Planting Weekend

I had a pretty aggressive plan for the orchard planting weekend, but thanks to help from my parents and my wife, we got almost all of it done, if a bit behind schedule.

My parents arrived on wed night.  On thursday they fought with a 2wd truck that got stuck in the mud on the road down to the meadow and had mechanical issues, but managed to pick up several loads of pre-ordered fencing and mulch from agway and move the tractor down to the meadow before my wife and I arrived thursday night.

Friday was warm (60's) but windy and cloudy.  We tried out three different pH testing kits.  One was a digital probe that rarely gave any reading at all.  One was an old kit that my parents had that used indicator liquid put into a tube with soil and water.  That proved to be very difficult at best to read as the water remained cloudy and brown.  The third was a kit that I picked up from my local garden store at the last minute.  Similar to the liquid indicator, you put a small amount of dirt in a clear container and add water.  The indicator material is a capsule of powder.  When you open the capsule, pour the powder in, and shake it up, the solids settle out after a few seconds leaving a clear, colored liquid to compare to the pH scale.  There must be something in the powder that causes stuff to coagulate and precipitate out.  It worked quite well, and in the one location that we got a reading from the digital probe, it matched the capsule method.  The capsule kit is made by "Rapitest" and you can get it with different numbers of capsules.  I've seen it at a couple different stores and it will pop right up on a google search.  All the samples from the area that I had prepped for the orchard last year read between 6.0-6.5.  Another spot that was tested nearby in the field was 5.0.

We made great progress on Friday prepping the soil and digging holes.  Some of the holes were dug manually, which turned out to be easier than expected, though once you hit the compacted sand/clay layer about 8-14" down, you couldn't really get much deeper.  Simultaneously the tractor was digging holes(trenches) one bucket wide.

The idea being that it would be faster to dig the holes that way, and then we could just fill in the dirt on the sides of the trench that weren't needed for the tree.  By mid-afternoon we were well ahead of schedule and had completed all the soil prep work and dug all the holes.  We were about to start planting some trees when the leading edge of a cold front showed up.  Since we were ahead of schedule, we decided it would be a good time to stop for the day.

Saturday was in the upper 30's, cloudy, and quite windy.  Occasional sleet.  Unpleasant.  The plan was to plant almost everything that day.  Things moved along at a decent pace with the smaller hand-dug holes, but the tractor-dug holes ended up being rather time-consuming to fill back in.  We ended the day in the late afternoon with probably only about half of the ~55 trees planted.  Those that we did have planted were mulched and fenced.  

Sunday we got an early start.  When we got to the meadow the sun was just starting to come over the pines and melt the dusting of snow. Temps were in the mid 20's.  The water buckets had about an inch of ice on the top and sides.  As the day went on it warmed up into the 40's, clear, and light winds.  We decided to fill in all the remaining big tractor-dug holes with the tractor and re-dig by hand.  We made better progress after that, ending the day around 1:30 with almost all of the trees planted.  The only thing we didn't get planted at that time were blueberries that had been planted over by the northern pine plantation years ago and were to be transplanted to the orchard.  As of Sunday afternoon we had 50 trees planted, mulched, and fenced, plus a couple good sized beds of asparagus planted.  

My parents were staying an extra day, so they kindly volunteered to do the transplanting of the final blueberries as well as cover crop seeding on Monday.  Hopefully that went ok.

By the way, the watering was done using a couple of 55 gallon drums that my Dad was able to get from a friend.  We strapped them into the bucket on the tractor and drove them down to the brook where we used a generator to power a sump pump to get the water into the barrels.  We added a boiler drain spigot to each barrel that we connected to a garden hose.  Drove the tractor with the drums out into the field to do the watering.  It worked well enough, though not perfectly.

I'll be headed back up somewhere around Memorial Day to see what looks alive.  At that time I will also put either aluminum window screen or hardware cloth at the base of the trees for rodent protection.

Miller Homestead North

Its been quite some time since I have posted on here, but there has been a recent homesteading development that merits a few posts.  Miller homestead is expanding, and there is now a Miller homestead north!  Our family purchased a property in the Adirondacks in the 1940's, part of which was a very small scale dairy farm.  A homestead, if you will.  Since that time, much of the pasture land has been fallow.  Last spring several acres of the former pasture land was cleared of saplings and brush.  One area of it was set aside for a future orchard and soil preparations were begun.

The soil is very sandy and acidic (pH was approximately 4.5).  The area was fertilized, limed, tilled, and seeded with buckwheat as a cover crop.  The buckwheat grew quite well.  My mom was checking out the variety of insects attracted to the flowers.

In the fall, the area was again fertilized, tilled, and seeded, this time with oats.  The oats were seeded in mid-september, and that did not seem to give it enough time to really get going before winter hit, but at least the soil was in much better shape than it was in the spring.

Over the winter I spent quite a bit of time planning out what to plant in the new orchard area in the spring.  I ordered trees from several different different nurseries and planned to put them in the ground in late april.