Kris Winter

We planted four currants at the bottom of our orchard, watered by just the subirrigation, almost full sand, lots of shade from weeds and small fruit trees. Three have not fruited in four years and are still very small. One was weed-whacked so I'm not blaming it, but the other two... The fourth is a black currant and fruited so well this year. It is about 2' high and sprawls about 5' in a bunch of long branches going every which way. I got enough to make one cup of jelly in the first picking, and may get another cup later this week. Very tasty.

A friend of ours on similar land nearby has a black currant that is very old planted at the door of her greenhouse. She cut it back hard twice and it came right back so she is leaving it. It makes so much fruit, like there is probably 5 gallons on that thing, more berry than leaf, branches groaning under the weight. It's about 5' in all directions, maybe slightly more like 6' wide. I'm going to ask for a cutting this fall. Thank you for the tip about rooting them being easy, if it applies to currants as well as gooseberries, Nancy.

Another thing to note is that in addition to powdery mildew they also harbor blister rust which kills white pines. We have close to 100% infection rate here, but no wild currants, so I don't think it matters. Pacific ninebarks and other natives also harbor blister rust.

I've been wearing earthing shoes and I have not had as many "burns" from capacitative sensing touch screens.

I need advice on financial arrangements, landscaping, and anything else you can throw at me, from people who have hosted work-exchange type experiences on their land.

We are currently renting the second house to friends who are saving up. The discount off market rate is mostly due to the house not being ready for a rental (lots of duct tape patches, complicated procedures to keep pipes from freezing, etc.) We're fixing it, but when they move on, we'd like to keep the garden permaculture. We'd love to continue to rent to permaculture people who would do the work in exchange for a rent accommodation. Is this possible? It's a large newer home, and we need to charge half or 2/3 market rate, but we're very close to a town with ample employment. Here are some of the problems I don't know how to answer so far:

1. Prices for labor are crazy here, $150 per mow for landscaping companies. If the future tenants did not want to do the work, hiring someone to weed high value perennial beds (grapes, blueberries, apples, strawberries, raspberries) and brush hog or weed whack the rest of it, on 15,000 sf, would cost $$$, probably $2500 per month.

2. This also makes it hard to ask for a work-exchange for landscape maintenance, as anyone who would be potentially interested could just go mow lawns and make more money for their time. Unless I'm underestimating the tax burden--they are charging $300 per hour, but they may only be getting $50 per hour after overhead and taxes.

3. I had planted perennial herbs everywhere--culinary herbs and medicinal herbs, all the mints, echinacea, valerian, lady's mantle, bugleweed, etc. My friend is harvesting the herbs for her business, which I thought would be an incentive to maintain them, but she isn't putting time into maintaining the beds. She maintains the annuals beds instead, which makes sense from her point of view. Is it possible to design landscaping that is tenant proof but doesn't look like a bed of neon red plastic bark chips with an anemic ornamental every 20'? Or grass? With landscaping fabric perhaps? Mints will grow in mulch over fabric but so will grass and certain weeds.

4. In the future, could I hire someone as a gardener to maintain the beds and share the harvest with them instead? We do have a gleaner community, but I don't know that they would be incentivized to take care of the beds either.

5. I do have enough time to maintain the beds myself. Right now they are well mulched and were well-weeded until early/mid-spring. Next year they will need a little rehab after the neglect, but I could still do it. Should I hire myself as a gardener and take the harvest? How weird would it be to have your landlord also be the maintenance/caretaker?

6. She has expressed interest in putting goats in a corner of the yard that isn't used for production perennials. It's in native perennials right now and is the only part of the yard that isn't subject to extreme weed pressure. I've never kept goats but it's a small area, and it would be a highly fertile dirt field within a week. As long as we build adequate fencing (to keep them out of the blueberries, etc,) and a winter barn, and she keeps to organic principles, are there any other downsides to letting her put in goats? We had discussed her putting poultry there but she wants goats now.

I don't want to give the impression that she is taking advantage, because she is meeting all the conditions we set and thought reasonable. i wasn't sure how the rest of it was going to go, but now I know. Renting in a land-ownership culture just isn't great for the land, but I'd like to try my best to keep this little patch improving. Help me out! What do you think?

A local rose society or garden club will be your best bet, better than a local nursery. Or a rose garden, if there is one nearby. You could also try writing to one of the online rose companies, like High Country, and sending a few photos.

Hi neighbors, please help me with my plans to get into dairy sheep. Here is what I have so far.

I need a small project for next year, to learn how to care for sheep in general, and to teach my dog, who is an LGD, but who is also a dufus, how to be with sheep. We will need to add another dog when he figures out what is going on. So I'm thinking three wether sheep or lambs to start. Maybe Icelandics because they do well in cold, don't need shearing, and are somewhat small. Eventually I would like a dairy breed to make and sell cheese.

We have a very small fenced area planned for a pen by the shop, which is near the house, 40 x 40, next to the lean-to which will serve as a barn. The low temperature in the five years we've lived here has been in the -30s, so we'll have a fully enclosed area for winter that opens onto the pen for nicer weather. They will be in from November through May, roughly, due to snow and wet soils in the pasture.

