variety of spring things, but not much of each out on display. See the regular garlic, elephant garlic, baby squash, beets, lettuce and parsley, with one of the big coolers in the background.

We would give away cherry tomato samples to kids (or anybody) and it was so much fun to watch their eyes light up and say "oh... that's goooood". The cut samples in the dish and the dark, scalloped ones on the table are "Purple Calabash" which I think have the most "smokey" flavor of all the purple/black tomatoes. However, they are not the most productive plants.

We also had the occasional harvest of experimental things like Yellow Wax beans.
Anything that did not sell we just took home and ate (or preserved).

More tomatoes, more garlic, shallots, and cucumbers, and the peak of the sweet pepper season. By the way, if you've never had it, fresh garlic is amazing, and super easy to grow! Our favorite variety was one called "Music".

I also tried my hand at some crafty things like bamboo vases. They were very unique and surprisingly popular. They would be better if they were preserved somehow after being properly cured. Most of mine were sold "green" with a linseed oil shine and would change color over the next few months.

Most customers came for tomatoes and we had a few loyal ones who always came early to get the first pick. Those big green ones are ripe: they are called "Aunt Ruby's German Green".

Here is the indoor WIC market which required everything to be in fixed price packages so they could be bought with coupons. This is a real good price for homegrown, organic, heirloom tomatoes. I hope the people who got them appreciated them, since you could not buy anything like that in the grocery store.

We are very happy for those times and don't regret living on savings and naively thinking that if we just brought as much stuff as we could to the market and worked hard, that it would have to at least pay for itself. Lack of profit, although reason enough, was not the overwhelming force in our decision to change tracks and live a more "normal" life. We started thinking of long term sustainability and personal fulfillment. This experience cemented our partnership and helped us clarify what life we wanted to create in our place on the earth.

Growing For Market (part 2)

2009-07-13T19:40:00.008-04:00

So, we decided we were going to take advantage of every available spot in the back yard to grow food. On paper it's possible to grow and sell enough fresh produce to make a modest living from 1/2 acre of intensive, succession planted raised beds with paths between.

For two years we basically supported ourselves on savings since our job was to bring a continuous supply of all this wonderful homegrown food to grateful, loyal customers at two or three markets a week.

Here are some pictures of some plant starts:

Perfect germination of tomato seeds for the 2005 market.

"Patty Pan" summer squash, basil and sunflowers hardening off.

A very dense bed of beets. They grew well, but I think they do even better with a wider spacing or thinned to have some baby beets and greens first, and then big ones later.

The above is an example of why you don't want to plant your tomatoes too early. We had to protect them from late spring frost by using every big pot, brick and old sheet we had, and then go out the next morning to uncover them and put everything away. This was WAY too time consuming and just because we wanted tomatoes a couple of weeks earlier than "normal".

We even used some of the "nice" sheets and pillowcases. We don't do crazy stuff like that anymore: life is too short.

Our main Saturday morning market was in Marietta (about 30 minutes away) and here's the big billboard for it.

Although we were not in charge, Patty collected all the vendor information and applications and kept in touch with them through the season. I rebuilt the website to look more or less the way it does now and took some pictures. (But we have had nothing to do with it since the end of the 2005 season.) We also went sometimes to real nice small markets in Kennesaw and Acworth.

As you can imagine, time was precious and we quickly became busier than ever. Here's a general weekly routine for only two markets, say Tuesday and Saturday:

Monday: Harvest, sort, wash and pack produce, prepare market materials, get ready to leave early the next morning.
Tuesday: Get to the market, setup, sell, packup, drive home, unpack, garden work.
Wednesday: Garden maintenance (planting, weeding, mowing, building, watering etc), domestic chores, take care of unsold produce from Tuesday.
Thursday: Garden maintenance, planning, cooking, everyday life stuff, contact vendors, update website.
Friday: Same as Monday, but bigger.
Saturday: Same as Tuesday but much bigger, go out for Mexican food (because we were hot, tired and starving), unpack, do some yardwork, one evening to relax.
Sunday: Sleep in, garden maintenance, housework, take care of unsold produce from Saturday.

