Baby Digging In

No actual post here. Just a shameless display of our youngest helping Daddy with the compost shoveling. So cute. 

Digging In

It has been a while since we've updated our blog, mainly because we have been hard at work. So many things to tell… lets start where we left off.
Our designer, Erik Blender, was hard at work on our design as well as pruning trees for orchards.  It is a busy time of year for tending to newly growing things.

We found someone to deliver compost to our driveway for a good price and on April 11th, we got 7 yards dumped on our driveway.  We now had two giant piles of wood chips and a huge pile of compost.

Right after the compost was delivered, I headed out to a plant sale at Glenn Walters Nursery and bought many of the plants that our designer suggested for us to get to use in our fruit tree guilds and other places in the yard.  I bought: (5) Gaultheria (wintergreen) a ground cover, (3) hydrangeas, (4) ceanothus for apple tree guilds, (1) weigela to attract pollinators, (5) knickknick a ground cover, a gala apple, winesap apple and summer red apple, plus 2 lemonade blueberries which have pink berries (who knew?).  You should have seen me trying to get that all in our van!

On April 15th, thanks to a friend for giving us a head's up, we went to Motz & Son's Wholesale Nursery to buy some bare root fruit trees at amazing prices. $3 per tree. These trees were at the end of shipping season and starting to come out of dormancy.  The only trick was that we had to buy them in a bundle if they were tied in a bundle.  So, we ended up coming home with 25 fruit trees and heeling them into our compost pile.  Now we have a very fruitful driveway. We bought Shinseki and Hosui Asian pears, Red Anjou pears, Stanley Prunes, All-In-One Almond, Chinese Mormon Apricot, a couple cherries, and a couple of ultra-dwarf trees for our rental. Some of them were in bundles of 5 or six, so we have extras!

In the mean time (what time?) we were inoculating our logs and stumps with the mushrooms we had purchased from Fungi Perfecti.  We now have a larch stump and pillar inoculated with Chicken of the Woods, we have a birch stump with Maitake, and several logs with Turkey Tail, Shiitake and White Elm Oyster.

On April 23rd, Erik met us to give us the final draft of our design and boy did he deliver!  We now own a 45 page document of our entire yard known as Cook Family Edible Landscape Design. Each section of our yard is beautifully detailed with the plants specifically chosen for our space and their companion plants that will help them grow and create essentially their own fertilizer or attract beneficial insects and pollinators or keep away pests.  

Now all we have to do is get digging!

Starting on the southeast side of the house, we planted a row of apples and pears. First we dig the holes for the trees and the companion nitrogen-fixing plant. For the apples this was the ceaonathus. Then, we sheet mulch around them to the eventual drip line of the trees (six foot radius).  Sheet mulching is laying down well-watered cardboard over the grass and placing a thick layer of compost and then wood chip mulch over the top. This way the grass dies and gets absorbed back into the earth, the cardboard prevents it from growing again until the cardboard breaks down back into the earth. Then, we plant other guild plants like chives, nasturtium, lupin, and comfrey in the compost under the mulch. Bulbs will go around the circles to prevent grasses from moving back in. 

Just this weekend we got all the apples and pears in the ground. And, tonight we got the final two mulched. 

One of the Asian pears' companion plant is Elaeagnus multiflora known as Goumi berry.  This little nitrogen fixing berry bush produces a cherry-sized fruit that is considered delicious.  I have never tried one before, so we shall see. But, what a deal! A companion plant that essentially fertilizes the pear tree at the same time as producing beautiful flowers and yummy edible berries! Win-win-win!

The other Asian pear will have Elaeagnus Umbellata, Autumn Olive, which also fixes nitrogen and produces edible berries. 

We are getting so excited for our trees and shrubs to grow up! But, we must exercise patience. So, while we wait…. we get chickens!  That will have to be the next post :-)

All Spruced Up

On Monday, March 24, 2014, things really started to look different in the Cook yard.  We got a call from the arborist that morning that they were able to come out and take to take down our trees.  We scrambled out of bed to finish chopping out the cedar shrubs so that all of the shrubs and tree limbs could be chipped at the same time. We lucked out on the weather too!  It was a beautiful, dry day. Amazing. 

Peter is loving the reciprocating saw.

Conquered that shrub!

