Kate in New Hampshire

Hello Everyone,

I am just getting on the forums. I have recently started turning my large lawn into something more useful than a place to toss a frisbee. The front yard now has 3 swales, 8 hugelkulture beds and small pond that doesn't hold water yet. I am busy planting seeds, seedlings and trees.

Howdy Kate , welcome to permies !

Welcome, Kate!

Welcome Kate

Here are some photos of the new garden. I am still planting it out.

Here is a photo of the largest swale we built. It is 224 feet long.


I have planted 2 peach trees, 2 plum trees, 1 Asian pear tree, 2 sweet cherry trees, and an apricot. I have diakon radish, several clovers, vetch, field peas, buckwheat, sunflowers, tomatoes, comfrey, summer squash, winter squash, watermelon, muskmelon, and asparagus.



Here are my zone 1 hugle beds. I am still working on planting all of these. There are 2 swales and a future fish pond too.


This hedge divides the property in half. I was pleasantly surprised to find roses, autumn olive, grapes and raspberries. I still don't know what I have on the back half of the property.


These beds are my main kitchen garden.


This will be a pond once it starts to hold water.


Here is another shot of the main garden.

Wow! Such a healthy start to Permaculture! Thanks for the pictures. It looks like you'll have a food forest in no time.

Thank you. We bought the house at the beginning of the year. Last year for our anniversary we took Whole System Design's Applied Permaculture Design course last year. To say the least it was life changing. I am still planting it largely as a zone 1 kitchen garden. I will post more photos as it progresses.

Kate et all: W.O.W. That is a lot of work, i hope your ground cover is starting to explode all over your diggings, that is a lot to attempt all at once, good luck! and continue
to keep us updated ! For the Good of the Crafts ! Big AL

I am discovering it is a lot of work. It is my new work out/diet plan.

We rented and excavator and had a weekend building party. Friends, friends of friends, and some of the students from the FIRST Robotics team my husband and I mentor came and helped. The kids loved using the excavator.

I am spending about 2 hours a day on it. I do have one friend that comes once a week to help, share, and learn. She loves it. Another friend and I get together once a month to garden in each other's garden. We have been doing this for a couple of years now.

I still have a couple of the smaller beds I need to finish cleaning up and planting. My cover crops are starting to sprout and everything is starting to like nice and green. I am using most of this space as my kitchen garden. Much of it is being planted with seeds and transplants. I am basically throwing stuff in the ground and hoping it will do well. I just have to remember it will be easier and more productive every year.

Kate Muller et all : Like the Hobbits 'Path outside your door' You will forever be moving forward on a journey that will nearly always be rewarding, always a challenge,
and the wellspring we can all hope to future health and a long life !It is also nice to know that some people out there are being rewarded for their efforts to serve the
community! I can think of no better toast for you than l'chaim !!! For the Good of the Crafts ! Big AL.

Welcome, Kate - and WOW!

My garden is now 2 years and 2 weeks in the making. I am still working getting my plants in the ground while battling the crab grass but I figured i would post some updated photos.





My new asparagus bed.


These beds were made a hugel beds 2 years ago and the were too wide and the chickens were making them wider. My husband converted them into 4 beds about 3' wide and most of the wood that was buried is gone. All of the hugel beds are full of rodents.


I love raised beds. This one has garlic and potato onions in it.


This comfrey is very happy. We also planted a bunch of it along the front fence and my husband mowed it down for the first time to use as mulch.



This is a swale berm is full of flowers and 2 apple trees. It is a bout to start exploding with color. It is my favorite part of the garden.


Here are my zone one tomatoes. They are very close to the house and go with the herb and salad greens next to the porch.



We built this bed this year and I love having everything just outside the front door.

Nice work! I especially like the apple berm and the garden right by the house. Putting the kitchen garden right by the house was one of the best things I ever did here at our place.

This is the view from my front door just before sunset.



Eventually we will have a garden pond just to the left of this image. We need a pond liner for it since our soil is too sandy to have it self seal.
The neighbor's barn will be harder to see once the hardy kiwi and grapes take over. They were planted this month and are only 3" tall at the moment.

