pete eakle

Request above for pictures of a really big mullein.  Here's one that volunteered atop a large hugelkulture mound.  It would look even larger if I hadn't taken off the lower leaves; they were dehydrated for medicinal purposes (supposedly good for lung issues):

I want to share a picture of a beautiful Mullein that popped up atop a large hugelkulture.

We have a lot of both apple and pear fruit drop each year. Pears fall in our barnyard food forest so chickens get a lot of that and apples fall in our orchard.  I collect the excess drop and save in buckets until I'm ready to make a compost pile.  The fruit composts readily once its chopped up and I have a great tool for doing that I'd like to share.  Once I have some fresh cuttings, such as after trimming hedges in this example, I pile them up, cover with the apples and pears and cover that with a bunch of chicken manure, add moisture and straw as needed and then chop that all up with a flail (tractor) mower.  That mower will chop & mix just about anything (even stacks of wet cardboard) into nice little, compost-able pieces. I made a small compost pile today and took some pictures.  A flail mower is a really nice tool for preparing compostable material.  It also cuts grass, but I rarely use it for that.

About 10 years ago I plowed about 30 acres of my property with a Yeoman's plow.  It worked great, but it also pulled up an enormous amount of rock.  It was way too much for me to clean up on my own and some of the rocks were many hundreds of pounds in size, too big for me to move, so I hired a crew of 4 guys who, along with me and my tractor we cleaned all the rocks out of my pastures and into several large piles (see first picture below of my main pile), plus we used rocks from one particularly rocky pasture to build a 500 ft. long dry stack stone wall/fence line (picture).  Since then, I've used these rock piles as a permaculture resource.

The rocks have been really useful for jobs such as terracing to turn sloped ground into nice, level grow beds (pictures below of nut and fruit orchards).

The property contains two seasonal creeks and one of those has a road crossing with a culvert that would clog with rock and debris during big storms.  So I removed the culverts and filled the area in with rock to make a ford and held the road together on the down hill side with big rocks (see picture).  I also used large rocks to make a one rock dam on that same seasonal creek and after every big storm it collects a pile of sand and leaves: another nice resource (no picture, sorry).

Marco, I am also growing the Wonderful variety.  The male and female flowers both have the same red petals and look the same, but they differ at the base of the flower where they attach to the stem.  The female flower bulges in that area and that "bulge" will grow & become the fruit.  The male flower has a more consistent funnel shape and no bulge; once its petals fall off, no fruit.  I'll attach a picture (found on internet).

Linda, your comment that "fruit grows on new wood" is interesting.  If true, I believe it would also mean "female flowers grow on new wood" and maybe "male flowers grow on old wood".  I'll look over my tree tomorrow with this in mind. The flowers are long gone, of course, but the female flowers are kinda still there, now in the form of fruit.

Our largest pomegranate tree (multi-trunk) grows vigorously and is over 10 ft. tall. It's one of several pomegranates in the same area.  It's a beautiful, healthy tree.  Each spring it puts on hundreds of red flowers.  But unfortunately, only a few of those flowers are female, which then turn into fruit.  Almost all its flowers are male (its easy to tell them apart).  And since only female flowers turn into fruit, this large healthy pomegranate tree produces only a few pieces of fruit each year.  I don't understand why it flowers in this way -- seems to be the same each year.  Any ideas?