The produce, which changed each time, got packed the night before market day and loaded in our trusty wagon early in the morning. Also the little truck was loaded with umbrellas, chairs, tables, plants, other coolers, ice and anything that would not fit in the car.

When we got to the market, the routine was to "set" the tables with the baskets that were ready to go and then to "stage" all the rest of the produce and coolers under or behind the table for restocking the tables as needed.

We were not really stressed out because we get along so well and the appreciation of some of our customers made it worth it. It was like a two year working vacation with many side benefits. However, my next post will describe the activity at the markets and why close to the end of the third year we decided to make some changes. Hmmm... we also made a rule that at "LogRock" there were no alarm clocks so that may be part of the reason we are not still doing it.

Trellis Building and Propagation

2009-06-16T21:20:00.004-04:00

One quick round trip to the present. Here's what I've been up to during May and June 2009:

Building this trellis structure for my main set of mother plants. I also received 4 new plants and had to prepare their beds and mini shade houses.

Also, this is the best time of year to start propagating next year's "crop" of kiwi plants. The picture above is a closeup through the translucent wall of an experimental humidity chamber with near sterile growing medium. The idea is to keep them from decomposing until initial rooting takes place. It's a miracle and a joy to nurture that glowing spark of life into a new individual (although genetically identical to the parent).

This is what a new plant looks like when it comes out and is ready for some real soil. Notice the leaf on top providing enough energy to feed the formation of new roots while the bud grows from the node below it. The leaf was cut in half to limit moisture loss during this delicate phase. Also the bottom is still green where the "stem cells" differentiated into root cells. Pure magic!!

Growing For Market (part 1)

2009-06-13T20:00:00.000-04:00

This blog post took a bit longer to put together because I was working with my kiwis. I'll fill you in on the very next post. For now ... back to the main story (2005):

We had this still mostly blank canvas. So what did we really want to grow in our backyard and sell to become part of the local food movement? What were those "diamonds"? Here is how we started to go full time into producing tomatoes, and garlic (and a few too many other things).

Neither of us to our knowledge had ever tasted fresh garlic before, but with relatively little effort we were able to grow our own and sample six different kinds the previous year. The flavor and quality was surprisingly good. A quick analysis showed that garlic will multiply 10 times in one year under good conditions and by saving the biggest heads, the next year's crop was supposed to get better. So that fall we ordered several small bags from a garlic farm in California before they sold out.

Above left is what they look like in the fall after they sprout and apparently go to sleep for the winter. Then on the right is at the peak of their growth in the spring. It's a beautiful thing. The large, bluish leafed ones are elephant garlic.

While the garlic was growing, we committed to bed construction to get ready for the hundred plus tomato plants and other things whose "fruit" we planned to grow and sell.

A large section of the yard was rototilled in the fall to "break the sod" and Crimson Clover was broadcast seeded and raked over. That's it. And being a legume it did it's thing to trap nitrogen and grow miles of roots to break things up. For a while, the bees and butterflys loved it. Later, at about this stage of growth in the spring it was simply mowed and left in place as mulch.

This was a one time conversion of bare ground into raised beds. Tilling, double digging and adding manure to build up areas that can be reached across. Soil from the paths was scooped up into the beds which will never get walked on again after this prepration. The paths needed to be wide enough for a wheelbarrow or mower.

This is after a rainstorm where you can see the terraces in action. Most of the water can't flow more than a few feet so it just puddles up and soaks in slowly.

This is the lowest flat area where you can see some of the perennial herb and flower border shaping up. The soil works so nice after incorporating the Crimson Clover cover crop. On the far right are a couple of the fruit trees leafed out among temporary, smaller raised beds. The plan was to move that good soil somewhere else when the trees got big enough to take over that space.

We are still amazed at the level of effort we put into this. We actually quit our jobs to work on this. "The Tomato Years" was a nice break from corporate America and a re-focus of values and energies.