It has been 3 years since we started converting our yard into a farm.  So it  is the beginning of another gardening season and I am busy as ever.  
Things are just starting green up and come to life.  


This is King George.  This is his yard and he would like a snack.  


My husband has created a jig to reshape our annual veggie beds.  They were made too wide when we first constructed them and so my husband is reshaping the into more usable widths for me.  Now they new beds are much easier for me to sit on a stool and tend them.  
 

Here is one of the reshaped beds with garlic and bunching onions.  


The herb bed is just starting to come to life!  I am hoping the various shrubs will flower this spring.  


The raspberries, blackberries, jostaberries are in the process of getting supports to keep them from tip rooting and taking over the rest of the garden.  We picked up the fence posted second hand from a farmer who lives down the street.  He and his family are running a sugar bush and 100% grass fed cows.  Great people and we just bought half a cow from them.  


This is my third and final attempt at getting a asparagus bed established.  For some reason the deer around here love to trample  my asparagus beds.  Last year they jumped a 7 foot fence to trample them.


In this bed we are getting red wine cap mushrooms established.  We will spread them everywhere once we get them established.  


We lucked out and got the tree trimming company to give us wood chips when they were working along our road.  We will be putting between all the annual veggie beds and around the perennials.   I also got composted delivered and I am keeping it covered till we get it  in the beds.  


My husband built me a rain barrel last year.  I was a big help with the drought last year.  


We moved our bee hives and my husband will be building them a bee hut latter this year.  
The swale berm is full of fruit trees and shrubs.  They have been hit hard by the deer and I think a few of them won't make it.


They are hard at work on my soon to be garden bed.  I tried gardening in this spot last year but my Russian bees would not let me garden this close to them.  They died this fall so we moved hives and now this space will be getting potatoes, winter squash, and sweet potatoes.






 

I built a new raised bed and planted potatoes at the same time.  I got the idea from one of my PDC teachers Sean Dembroski.  He is doing all sorts of cool things in the Finger Lakes region of NY.
http://www.edibleacres.org/video


I used my Meadow Creature to broad fork the bed.  Then I added a layer of compost and set the seed potatoes 12" apart in 2 rows. Then I dug up the soil in the walk way and piled it on top of the potatoes.  



This is a photo half way through burying sprouted potatoes.

The seed potatoes were left over potatoes that we grew last year and didn't eat.  I figured they may or may not be diseased but I figured I would try them in a new garden plot that still needs to have raised bed made.

I put low tunnel hoops over the bed and covered it with netting.  You can see the bottoms of the low tunnel hoops in the bottom of the photo.  Hopefully this will keep the chickens from scratching apart the bed and keep the potato beetles off the plants.

The location of this new bed is the former home of the chicken coop.  We wanted to garden here last year but the bees were not having it.  So we moved the bee hives and this year the space with be potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash and sunflowers.  The sunflowers are from throwing Black Oil Sunflower seeds in this spot since the snow melted to keep the chickens till it for me till I could get the potatoes in.  

Great stuff Kate and hello from just over the border in Maine!

Skye Teal wrote:Hi Kate. are you also vegan? looking for good help ?

I am not vegan.  I have some medical issues that don't do well eating vegan so it isn't really an option for me.  I do eat lots of veggies and fruits that are low in fructans along with organic or better meat, dairy and eggs.  I try and source as much as I can from local farmers that have great farming practices.  I am trying to get to a point where I am growing all the fruits and vegetables we eat all year but I have a long way to go.  

At the moment I am not looking for help.  I would love to expand the farm but I need to get some tough to treat medical issues resolved first.  Luckily I have an awesome husband and I don't have an off site job.  We designed the garden so I could do much of the work sitting down and with minimal heavy lifting.  The narrow raised beds, wide path ways, heavy use of wood chip mulch, rain catching swales, and appropriate light weight hand tools means I can still garden when I have partial functionality.  If we expand the farm to be a business will largely depend on my health.  I am hoping I don't become severely disabled but I may not get so lucky.  

Greg Martin wrote:Great stuff Kate and hello from just over the border in Maine!

