Good Afternoon Everyone from Birch Creek Farm
by Kathy Osborne
Here I am taking another stab at blogging my garden experience.
2021 was a year of loss and learning for me. I started out well, taking photos and getting my garden pens in order. But we had some setbacks due to COVID and the ensuing heat wave became problematic for not only me but farmers everywhere. Still, there were some valuable learning experiences.
Among the things I learned:
1. Don’t plant nightshades near a walnut tree. I lost my entire tomato crop last year and the
potato crop the year before due to this ignorance.
2. Deer are opportunists. Don’t underestimate them. If they can’t fit through the hole, I swear,
they send in the kids!
3. If deer get the chance to mow the potato patch, it will not necessarily recover. The plant
above the ground will, but not the tubers.
4. Garlic needs to be moved to a new location every year to thrive.
5. Carrots and beets love each other
6. Compost is even more important than gardeners wildly emphasize that it is. Sigh-
7. Bears do in fact climb plum trees, and break branches and leave poop in the orchard.
8. Cedar Waxwings and Robins are beautiful to look at and love my Rainier cherries as much as I do.
9. Once tomatoes suffer heat shock from too much sun it is very hard to save them.
Well, there is more but it mostly has to do with weed control which I hope to write about after I have a chat with Chase from the Bonner County Weed department. As much as I hate to kill anything, the weeds have overtaken my hay fields and I must deal with them – Red Sorrel, Oxeye Daisy, Yarrow, St. Johns wort, and a wicked thick lime green grass thing that creeps along the ground and creates a mat worse than anything I have ever seen before. I can’t find it on the invasive weed list so will probably have to dig up a square and take it in for identification. Thank The Good LORD I don’t have Knapweed.
Quite a few good things happened in 2021 and there was much to be grateful for.
I learned to prune a fruit tree properly. All of the fruit trees I planted in spring 2020 lived through the winter and came back quite vigorously. My small pen garden system, dividing the garden into smaller 8’ x 16’ or 16’ x 16’ pens with livestock panels helped control the deer. Only when I left the gates open was there any sort of problem. Sigh-
Drip irrigation is the bomb! This is so great I plan to implement it throughout all my garden spaces over time. It was so hot last year that everywhere I watered with fan sprinklers just seemed to dry out faster. It was the pens with compost and a direct watering device that did the best.
That’s about it for this first post. I will have pictures next week as the garden will all be in just in time for the next round of rain. And that beautiful space beneath the walnut tree that kills nightshades and dahlias? I am turning it into a meditation space! I found one of those big wood spools and put it in there along with some chairs I found cheap. With a table cloth and a vase of flowers, this spot will be perfect for resting between orchard and garden chores.
