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Thursday, June 30, 2011

Catching up and new garden space

We just came back from a month visiting friends and family in France. Of course, we also visited lots of medieval medicinal gardens as well as a lot of prehistoric sites, some of which have been continuously inhabited for 55,000 years!

It was good to be back home though and we got in gear immediately by expanding the garden in front of the cabin. A few big rocks helped delineate the garden and I brought in several wheelbarrows full of dirt from the root cellar excavation site. It also gave me the opportunity to use our humanure compost. It had been resting for two years so was mostly ready, though a lot of the sawdust didn't quite compost completely. So this year I'll add some white rot fungus to each batch to see if it would accelerate the decomposition of the sawdust. The fungus is easily found under each rotting log in the forest floor. I also make a point to pee on the compost pile whenever I can.

This year we'll just be planting a cover crop of red clover in the new space, and next year we'll turn it into a real medicinal herb garden. In the meantime, the old space is still home to Valerian, Echinacea, Bee Balm, Codonopsis, and Elecampane, as well as lots of veggies.

The weather has been a little too cool to allow for things to grow real well yet but it is nice to keep on working on our forestry project, limbing all trees to 15 feet. I'm also shooting my bow as often as I can in preparation of the hunting season in September.

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