Hello!  My husband's family is on the Mid Coast of Maine so we are there quite often.  I love Northern New England In general and I am so glad I moved to NH.  

So this bed is my current favorite part of the garden.  It currently has an over story of grapes, sunflower, and milkweed. I love that sunflowers and milkweed self sow and I only remove them when they are in my way.  The under story has several kinds of lettuce, thyme, chives, basil, cilantro, parley, sage, rosemary(it is an annual this far north) marjoram, Asiatic lily, nasturtiums and a few other things.  The lettuce isn't bolting yet and cilantro is covered in flowers which is great because I just want the seeds.  Next year I want to do more mixed layered annuals  because they are pretty and the critters haven't eaten all the greens in this bed.  

I can't wait till my blueberries are full size.  My in front of the house shrubs are currently 9 blueberry bushes and a lovage.  Several of the blueberries are producing fruit this year.  The 2 pale looking ones were just planted because I picked them up on clearance at a big box store.  There are strawberries in there and the milkweed is everywhere I will cut a bunch of it down before it goes to seed.  I don't need it everywhere and I want to save seeds from the plants that have flowers that are more purple.  I will always have lots of it in the garden since the seeds blow over from the pasture across the street.  


The lovage in the left corner is thriving and the flowers reach the gutters on the house.  Every morning the plant is covered in pollinators.   I love using the lovage in place of celery in soups and stews. I am still trying to decide if I want more of them and where to put them if I do plant more.  Either way I will save the seeds since it will be easy to do.





Of course my biggest and healthiest winter squashes are volunteers on the edge of the compost pile.  I have quite a few volunteer potatoes this year too.  It will be fun to see what type they will be latter this summer.  Now I just need to figure out how I can turn the compost with the plants in the way.


The annual veggie beds are coming along despite the critters enjoying the buffet.  I am covering some of the beds with row cover due to the heavy nibbling.  Luckily the weather is still pretty cool so the row cover isn't a problem.  








This is the sorely neglected part of the garden. I am hoping to get it weeded and mulched before the end of the month.  We need to figure out what survived the drought, the cold winter with very little snow and too much deer pressure.  We want to add wood chip mulch to everything we want keep and figure out how many plants we can add to it next year.  It is a swale berm that is about 6 feet wide and 224 feet long. This whole part of the hill side needs a lot of work but we are short on time and energy right now.  Hopefully by fall we can give it all the TLC it deserves.  



Our future pond is a wildflower garden this year.  We were going to get a pond liner for it this year but we wound up needing to replace the well pump and pressure tank.   So finishing the pond has been pushed out another year. The ground is glacial sand that drains extremely well so we are going to get a liner for the pond.  
 

It has been 3 years since my husband and I started our garden and we are getting fruit this year.  


Grapes


Raspberries


Blackberries


Pears and Strawberries


Highbush Cranberry and Aronia berry


We have also gotten a few blueberries this year but the critters have gotten most of them


My freezer is full of rhubarb and strawberries that I need to can into pie filling.

I also planted goji berries, hardy kiwi, and red currents this year.

You have made amazing progress. You're far ahead of many who do not have serious health issues. That's quite an accomplishment. All of this good food and exercise, is bound to help, even if you have to take it at a slower pace sometimes.

I like it that you took a course together for your anniversary three years ago, instead of throwing the money into a trip or some frivolous purchase.

Dale Hodgins wrote:You have made amazing progress. You're far ahead of many who do not have serious health issues. That's quite an accomplishment. All of this good food and exercise, is bound to help, even if you have to take it at a slower pace sometimes.

I like it that you took a course together for your anniversary three years ago, instead of throwing the money into a trip or some frivolous purchase.

Thank you. We designed this garden so I could do much of the work while sitting on a stool, No till beds, lots of mulch, and we are adding more perennials.  All of it is designed to reduce the work load.  

We finally are making progress on the garden pond project.  
The first critters to move in were the dragonflies and the tadpoles.  We also added 19 goldfish.  We are still adding rocks to in and we will be planting a bunch of bog plants to the shallow areas next spring.