Hollybeth Bittick

William Bronson wrote: Any concern about voles?

To be honest I'm not sure. My small garden bed has never had an issue but there's no cardboard mulch just some hay with lots of compost

My husband and I will be planting our orchard this weekend and we have planned to use cardboard to much under our trees. We will lay it out under the trees and top with several inches of compost and then several inches wood chips. We also wanted to make guilds for each tree but I'm wondering if I can plant over the cardboard? Will the roots have enough room to grow or will they grow through the cardboard? Do I need to cut holes through the cardboard?

We are planning on planting things like comfrey, calendula, borage and some berries like currants.

Thank you in advance this community is incredible and I'm so blessed to be apart of it!

We do use the berries but we have about 7 acres of just salal. We want to clear out an acre or two to hopefully have livestock and it would be great to use what we pull up.
You're comment has made me think that I should throw it through our chipper and mulch our blueberries with it. Maybe that would work well for them!

I live in western Washington on the north Olympic peninsula zone 8b. Our property is surrounded with doug fir, cedar and alder with a thick undergrowth of salal, Oregon grape and rhododendron. I would love to utilize what we have growing around us in our permaculture design and I'm wondering if anyone has used salal as a woody much for their garden/orchard?

Do I need to compost it first or can I just layer it over the top in the fall to over winter? Will the acidity of the plant interfere with our soil ph? I would love anyone's experience with this so we can utilize one of our most abundant resources!

My husband and I dug a pond in our front yard for ducks, it's about 20x24 and 4ft deep in the center. It can hold around 13,000 gallons of water when totally full. I'm thinking that in order to keep our pond clean we will use a sump pump to irrigate our orchard/garden with the mucky water and then add fresh water back into the pond. We will also be using a solar aerator to help. We get alot of rain from fall to spring so we plan on capturing that to add back in in the summer when it's dry

I'm wondering if I'll be able to use the duck fertilizer straight from the pond, will it be diluted enough not to burn our plants. Or do I need to add it into a compost pile and let it further breakdown.

And how often should we be fertilizing our garden, is this a twice a year or once a month scenario.

My husband and I dug a duck pond in our front yard, it's about 24 feet long by 20 feet wide and holds roughly 10,000 gallons. Where we dug it is clay soil so it holds water without the need of a liner. We are planning on having a flock of 10 ducks this year that will be free ranged and have full access to the pond. We are wondering what the best way to maintain the pond will be.

We live off grid so we have limited electricity, we are planning on buying a solar aerator to add oxygen to the water. I like the idea of using a sump pump in the pond to irrigate and fertilize our orchard and garden and then refilling the pond to keep the water somewhat fresh. I'm not sure how often we should do that though. I'm planning on setting up a large rainwater catchment system that we can eventually use to refill the pond so we don't have to use our well as often. We live in western Washington and get alot of rainfall. I would love to use plants to help filter things but it sounds like ducks will eat most aquatic plants so I'm not sure how feasible that is.

Having a filter that needs to run constantly isn't an option due to limited electricity. Alot of the information I see on duck ponds are for either really small 1000 gallon or less ponds or huge acre large ponds.

How quickly will 10,000 gallons get gross with 10 ducks?

Ben Zumeta wrote:I’d use your duck pond water on the garden, which will filter out the nutrients (ie muck). In a similar situation I changed their water every day or two, and had a sump pump to run it to woodchip covered hugel beds. If nothing needed water, to the woodchip pile or compost. Overflow ran off into woodchip and woody debris filled swales and trenches in between hugel beds. We are in the last part of California with abundant good water, so this may not work everywhere, but that garden grew very well. For more pictures, video,  and info, check out my post on hugel-chinampas with duckoponic swales.

Wow we are absolutely going to start doing this with our pond! We are located in western Washington where we have abundant water, I can see doing this in the fall to fertilize/water our orchard and garden and then letting the fall/winter rains replenish the pond. Just free fertilizer and a good way to refresh the pond!

Matt McSpadden wrote:Hi Hollybeth,
I think skipping a tree or two is probably still close enough for pollination. Stefan Sobkowiak out of Canada does it in his orchard and it is doing well. Also, since the entire space you are planting is less than a quarter acre (if I did my math right), I don't think you will have any problems. If you were going to be planting hundreds of trees across multiple acres you might not want to put a pear tree on each end of a row :)

Have you purchased these yet? I just wanted to mention that certain apple tree varieties pollinate each other better than others. Most places you buy them from will have this information available. I'm not sure about the other fruit trees you mentioned.

I put my order in to our local nursery yesterday, they specialize in plants that are acclimated to our zone and I did some thorough research on which species pollinate each other so we are good there! I'm happy to hear I can intermingle them, it feels more natural to me than grouping everything together.