Bret and Damon from Mangold Tree Services drove up with their bucket truck and awesome chipper affectionately known a the "Chuck n' Duck."  Damon had a few stitches on his brow that I wondered might have been a result of a time when he didn't duck quite fast enough. Below is a short video of that thing in action.  WOW. 

The first tree to come down was a larch. This tree is a deciduous conifer tree. It loses all of its needles every year and looks dead until spring. It was growing really close to one of our spruces and we figured it was a volunteer. It needed to come down. As it came down, we got a chance to see the new needles and new cones up close.  Each year, these only bud at the very top of the tree.

We also limbed up the two spruces on our property to above the roof line of our house allowing air and light to penetrate the yard. I was worried that it would seem too bare, but after they were trimmed, it just looked...well, spruced up!

The maple on the top side of the property also got a trim. I didn't really like that tree as it was just not visually pleasing, but the kids love to climb in among the large branches and decorate it with flowers.  Our designer took one look at the decorated tree and decided it was a sacred space for the kids.  I suppose he is right. Sofia says she likes to go there to be alone and quiet. It makes her feel happy. After the trim, I think it might become a favorite of mine. 

Last climb in the birch before it came down.

When the first few branches of the birch came off, it started pouring with water. The birch trees suck up an amazing amount of water in the spring. We learned that this water is a delicacy in Russia where it is harvested and bottled. It is sweet and refreshing and is a natural source of xylitol.  We decided to try some before the tree came down. It was very good!  It reminded me of drinking coconut water, but with more of an apple flavor. Not bad at all.  

Peter catching the birch water in his mouth.

Watching the birch come down was the best show all day. Part of the tree was really diseased. Only the shell of the bark remained. 

After it was all said and done, the tree service left us with the chips so that we can make a chip path in our yard and the logs and stumps so that we can inoculate them with mushrooms!  

We have ordered shiitake, maitake, chicken of the woods, lions mane, wine cap, and white elm oyster mushrooms for our logs, stumps and chip path.  The mushrooms will take years to digest the stumps and the root systems of the trees, but in the mean time we will be getting edible mushroom crops on a regular basis. I can't wait!  Darren is determine to develop more of a taste for mushrooms, but I will be in heaven right away. Whee! There will be more about that in another blog post when we get our mushroom spawn and start the inoculation process.  We have to wait about a month or so for the logs and stump to lose some of the anti-fungal compounds that the trees naturally produce. In our wood chip path by the driveway and street, we will inoculate with a bioluminescent mushroom, panellus stipticus.   Hopefully, we will get to see it glow a bit, but if not, it is still useful for its bioremediation properties. We will definitely post photos if we get some lumination from them.  

At the end of the day, we were exhausted and satisfied at all the work accomplished. We got a chance to enjoy the first outdoor fire of the season, complete with s'mores. We are looking forward to the next step.

Fun With Fungi

At the suggestion of our designer, Erik Blender, we attended a workshop (playshop) this weekend about fungi! Specifically about growing edible mushrooms. Yum.

The class took place on the beautiful Winslow Food Forest in Boring, OR. This brand-new food forest is only about five months old. All of the plantings are young and just beginning to show some growth for this spring. We are very interested to follow this permaculture model and see it grow in seasons to come.

Winslow Food Forest hosted Mitra Sticklen from Sporulate Learning Farm to do a two day playshop on mushrooms. Saturday, we learned about how to grow edible fungi on logs and stumps. Fungi are a vital part of the ecosystem in soil helping to breakdown and decompose dead wood and other bio material as well as feed the soil for new plants to come.

The first day of playshop, we learned how to inoculate logs and limbs and even tree stumps with a fungi mycelium of your choice. After it colonizes, it will fruit (bare mushrooms) you can then harvest and eat. It will do this over and over, about every three months, until it has digested all of the log or stump. We were excited at this possibility as we are having a large birch tree removed, as well as a larch. The benefit to inoculation is that you know for sure what kind of mushrooms you are growing, you will be breaking down the stump and roots thoroughly back into your ecosystem AND you get to harvest and eat them! What a deal!