For pasture, we have about 5 acres of wet areas for paddocks, where a lot of alder, cottonwood, and hardhack (pink spirea) grow. Cattle were ranged there previously (like 50 years ago) and there are still areas where really tall grass grows, like 8' tall, mixed in with tansy and some poisonous herbs like cow parsnip and wild angelica. I'm hoping that rotationally grazing sheep will encourage a better mix of pasture grass and forbs (after we pull the poisonous ones.) I'd like to fence a little more each year, and keep the sheep in their pen between rotations until enough pasture is established. Do you think they will eat the spirea? Maybe if we take a machete and brush hog and coppice it for them?

We have all the predators, but neighbors use dogs with their stock and it works well. We have so many mosquitoes that I don't even want to go down that way from May until August, but I'm hoping that taking down the brush and tall grass will decrease the amount of mosquitoes. The ground does dry out. The walk to the pastures is long, so that will make milking take a long time, but there is a hydrant down there, and one by the barn.

Anything else to think about? Should I think about a cow instead? We've considered goats but we're trying to keep our cedar trees alive, and may try to plant black walnuts in the pastures. Also my husband has kept goats before and doesn't care for the billies lol. Thank you neighbors!

With Smilax, it is the root you want. Various people use it differently, but it is a kind of male tonic in my tradition. I haven't worked with it though because I moved west and it doesn't grow here.

We can forage blackcaps, though, and tons of serviceberries, and huckleberries. There are wild strawberries but you really have to coax them to bear. All our rosehips are too small and I'm hoping to naturalize some larger hipped varieties, little propagation/breeding project. I have a collection of Rosa rugosas that have decent hips and require no care, and I've just acquired a Harison rose, which grows without care here, and has decent hips. I'm looking for a source for Sitka rose bareroot and seeds to try to mix that in, too. They have the best hips, just huge, and grow on the west coast of this continent from Washington up to Alaska. I'm too respectful of the buttercups to eat the Oregon grape berries, as many do. I don't see a long tradition of it, but I'd be happy to be wrong if someone knows where there are good records. All my books put snowberry in the very poisonous category, but unlikely to cause harm due to also being very emetic.

We're thinking of renovating a backwoods pond that has filled in, had some tree fall, etc. The ground is probably clay but we'd love to put some duckies back there. There are wild ducks on another pond down by the river, but it is overgrown with willows, tons of hiding places.

Can anyone think of any way to create duck habitat relatively quickly, to help them have a half a chance back there? They would be away from the house and garden, and pretty much on their own at the back of the trail through the woods. There is a barred owl that hangs out on a snag. Is this just a terrible idea? We have had free ranging Icelandic chickens that evade predators, but they fly really well, and stay by the house for the most part.

Melonie Corder wrote:

Our problem is other dogs, foxes, coons and weasels of variety. Maybe a skunk or possum that get hard up.

If you don't have packs of roaming dogs, you might do alright with just a general farm dog, like a rough Collie, or a black mouth cur. Great Pyrs can handle large predators, and Anatolians will address themselves to small ones (although nobody is very good at catching weasels except people with traps, they are sneaky.) The main difference is that Pyrs alarm bark for about an hour at night every night, and Anatolians are more wary of humans, and a little more likely to challenge authority, (but no more likely to disobey, Pyrs are independent minded as well.)

Thank you for the great lists!! We did not know our orchard was in zone 3 until this year when it hit -32F. I mostly planted for zone 4, and many of them have one living bud down by the ground, and may come back. But here is what survived:

Sweet Sixteen apple
King Edward cider apple
Kingston Black cider apple
Surefire pie cherry
Seker Gevrel quince
Toka plum, Asian x P. americanus hybrid, although it has some kind of disease now turning its leaves pale

All except the Sweet Sixteen were purchased at Raintree nursery in Oregon. This is their 3rd year, and the Sweet Sixteen is 6, but it was transplanted last year. None of them made blossoms and they all look a little haggard, especially the Toka.

Melonie Corder wrote:
While we would love a LGD for our chickens and rabbits back there, I run them in tractors, we just assumed our one acre isn't enough. In the future we may have livestock on acreage away from our home and may want them there. Is it possible to have a happy LDG in a half acre backyard at night? During the day they would have access to the other half in the front as well but we have an alley running through our land so fence will need closed.

Just chiming in as we had a similar set up, and chose to get an Anatolian. He was very unhappy without something more to do, and took up barking and running at cars along the road. Maybe a breed without as much human aggression would have done better, but he did deter some human predators, so it wasn't horrible for us, and he definitely kept the wolves, bears, and lions off. The dog would have preferred four-footed charges and a teammate and another 2-3 acres, however, and developed some separation anxiety, which was sad because he didn't do well in town. He loves people but he wants to make friends with dogs, and they are intimidated and it doesn't go well. So again, maybe two dogs would have been better. We've just moved and hopefully we'll be getting another dog and more work for the old boy. He's a great dog.