Nynke Muller

I am with Greg.
Select one and remove the others to concentrate growth.
If you leave the roots intact, regrowth can be huge in the first season.

However, if you want to graft onto this tree, you can leave it be. Graft ont them all, see what graft takes and then select which one to keep.

Good luck!

Good morning Peter,

Nice design. I think you need the olla or something like it. As an alternative, you could water into some of the holes in the side. Spiraling a drip irrigation hose inside the strawbelisk will certainly help. I think, the amount of soil in the strawbelisk, as well as the amount of plants, need a lot of water. It requires a lot of patience watering that all into the top of the strawbelisk, especially when the top is dry.

A cheap alternative for an olla, could perhaps be a bunch of sticks in the ground, sticking up almost to the top of the strawbelisk, wicking water from the ground (assuming there is water in the ground). I want to try this wicking myself this season, but I have no actual experience yet. The height of the structure might be an issue for wicking, so you still need to water from the top.

Good luck! Let us know what you did, and how well it worked. I would love to see a picture when it is ready.

Hi Burra,
My leeks and garlic have done that once. With one leek flower, I let it go. Miniplants grew out of it. I carefully picked the mini plants and planted them in a planter. I stopped when I had 400. There were still many more, so I passed the flowerhead on to someone else, who passed it on after she picked out as many as she wanted, and so on.

As I understand it is pretty normal in the allium familly. When the flowerstalk flops over onto the soil, a new bunch of alliums will grow there.

Somehow I am not sucessful at further propagation. Does anyone know how it should be done?

Lin Frost wrote:So you just plant the pumpkins right on the chip piles? Wow! Do you add dirt or anything? Thanks.

Hi Lin,
I have two compost piles. One I am adding on. Try to be diverse, but dont bother to much. Just dumping stuff on that I can not or will not use elsewhere in the garden.  
The second position, I clear in fall and winter, I spread it in the garden. In spring, I put some debris, from all over the garden, like mulch that covered the beds in winter on this second position. Than I make a small pile of grassclippings, in the middle, this will cause some extra warmth. My husband turns the compost from the first position onto the second. It looks like black soil with lumps of decaying wood in it. I level the surface. Really big chunks of wood, go back to the first position. Than the pumpkin is planted. I sow some other stuff around it, with varying succes.

Josh Warfield wrote:When you say "broad beans" you mean the same thing as "fava beans," scientific name Vicia faba? I have tried sowing those in spring, and they all wilted and died by early to mid summer. Should I be sowing them in the fall instead, around the same time as the peas?

Hi Josh,
Yes, fava beans indeed.
They can be sown when the weather is still cold, like february here in the Netherlands. Harvest in may or june. After that the plants deteriorate.
I understood that the race "aquadulce" should be particulary good for fall planting. I tried that last year, the plants did well, besides being nibled on. Last fall, I could not find aquadulce, so I tried something else. Aquadulce definitely did better for starting in the fall. I will try to get them for next fall.

My experience is not that succesfull to recommend them here on permies, but I certanly recomment including fava's and especially aquadulce in your fall planting experiments.

Good luck

Hi Josh,
I am experimenting with winter peas and rye for harvest in spring/early summer, like you do. I try broad beans as well.
My purpose is two fold:
- Avoid having young vulnerable plants in spring when the snails are hungry.
- Have some roots in the ground/soil cover during winter.
So far I am not very succesfull, because something is nibeling on my peas and beans in winter. This is only my second year trying, I don't have a great landrace to start with, so you might do better. I really believe it is possible.
I do have succes with the following crops growing over winter: Miners lettuce, garlic, kale. The miners lettuce, I can actually eat during winter, and it sows itself at my place. I am looking for more variety, hence my experiment with the peas and beans.

Good luck Josh, let us know how it goes.

Good morning William,

Lizards sound great to help with the slug population. I have some froggs and salamanders as well, but most of them are smaller than the slugs. Haha.
I expect your elderberry cuttings will be happy in the new compost bed.

I am not so sure about the garlic. I have some unions (same family) planted around in my garden. The ones on a small new made bed, made from wood and compost don't do very well, while they trive in more established situations. It could be my specific situation. Somebody else maybe has experience with garlic in new beds from leaves and compost?

However, I have always understood that allium family (to which garlic belongs) is a bad companion for legumes. So, I would avoid planting them together.

Whatever you decide, please let us know how it goes.

Good morning William,
For years I have planted pumpkins on my aged compost heap, with great succes, until the slugs found them and kept on eating them to the ground. This year I am trying legumes on it as well. I still have to see how it goes.
Maybe your wet woodchips are a slug paradise as well? In that case, you better plant something slug resistant, but I have no idea what that would be.
Good luck!

Judith Browning wrote:
...I sometimes wonder what would happen if I walked into someones yard and began planting garlic? or sowed flowers? or maybe planted some trees and shrubs that might satisfy my sense of aesthetics?...

Oh Judith,
I would love that! (I am not always as kind as I am here).

I could certainly do that. Preferably when the people are in the yard, so that they can stop me before I really have to execute it. And than explain with a smile why I am doing that. Now that I think of it, I once planted a chair in someones garden and just sat on it reading a book, to make a point (something else than this topic). No need to explain anything. After being flabbergasted at first, they got my point and felt ashamed and after a while they even appologised. The harm was done, but after the appology, I choose to let it go. I do pick my battles.

You do have to judge the situation carrefully. If you can keep it light and humorous, do it, if it will make things worse, maybe you better let it go. Nobody should get hurt over this.
If you think it is risky, you can tell them with a big smile what you plan was...

Max Jenkinstein wrote:... Now after two years in the fields they are only around 3' tall, but they have put on lateral growth... I've heard that chinese chestnuts can grow 1-2' a year when young, so their short stature is a little concerning...
Any insight would be much appreciated!

Hi Max,
A couple of years ago, we visited a chestnut forrest area in France. (They were probably not chinese chestnuts). The younger trees looked a lot like yours. The soil had a lot of clay. When I look at your tree, I see nothing to worry about.
Some groundcover was growing in the wood, but it was not grass. I remember the forrest being pretty damp, but maybe we just had bad weather.

The most interesting thing I observed was the coppicing. Most trees were regrowing from large stumps. We asked locals about it. They grow the chestnuts for wood as well as nuts. We were shown a beautiful, brand new building made from large chestnut wood beams in a warm golden redish colour. After harvesting wood, the stumps would regrow. By managing the regrowing stems by pruning thempartially away, or using a chainsaw at a later stage. One could concentrate new growth in a selected number of stems to create straight trunks. Big roots of big trees would regrow fast. I forgot the frequency of harvesting wood, but I remember it being an impressively short time.

So, if you are really unhappy with the shape of your chestnut tree, you can cut it to the ground (if you have the guts) and select for one single straight shoot to regrow. I bet it puts on a few feet of regroth in one year if you cut it in spring and start pruning to one single stem right away. But please try this at only one chestnut first, to see how it goes.... And let us know of course.