The second day we learned about growing mushrooms in the soil, compost or directly on the ground. We also learned that mushrooms are capable of breaking down petroleum based oils. This process is known as mycoremediation. Our designer suggested that we could inoculate wood chip paths on either side of our driveway with oil-eating mushrooms to help keep the oil from cars in out driveway from seeping into our garden. We might also put the wood chip path along the street to help with remediation, but also just so people stepping out of their cars have something firm to stand on rather than the muddy grass that currently exists. The mushrooms that we would produce from this effort would be an edible variety, but we would not eat them as they would be fruiting in highly tread areas and although mushrooms can safely break down petroleum and not be harmful....they may not taste very well. In fact, we heard that mushroom taste can vary depending on what kind of wood they are growing on.

On the first day we brought home our newly inoculated oak log with shiitake mushrooms. Incidently, shiitake in Japanese means "oak mushroom." From the second class, we inoculated two mushroom beds in the Winslow Food Forest and we brought home some spawn mycelium of the white elm oyster mushroom or Hypsizygus ulmarius, which we will add to our wood chip path, although we may order some more to make additional logs (for eating).

The class was awesome and we would recommend taking a "playshop" from Mitra Sticklen as she is fun and very knowledgable. We also recommend visiting the Winslow Food Forest in Boring, Oregon and checking out their list of events. Now, we just have to get on removing those trees so we have some mushroom logs and wood chips to play with!

Grass Roots

We bought our house five years ago, just before we welcomed our fourth child. It was built in 1962 and much of the house, inside and out is all original. It is set on the inside curve of our street so front and side yards face the street. The lot is a quarter acre and the house sits on about half that space. The landscaping is 50 years old. Two spruce trees, a birch, a volunteer larch, a maple, and a hazelnut grace our yard; all mature and in need of pruning. The cedar shrubs are all overgrown and taking over the driveway and the fence. When I went to plant some flowers in those first years of homeownership, I discovered all of the yard that wasn't designated "lawn" was covered in landscaping plastic under the bark chips. The previous owner had put in a few azaleas just before selling that were choking under the plastic.  I remember ripping up the plastic from around the plants in an effort to save them. I felt like the plastic was smothering them and I had to let them breathe! Darren assured me that landscaping plastic was an accepted practice to prevent weeds, but I was never convinced it was healthy.

Aside from mowing and planting a few bulbs, we didn't do anything to the yard in four years.  Then, last year, along with Darren's sister, Dana and her husband, Stephen, we decided to use some of the underused lawn to put in some raised beds and plant vegetables. We put in two boxes that Stephen put together and Darren found a crate box we used for potatoes.  We decided we didn't care if we were successful, we just wanted to give it a try.  We knew that we wanted to grow them without using chemical fertilizers and see what happened. It was a good run.  We really enjoyed making salads with our own vegetables and watching our kids discover the joy of pulling a carrot out of the ground.  And, we were using our yard in a place we never went to unless we were mowing the lawn. It felt good to get out in our own yard and use it for something productive! Productive. Efficient. Organic. Sustainable. Edible. Compatible. These are words that consistently lead to a set of design principles called: permaculture. The dictionary definition (a al dictionary.com):

per·ma·cul·ture [pur-muh-kuhl-cher]  Show IPA

noun

a system of cultivation intended to maintain permanent agriculture or horticulture by relying on renewable resources and a self-sustaining ecosystem.

Permaculture design combines art and science to create plant guilds that will grow together in abundance, working together to give the nutrients they need without artificial fertilizers and pesticides. The practice also seeks to use water efficiently, often reclaiming water from the land or roofs that is normally wasted. The model is based on the observations of how plants work in harmony in a forest operating in various levels from tall trees to root level.

This all sounded very good to us. We began to think of our yard having lots of potential, but we knew we didn't have the knowledge to start this on our own and we needed a plan. So, we hired Erik Blender, an Ecological Land Steward to help us design our yard.


Now the fun begins!

Growing Interest

A year ago, permaculture was just a buzz word we sometimes saw in the clutter appearing and disappearing on our iPhones when we searched for information on how to plant our new raised-bed garden. Today, we find ourselves unable to think about much else as we excitedly prepare our yard to be transformed into a permaculture paradise. A year from now, we may laugh at our naïve undertaking and be merely satisfied with a few fruit trees. Who's to say? We won't know until we explore our growing interest in permaculture. This blog will be the journal of our progress in the yard as well as a place to share what we learn from this experience.  We want to bloom where we are planted and now we are going to bloom in permaculture.

Pax,
Darren & Corrie