Blackberry Acres homestead diary

For about two years, I've been toying with what this thread should look like. I have threads where I post about specific projects like foraging or building a henhouse. And other people have 'pictures of my garden' threads that I enjoy seeing. So I know there's a place for this kind of thing, but I'm even still not quite sure what I'm going to put here.

We bought 20 acres in the woods of northern Minnesota in February of 2020. We arranged for some professional remodeling while we lived in town and drove up here every weekend to move stuff into the garage and work on the house and yard. We finally moved in in October and sold our other house shortly after. If you include that year that we didn't live here, this is my sixth year learning to garden here. Most of my property is on glacial till. It's about 50 feet deep where the house is and in one back corner it gives way to peat bog, so there must be a gradual raising of the bedrock but I don't have well-reports every 100 feet, so I have to guess about it.

I live on Blackberry Lane and wild blackberry is a significant weed here wherever there's sun that gets through the canopy. I've been sort of informally calling this place Blackberry Acres.

Everything grows very slowly here. I suppose it's because water vanishes instantly into the ground (seriously, I've never had a puddle) and takes nutrients with it. Trees are slow, slow, slow -- spending 2-3 years on underground growth (I think) before they start to produce seriously above ground. I don't know what things will look like fifteen years out, but I have reason to believe once they get going, they go just fine. My annuals hate this place. The most obvious avenue to success is to grow in a layer of compost on top of the sandy soil/turf. I don't love the contents of the only bulk compost option I have, so I've been experimenting with dragging organic matter out of the woods and various mulches. I get some produce, but I'm glad to have a day-job so we don't go hungry.

I'm going to just drop a big wop of images that I've capture in the last three weeks here to get this started. (TIL: there's a 30-picture limit per post!)

I really appreciate this kind of thread. And because I am always looking for plant ID's, my thoughts....

a different daisy

Flea bane daisy?

dunno...pretty

Yarrow!

More stuff I don't know -- but I have room for letting nectary form.

Bee balm?

my plant-ID app says these are Black-eyed Susans, but it's the only plant here that's fancy.

Blanket flower?

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:I really appreciate this kind of thread. And because I am always looking for plant ID's, my thoughts....

a different daisy

Flea bane daisy?

dunno...pretty

Yarrow!

For sure! I knew both of those at some point, but I have to know them often enough for them to really stick.

More stuff I don't know -- but I have room for letting nectary form.

Bee balm?

Yeah! This one I didn't know but the pictures on the internet agree with you 100%. :)

my plant-ID app says these are Black-eyed Susans, but it's the only plant here that's fancy.

Blanket flower?

Neat! I've never heard of that, but it sure seems right. I should go look at the foliage to be sure.

Thanks for sharing your pictures. I always enjoy seeing other people's homesteads!

And I really think that second to last flower is a rudbeckia (black eyed Susan).  It looks like some of the fancier varieties I've seen around. I'm wondering if some critter just moved a seed from a cultivated variety out into your area.

I've never seen a gaillardia with such big petals.

I think Joylynn is spot on on everything else.

Do you know what kind of frog that one is? I saw a similar one a few years ago. All I could come up with was the pine barrens tree frog which is rare and rarely seen in this part of the world. The green tree frog didn’t seem right.

M Ljin wrote:Do you know what kind of frog that one is?

I don't want to claim any knowledge of herps, but my guess from MN DNR documentation is a gray treefrog: (Hyla versicolor) https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/reptiles_amphibians/frogs_toads/treefrogs/gray.html

Christopher Weeks wrote:

M Ljin wrote:Do you know what kind of frog that one is?

I don't want to claim any knowledge of herps, but my guess from MN DNR documentation is a gray treefrog: (Hyla versicolor) https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/reptiles_amphibians/frogs_toads/treefrogs/gray.html

Oh! Could be. The solid bright green I saw was unlike any other frog I’d seen.

those rudbeckia types are a nightmare to ID confidently, there are so many cultivars and they cross freely. if it showed up without you planting it I'd guess it blew in from a neighbour's garden rather than wild stock, the fancy ones tend to be more vigorous seeders in my experience.

Where I live, we get about 32 inches (800 mm) of precipitation per year. I have the sense that's more than a lot of people get, but not if you live in a rain forest. (NOAA says 30" is the average for the US, so we're pretty close.) But it's been pretty dry for eight weeks or so. My place is in a "D2" drought zone. As part of the physical therapy regimen that I'm following to rehabilitate my left foot, I walk 1.5 miles each morning, so I just went from my desk in the basement upstairs to get shoes on and found it raining. I could gear up -- I certainly have rain protection, but I think I'll just skip it. I love the rain anyway, but especially when the garden has been dry enough to resort to sprinkling -- which I don't have to do every year.