We also started playing with lettuce and other greens like swiss chard and kale, suspecting that although valuable, it would be labor intensive. We were right. It is extremely perishable and has to be washed, spun dry and kept in moist refrigeration for hours which is kinda hard to do in an open-air market on a Saturday morning with no electricity. So we bought a couple of huge coolers and just kept a few bags on display.

Tomato time...

Starting tomatoes early in the garage with racks of florescent lights and shelves. There are enough here to plant all we have room for plus a couple of hundred to sell. We were very active in trading heirloom tomato seeds so we probably had 50 varieties represented. Since then we have cut back to 10 or so favorites that we save seeds from, although every year there seems to be two or three new ones to try.

Tomato beds with straw mulch and garlic hanging to cure on the shed porch. After that "string" year we always grow tomatoes inside big wire cages which dramatically reduced the maintenance while increasing the lifespan (and productivity) of the plants.

A view of the lower bed with a cucumber trellis in the foreground and more tomatoes farther down. We were trying to get the most out of our still immature backyard and having a blast doing it. Did you notice the abundance of bamboo? It grows in large patches in protected areas around here. However it only lasts for one or two seasons for structures that are in contact with the ground. Our current raised bed frames are made of copper treated deck boards screwed to landscape timbers planted vertically. In 5 or 10 years when those rot out, We may use stone. Won't that be nice!

That's all I have time for ... in coming posts I'll tell of our experiences at the local farmers' markets. It was great having people waiting for us and coming early to buy vine-ripe, homegrown, heirloom tomatoes, but I almost got a bigger kick out of selling the plants early in the season.

Natural Magic

2009-05-16T14:24:00.048-04:00

What happens when you bring together all the ingredients for things to grow, plant a few seeds and coax a few perennials to spread their roots? All kinds of life moves in and starts to thrive. I wish I could be more poetic about this, but ever since we decided to start growing things, it's been one amazing revelation after another. To paraphrase Michael Pollen in his very enjoyable book "Second Nature", the gardener is simply another force of nature, consciously selecting or "cultivating" some life forms while inhibiting others. Bermuda Grass and Fire Ants will always be here, but by constantly uprooting and annoying them and filling their habitat with something we want, hopefully their vitality and numbers will gradually diminish. This takes time.....

Incoming note from the future: I have never seen either of those pests inside a Pennyroyal patch. Pennyroyal is a tough, dense ground cover that is not nearly as invasive as other mints. It is shorter and may only need mowing two or three times a year. A side benefit is the explosion of smile-inducing aroma, making mowing less of a chore. Hence, my long term goal is to help the Dutch White Clover, Pennyroyal and any kind of low growing perennial herb like Thyme take over the space between all the fruit trees by transplanting chunks of them whenever I have the opportunity. My longer term goal would to get rid of the gas powered mower.

Back to the summer of 2004: Gaia had reacted to all our clearing and digging as though they were wounds on her skin that must be healed immediately to prevent erosion and loss of nutrients from the soil. Never before seen creatures, both animal and vegetable appeared on every bare patch of ground. Everything grew rapidly, and critters of all kinds found a new and abundant food supply in the fresh green things that we planted. I guess that's why gardening books tell you to start out slow with a small piece of ground: it can be overwhelming.

So what follows is a sampling of the natural colors, textures and life forms that magically appeared in our backyard that first year.

Close-up of a shovelful of genuine Georgia red clay, infused with minerals and probably organic compounds from the surface.

Coincidentally, the same color pallet shows up in these Arugula flowers.

A young Ginkgo tree that we adopted with a promise to give it a safe place to live. These trees have been reported to live for 1000 years, so you can tell we are thinking long term here.

Since no big flowers had been around long enough for the hummingbirds to notice, we put out a feeder for them. The ants found it way before the birds did by following the Wisteria which was simply looking for anything to climb on. Or... are they in cahoots?

We watched this female yellow garden spider roll up a large grasshopper in a sheet of web. They are always welcome in our garden although they do look quite menacing.

