By Andrew Haupt
Yesterday the chippers came out again, and it was sprinkling all morning, and of course they got the chipper stuck. They tried to get it out using a small skid steer with no luck, and it crushed a couple manzanita and a small oak. They left it here with the idea of coming back today with a bigger skid steer. It’s a visceral example of how machines can improve a landscape quickly, and destroy it just as fast
Our order from Burnt Ridge Nursery came in on Monday, so we got to work planting - 10 goji berries, 2 gooseberries, 20 hazelnuts, 5 groundcover raspberries, and a flat of strawberries.
I interplanted the gojis among the row of bush chinquapin that goes down the hill, in hopes that it will turn into an edible hedge a few years from now.
The gooseberries went into a couple of the fish scale berms that are fed with graywater. A couple of the raspberries went on the edge of the retaining wall next to the duck coop entrance, where I often dump poopy water, and the other three went along the berm of the second swale in the orchard. I made small brush cages for everything, but the stuff in the orchard is still fairly exposed, so I’m banking on the ducks not being overly destructive.
The hazelnuts (only planted 7 so far), which include the native beaked hazelnut as well as Yamhill, Halle’s Giant, and a couple larger Jeffersons, got planted back behind the garden. I’m planning to put the rest down around the outskirts of the meadow, replacing some of the manzanita that fell during the storm.
Bernie potted up our grafts from Sunday and prepared one of the raised beds for strawberries (the one with buried Bokashi), adding some sphagnum moss to make the soil a bit more acidic. Going to plant those this morning.
