By Andrew Haupt
It’s officially been a year since we moved out here. I’ve acquired more useful knowledge this year than in any other year of my life, much of it has come the hard way, and I’m grateful to this piece of land and the people who spent time in it for teaching me.
It’s strange to think that for most of my life I had little concept of the year’s cycles. I was generally aware of them, of course, but they only struck me in relation to holidays and the activities you could do outside. I didn’t see the budding out of trees as near miraculous, as I do now, the fact that the skin of the earth wakes up in concert with no prodding from humanity. My mood didn’t oscillate with the likelihood of rain.
We still have a long way to go here. Dead oaks ravaged by the golden spotted oak borer still stand while others actively battle them, poison oak and snowberry choke parts of the property, even where I initially cleared it, and there’s not much open space to work with. I still struggle with living in Southern California, and wonder if it will be a viable place to live long term. But the right now the pond is full and teems with ducks and frogs, the miner’s lettuce has sprung up, and the rain tank has water in it.
Back to the nitty gritty
One of those hard won pieces of knowledge is the necessity of setting up systems for everything you do. If a task doesn’t run on autopilot to some extent, it will get neglected. I tried to get out ahead of this one with our potted grafts -- by repurposing this old plastic tub we were left with, we can bottom water these infrequently and be confident that if they die it will be because we suck at grafting rather than lack of water.
On a related note, I started setting up irrigation lines to the trees we planted this spring that are scattered close enough to the house. It’s tedious work, but it needs to get done. Bernie made up a foliar kelp spray and gave the garlic a drench, as it looks like the leaves are yellowing some. I want to make foliar spraying a regular thing this year after reading Nigel Palmer’s book, and this is the first time we’ve tried it.
I finished a spatula made from the prunings of our apricot tree. It's really beautiful wood, but I did a poor job of splitting it straight, so I was fighting it to shape it back to uniformity.