This turtle probably used to be able to walk uninhibited and unnoticed through our backyard, and now he was determined to go through a fence, poor thing. He eventually did find his way back to the pond.

So did we actually grow anything that didn't have legs? Yes...

This was our first garlic harvest.

And we had more sweet and hot peppers than we wanted.

There were plenty of tomatoes in the upper garden.

The main lower garden (where the pine trees were) was still being contemplated and was left mulched all year. The "mulch" in this case was an annual cover crop of buckwheat to aerate and fertilize the soil and out-compete the weeds. You can see the head of a stump monster that won the digging contest. So we drilled holes, packed them with compost and decided to let time and millions of microbes work for us.

Along destiny lines, I was learning to propagate any "useful" or interesting perennials from seeds and cuttings. Above is a semi-shade part of the yard where the young plants could develop some roots. Also, the dozen or so bare root fruit trees we had planted last winter were just getting a foothold.

Now that we knew it was possible to grow stuff, our research and "calculations" led us to attempt to make a living growing "diamonds" and selling them at farmers markets. By diamonds I mean highly value, high quality produce that did not take up very much garden space, like LOTS of homegrown organic heirloom tomatoes and garlic.

The Lay of the Land

2009-05-09T20:28:00.000-04:00

Here's the main part of a map we created as a starting point. It's a copy of the surveyors plat of the property, overlayed with compass directions, outlines of what seemed to us like microclimates, natural paths and other notable features.

I got out my compass to determine where exactly south was, and drew that colorful arc to get an idea which areas the sun would reach throughout the day at different times of the year. Surprisingly, no matter where you are in the mid latitudes, the summer sun will rise and set at about 23.5 degrees north of due east and west, respectively. Likewise, the winter sun rises and sets 23.5 south of due east and west. The big difference your latitude makes is the height of the sun during the summer and winter. Here is an easy to use link from NOAA so you can knock yourself out on these calculations if you want. And unlike some even more nerdy astronomical sites this one comes with a complete glossary.

With map in hand, we did our first "walkabout" to get a feel for each area. We'd stop every few feet and make notes about slope, sun, water, shelter and anything special about that spot. We are both a bit nerdy so this process was actually fun. This is the 2nd map that came out of our analysis:

Notice the transparent overlays, spreadsheets and maps of paths. The circles represent individual "keyhole" beds... wow! I can't believe we did all that. Anyways, it became obvious where the prime crop growing areas would be and that we should have a perennial herb and flower border to provide homes and food for beneficial insects that we wanted to attract. Gradually some of those areas are becoming established, while some are still wild.

At that time we were reading about yard-scale permaculture, plant guilds, raised beds and cover crops while I found places to get free manure, bamboo for construction and more wood chips for mulch and paths. Over the next few years the yard went through dramatic changes ... more than once. Here's a quick summary of the first construction phase (with descriptions under the pictures).

We spent enormous amounts of energy moving dirt around, building trenches and berms to catch runoff water. Those are more sapling fruit trees planted among that mess.

An example of a double dug, compost enriched "keyhole" bed with a variety of things planted and mulched in the spring. Planting in numerous, small beds like this is an idea we later abandoned (when the little log border disintegrated and the bed became overrun with weeds.

Of course we had to start the hundreds of seeds we planned on setting out as the beds were created. Among those are many extra heirloom tomato plants that we sold from our driveway. That was our first experience with actually selling something that we grew. I think that's the bug that bit me because I was so incredibly proud to sell them to the neighbors who were very happy to get such healthy plants. These pictures are all from spring 2004.

Here's a view of our first year, upper garden showing part of the perennial border and some beds with tomatoes on the right.

Over time we became less focused on efficiently using every square foot and more on low maintainance, pleasure, variety and harmony. The walkabout is one simple but very important practice we learned early and will continue. It's both a reward and inspiration to regularly visit every place in the yard using all your senses to observe and discover what's happening. It's good medicine for the plants too, since "the best fertilizer is the shadow of the gardener".

