Category: The land

The weather for the past week has been perfect cabbage-growing weather — frequent rain, sunny days in the 70s, and warm nights. The cabbages are going crazy.

This, I believe, is not a cabbage but one of its brethren — broccoli, brussels sprouts, or cauliflower. I have quite a few of each.

I’m disappointed at how few apple blossoms I have this year.

Yesterday, while looking for a place down by the woodland stream to plant pawpaw trees, Ken and I came across two big stands of may apple. Though may apple is not exactly rare in the Appalachians and foothills, it’s an honor to have so much may apple growing down below the abbey, and it speaks well of the quality of the woodland soil. Though may apple also is called mandrake, I don’t believe it’s a member of the mandrake family that is so important in myth and witchcraft.

There are two separate stands of may apple, totaling 3,000 to 4,000 square feet. The leaves are still immature. I’ll make more photographs as the season progresses. The may apple should have blooms later in the spring, and it should bear fruit during the summer.

Every spring, I am amazed at the variety of habitat and micro-climates around the abbey. I have only five acres, but into those five acres are packed a sunny acre with house, garden, orchard, and chicken lot. I have quite a lot of grass (some of the yard will soon be converted to wildflower patches). There is almost a thousand feet of woodland boundary, facing south. This is where the rabbit patches, the fox den, and the groundhog holes are located. Lots of things love to live at the edge of the woods, especially with a view to the south. The land falls off steeply below the abbey, and a little stream winds through four acres of woodland, which I have not and will not disturb (except to plant pawpaws, which are native to this area). On the lower end of the property, the little stream merges with another little stream in a moist bottom that loves to grow mushrooms. This is where we’ve put the shiitake mushroom logs.

A stand of may apple. This is only a small part of the may apple area beside the little stream.

The grass is green at the abbey and getting greener.

The daffodils are fading.

Snow peas in a raised bed

I’m awfully proud of the cabbage and can’t stop photographing it.

Young day lilies. They’ll bloom prodigiously in May.

Ken with our organic cabbage. The seeds were started 49 days ago, and the plants have been in the ground for 11 days.

The cabbages were transplanted outdoors on March 15 and have now been in the ground for 11 days. They are doing really well. It was hard going at first. When we planted the cabbage outdoors (they were started from seed indoors on Feb. 4), I thought that our main concern would be cold weather. Cabbages can stand a frost, but not a hard freeze. Instead of cold weather, we had hot, dry weather. There were two days in the cabbages’ first week when the temperature was over 80 degrees. I had to carry water to the cabbages to keep them from wilting.

The cabbages are much happier now that they’ve had rain and established some roots. With any luck, they’ll be water self-sufficient from here on out.

We also started our tomato and pepper plants from seed today, in the grow-light system. The plan is to plant them outdoors around the first of May.

All in all, the garden is going well. The snowpeas are five inches high, and we also have some onions (started from sets) coming along.

We ordered 3-year-old asparagus crowns online from AsparagusGardener.com in Tennessee. They should arrive any day now. Ken is digging a bed for the asparagus and amending the soil with compost, sand, and organic fertilizers.

Asparagus is a perennial and will come back year after year, but there’ll be no asparagus to eat until next spring at the earliest.

The chickens go crazy whenever he digs.

Today we put almost a hundred young plants into the ground. These are the plants that we started indoors five weeks ago from seed — cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts. We also have eight small celery plants. I think the odds are low that we’ll be able to grow celery here, but I wanted to try that as an experiment.

The soil was a bit wetter than ideal, and the plants had been “hardening” (getting used to the outdoors) for only five days. But we thought it best to go ahead and plant because the forecast looks good. We should have some rain starting this afternoon, followed by a week with highs in the 60s and 70s and lows in the 40s and 50s — good cabbage-growing weather.

Next step: Starting plants for the summer garden indoors from seed — tomatoes, squash, etc. Those plants need to go in the ground in late April.

Every spring and every fall, the grass gets the same treatment: lime, fertilizer, and more seed. We also repair bare spots and pick up rocks. Today we picked up almost a wheelbarrow load of rocks while working on smoothing out one of the remaining rough areas of the yard.

Yesterday Ken planted two holly trees, two more arbor vitae trees, two forsythia bushes, a rhododendron, and a number of small plants. Rain is forecast for the weekend, so everything is in ahead of the rain.

If the weather cooperates, we remain on target for a productive spring. Depending on the long-range weather forecast, we may plant the cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, etc., next week.

The chickens love anything that scratches the soil.

A lot of work got done in the garden today. It’s almost time to plant the cabbages, etc., one to two weeks from now.

Ken spread 300 pounds of organic fertilizer, 50 pounds of lime, and many wheelbarrow loads of compost. All of that got nicely tilled into the soil. Now the soil needs to sit for a week or two so that the winter rye, which we tilled under today, can break down. The fertilizer also needs to wash in a bit. Rain is forecast for tomorrow.

We actually measured the pH of the garden today. It was 6.9 — just a tad on the acid side of neutral. This surprised me. Pine trees grew on the soil for years, and I expected it to be more acid. On the whole, the garden soil is looking much better than I expected. We’ll soon see how well things grow.

Ken spoils Patience.

We had a nice, big load of compost delivered today. It looks like a lot of compost, but it’s amazing how much compost this place eats. You spread a bunch of compost and then wonder what happened to it all. This compost came from a local landscaping supply business. It’s made from leaves and brush chips.

Next chore: Using the tiller to turn under the winter rye grass that now covers the garden. Most of the new compost will then go into the garden. It’s a shame to till the rye under, but it has served its purpose — ground cover for the garden during the winter and providing winter greens for the chickens.