Dancing with the Universe

From a year ago; I figured it would be good to pull this out of the Facebook memory hole.

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The idea of crop rotation in the home garden is lovely and all, but (at least for us) the numbers don't add up. If I try to break our veggies up into categories, I get:
greens: 44 square feet (cold-weather), 80 square feet (corn)
fruiting crops: 194 square feet
root crops: 75 square feet
legumes: 35 square feet
I can fill in the legumes part with fava beans over the winter and maybe chickpeas, but what a mismatch. Cold-weather greens, the root crops, and beans could rotate, I suppose, but with twice as much area for corn and four times as much for fruiting veggies, I'd have to grow a heck of a lot more stuff we don't eat if I wanted to keep up a strict rotation. I mean, there's donating to the food bank and there's "why am I farming close to a thousand square feet for three people".
Maybe I'll do a one-out-of-three-years rotation and figure that will be enough for soil diversity... disease isn't really an issue here.

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Ha. I've worked out a six(!) year rotation that seems to cover all the bases, assuming six 15' beds divided in half. It's approximate, of course, but I'm impressed that it does work out:

Beans, winter greens, tomatoes and corn, onions/garlic, carrots and beets (followed by a late winter feeding), tomatoes and cucurbits, fava beans, corn and sweet potatoes, fava beans, tomatoes and cucurbits, repeat.

Now, of course, Chez Foogod will put in their requests and blow my ratios to hell. :)

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[My rotation plan is in an Excel file in my Dropbox. I'll send it to anyone who wants it.]

Yesterday afternoon, I decided to finally tackle the project which has been preying on my mind, and I started digging the trench for the replacement sprinkler at the far corner of the back lawn area. The lawn needs three new sprinklers placed, and I was going to get one of them installed, dammit.

On my second stroke with the pick (dry clay) I saw something odd. By the time I figured out what it was, my third stroke hit, with the inevitable PSSSSSSHHHHHH. I had hit the main irrigation line. Sigh.

( In case you ever wondered how I learned irrigation work: this is the crap I have to fix at home. )

Need I mention that after the irrigation work I did a large load of laundry and hung it out, cooked a vegan dinner for nine from scratch, did dishes, attended our weekly Doctor Who session, and even remembered to take the laundry in afterward? Whew.

I was supposed to be taking it easy today. Oh well.

( Stuff )

I still have to make a pie -- or at least pie crust -- but I feel reasonably well accomplished, having checked off even a couple of longer-term items on my list.

It's odd, living most of your life in the same house. It's comfortable and familiar, yes -- but the flip side is that when things change, it can be jarring. Especially when you find out that they changed a while ago, and you just hadn't noticed; like a familiar face, you always use mental shorthand to represent it, and then something finally becomes so different that the shorthand fails and you see them for who they really are now, years later.

( Places age too. )

It turns out that what I thought was a mahonia at Greg's place (I'm not too familiar with them, obviously) is actually Italian Buckthorn, Rhamnus alaternus. I saw a Coffeeberry in the nursery and it looked so similar to what I had ripped out next to the street sign that it got me thinking. A little hunting on the net turned up images that look exactly like the survivor in the back yard.

Not a bad plant, and I'll probably keep the one in back. It's something to keep in mind for an evergreen screening tree with small, glossy leaves -- it beats the pants off of privet, even if it does manage to sow a few volunteers from time to time.

A curious note: the reports on its berry color vary. Some say reddish, some say dark purple. The one Greg has is the dark type; I wonder whether it's a varietal thing.

I pruned the cherry tree at the Pittsburg house yesterday. It had clearly been neglected for about 20 years; the base of it is half-rotten, with one thigh-sized trunk coming off that produces (what must be) Bing cherries, and the other side a tangle of thick branches that I finally figured out are Mahaleb rootstock (it doesn't produce fruit of any kind). The Bing had lots of dead branches and no real structure, though it seems healthy enough.

Cherries are, at least technically, supposed to have a central leader structure like apples and pears, though I've never understood exactly why (peaches and apricots use a vase structure, and plums can go either way). I've certainly seen vase-shaped cherry trees in orchards. So I compromised, left about three central leaders, chopped out everything in the middle, and encouraged a bit of scaffold growth. I took off some big limbs, and ended up with what looked like 2-3 trees worth of discarded wood. Renovation pruning always feels pretty savage. Fine tuning will happen in the next two years.

I left some of the Mahaleb for grafting (I picked up scions last month), but I whacked off a large trunk in the hope of shocking it into making some waterspouts I can use for better grafting stock. I'll try my luck this year on the smaller "trunks" I left behind, and see how well the buds take; if they take well, I'll have enough grafting wood in two or three years to move them to better locations if needs be, without having to ask for more scion wood from elsewhere.

It's already got Bing, and I picked up Black Tartarian (best early cherry EVAR), Lapin, and an unnamed pie cherry. With luck, in a few years, I'll have a decent 4-variety tree out there. :)