Here we are in January yet the days have provided temps comfortable enough for pruning a few apple trees. Plenty of "tree suckers", straight & long which had me thinking of Rick Pratt the Willow Furniture maker. Remember him? He was the first Adventure video I attempted to make. Not the best of filming & editing but plenty of great info & tips on using wood to bend & shape.
All those cuttings had me dreaming up what I would do with them.This year I will attempt to build an arched arbor tunnel based on this one for inside the garden:
This will be for the climbing beans & peas to twist & turn on this summer. Simple and pretty. A bit more saplings will be woven on the sides providing more spots to cling on. I envision about an 8 foot long section lined on the garden path starting from where my sand, brick & river stone entry ends.
I'm also going with Trellis style tomato supports made from bentwood. A bit ambitious, ay? No worries. I've got the time.
A short how to for a twist on the style I am after, found at this link* from Vegetable Gardener.
Being I will have 30-35 Amish paste tomato plants, mine will by far be simple yet useful being they will grow from one end of the garden to the other. O.k, maybe not too simple in looks. More like this style in 5 ft long sections:
The Captain & I paid a visit to the library where I picked up a great book I have previously poured over titled: Making Bentwood trellises, arbors, gates & fences Author Jim Long . If you can access a copy, I highly recommend it for some bentwood inspiration.
Now on to the subject of living mulch. I have tried hand tilling weeds out till I threw my hands up & walked away. I've tried Weed blocker cloth which just had weed seeds growing ON TOP & rooting down through the breathing holes. I even fell for & did the cover crop of winter rye grass , said to be a weed inhibitor {by the way, that method was worse then any of the others.}. And now I have come to the conclusion, I have nothing left to lose by trying one more method of weed prevention & soil health improvements. Crazy? Yeah. I think we settled that thought a long ways back.
I know what your thinking. Clover? Really Farm Chick? People try to get RID of clover, not encourage it. People! Hear me out. It has so many con's going for it and the downsides are not that worrisome {see winter rye & hand weeding belly aching comment above}. This whole idea came about while looking through one of the many seed catalogs {for like the 7th time}, when I spotted white dutch clover with a bar table describing it as a "living mulch" that it also did not go higher then 8 inches. hmmm. My interest is peaked. More like I couldn't stop thinking about, which is another reason why The Captain took me to the library. I was driving him crazy with "growing stuff" chatter and something about forest floors & Polyculture. Of which he thought I somehow switched to wine making and polyculture was a new kind of yeast I wanted... anyway, there was not a single book in the entire section on this matter. So I took to my personal library... The internet. Where I found this win me over post & encouraging reference point for the next weird step I take in experimenting with how my garden grows. Actually, they did my homework for me, with other forums & sites echoing all he shares.
- Less Weeding
- Retains Moisture
- Withstands Traffic
- Nitrogen Fixer
- Improves Soil Tilth
- Attracts Pollinators
As for it competing for nutrients, they had this to say {& I quote}:
On a side note, here’s a good read about polycultures being more productive than monocultures from a recent study at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science:
“…analysis shows that plant communities with many different species are nearly 1.5 times more productive than those with only one species (such as a cornfield or carefully tended lawn), and ongoing research finds even stronger benefits of diversity when the various other important natural services of ecosystems are considered. Diverse communities are also more efficient at capturing nutrients, light, and other limiting resources.” (Source: ScienceDaily.com via Virginia Institute of Marine Science)
Thanks to Seattle Homestead { :http://www.seattlehomestead.com/136-6-reasons-i-chose-white-clover-as-a-living-mulch/ , } our garden takes on another experiment.
Let's hope this one works out in our favor.
Oh! And did I ever mention how this last summer during the many road trips I had taken our children on,I seemed to always end up with getting us lost BUT never failed to discover a chicken statue on the road side EVERY time? Well marine was visiting & of course I took her on a mini road trip that I of course got us lost on the back roads. And what did we spot? Another chicken statue!
I guess that's my new thing... Not the getting lost {as if that would ever stop} but the Chicken statues. Wonder how long the streak will last...
Sweet dreams,
~Tammie
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