The Fun Begins

2009-04-29T14:09:00.070-04:00

We knew that our future included an easy to maintain, abundant organic garden. Visions of biting into perfectly vine-ripe, sun-warmed tomatoes danced in our heads. Memories of munching on sweet-tart raspberries as a kid, and the thought of filling the kitchen with the fragrance of savory herbs and fresh flowers started us dreaming about suburban self-sufficiency. In theory it's possible, but you have to start where you're at, learn the skills and "cultivate" the life you want.

I was (and still am) a computer programmer who likes to build and fix things. Patty was an IT business analyst and still is an expert "maker of lists" and "lover of life". We thought briefly of selling the house and moving "off the map" away from all stress. But one sunny morning as we were having "coffee talk" on the back porch swing, something whispered, "you are not finished here". It was the spirit of the Great Blue Heron that landed in the pond a few years earlier (before we met) and told Patty to buy this property.

We started to realize what a special place and opportunity we had and decided to make it our home for the indefinite future.

So, over the next few weeks (and months), we read and thought about it a lot and made a sun chart and map to help us understand what was where. I'll describe that a bit in the next post.

We were very ambitious .... and a bit clueless, like this Muscovy duck that was contemplating US!

One thing that became clear was that 35 pine trees were in one of the prime growing spots (they know). So our priorities sealed their fate and down they came:

We had slight misgivings ... until we saw all that space and the view of the pond opening up:

We couldn't get any big machinery into the backyard, so we dug up the biggest stumps by brute force:

Here is the biggest "Stump Monster", which I think we built a burn pile over to make it go away:

We were going to have raised annual garden beds and rows of berries, grapes and unusual fruit trees and lots of tomatoes and garlic and whatever other food we could figure out how to grow! (We didn't even know Kiwiberries existed back then). But we knew for sure that a shed needed to be built for garden tools and stuff:

This treeless panorama taken Jan 2004 shows the completed shed, the branches chopped to mulch, the compost bins, burn pile, the back fence and one lonely little pear tree ... a promise of things to come:

What does all this have to do with a Hardy Kiwi Nursery? Well, sometimes inspiration comes by tentative strokes on a blank canvas. All the dormant fertility saved in the clay soil of a temperate forest and pasture for generations was about to be released.

"The earth laughs in flowers" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Time Travel

2009-04-16T20:16:00.064-04:00

I've decided what I want to do with this blog. It will take you behind the scenes during the development of our live plant backyard nursery. To be honest, my point in writing this is to convert my readers into customers. Even if you don't ever buy any plants from me, I would like to encourage everybody to grow more of their own food and support other local growers. And there may also be some lessons learned for others considering starting a home based, online business.

Ok then, for starters, let me set the scene: We live in a small subdivision near Dallas, GA about 30 miles NW of Atlanta. This bird's eye view is probably from summer 2007 and I've outlined our 2/3 acre bordering a large pond.

If you look carefully, you can see some raised garden beds and maybe a few fruit trees. This weekend, I was building the framework for the beds where my collection of Hardy Kiwi plants are living.

... but wait, we're moving too fast ... Rewind!

Back in Sept 2002 the backyard was covered with pine trees and a few bushes.

We paid someone to cut the "grass" and we fed some Muscovy and Peking ducks that moved in (and almost took over the place), but really did not grow anything intentionally, and nothing you could eat.

We were both working fulltime and commuting to Marietta everyday, but knew there was something more interesting and personally satisfying in our future.

From here I will fast forward through the evolution of our yard and lifestyle and how the idea for a backyard nursery came about. At this point in time we do not have an actual product for sale but the vision is clear and we have the resources to make it happen.

I'd like to close this post with a quote from my current favorite guru, Bill Mollison: "If you're not having fun with it, what's the bloody point?"

Hello World

2009-04-04T11:05:00.010-04:00

This is my first ever blogger post. So I'm learning where to go next, just like that twisted new Hardy Kiwi vine.

I'm hoping to use this blog to share ideas with other growers, and keep track of progress as I grow my orchard and backyard nursery business.