guildfordcycads

I read that I am supposed to thin my dwarf peach trees (first year with them), but I’m confused about when to do it. Research turned up late May to early June for where I am and said “when the fruitlings” are about the size of a marble or a nickel. It’s early May and they are that size. They are covered in fruit! I am so excited and also so sad I have to toss a bunch, womp! And I just pick them off, is that right? Needed to verify this with some actual humans. Also, thinking of placing mesh bags over the entire trees. When is the right time, exactly? Thanks for any advice!

Hi y’all. I am putting this question out to the ether to get some different perspectives on how I’m approaching this. I have property in a high desert climate, red sand, 5k feet, desert heat in summer, freezing and occasional snow in winter, with less than 15 inches of rain annually coming mostly in monsoon season.

There’s a 1/2 acre horse paddock that is hard as nails with only the most pokey weeds – the ones that flatten tires and make you cry – growing. To try to get the land healthier, I’ve tracked rainfall and where the water travels, started by digging swales and planting trees I was able to order through a state conservation program. Through friends and neighbors I’ve gathered organic debris to deep mulch six to eight foot circumference around each tree. Next up is adding native and xeric perennials.

This however, especially as the trees are whips at this stage, is still leaving the majority of the space as pokey weed zone. We try to chop and drop but with the heat and wind everything that gets dropped dries to a crisp and blows away off the hard packed ground. Although pokey weeds have their place, it makes it impossible to even walk back there and my neighbors are probably silently planning my demise since the seeds travel. My dogs have been injured with foxtails burrowing into their paws.

Has anyone successfully helped a space move beyond the pokey weed stage in the American southwest or similar situation? If it was your space, what would be your next step? The ground is hard as a rock. I will be supplementing water to get the trees started but only by flooding where I’ve dug out. Would love to hear how others might approach this challenge. Thank you!

Hey guys, so we’ve moved into a new garden (Northern Germany) that used to be cultivated by a grandma who first planted a bunch of nasty stuff and then let the garden deteriorate as she was growing into old age. I’ve read a bunch of permaculture books and it might be that I’ve just not read the good ones, but they seemed to be cherry picking their way around dealing with actually unwanted plants in favour of a pseudo-inclusive, hippie-esque narrative about re-defining our attitude towards plants and “seeing the good in everything”. I’m exaggerating (only a little), but what I mean is that when it comes to “weeds”, I’ve had several books expound on the advantages of stinging nettles, goutwort, etc. – which is all swell and dandy, but none felt like they touched on the really problematic stuff. I’ll split said “problematic stuff” into two separate issues.

Issue 1) When “misunderstood”, useful plants become a little too comfortable around the garden.
The concrete troublemakers in our garden are: goutwort, hops, blackberry, ivy and creeping jenny. I like and harvest most of them (not the ivy 😉 but they’ve started sprouting into the vegetable patches and into the lawn. I guess for goutwort and creeping jenny it’s mulching/covering the exposed areas of vegetable patches – but what do you do about the lawn? I’ve read guides that say to cut the lawn often as the grass will eventually outgrow the herbs, but I shudder at the thought of becoming the “every saturday morning”-lawnmower guy. And how do you deal with guys like hops and ivy who have zero problems driving their roots through meters of covered area to come out the other side?

Issue 2) – the real kicker – how to deal with properly unwanted plants. What’s the permaculture consensus on dealing with healthy and sizeable specimens in your garden of
a) cherry laurel – it’s verging on becoming a tree at 4 meters of height. Occupying a prime spot in the garden, south facing in front of the house, where a lot of fruit trees would probably thrive. Is it possible to plant a fruit tree right next to it and eventually let the fruit tree outgrow the cherry laurel – I’d imagine true to poisonous and invasive form it probably doesn’t tolerate other plants growing next to it? So do I set about cutting down and uprooting a fully grown bush/tree?
b) Yew – I’m sure it’s the bush species, but they’ve let the thing grow into a tree-ish monster at six-ish meters of height. It dominate an entire half of the garden, the best south facing one at that, is now overhanging half of the vegetable patches and, most importantly, I’ve got a really small kid and i’m not looking to watch him die after muinching on a couple needles or fruit. But before I go and fell a living tree I’d like to know how the rest of the community deals with such a thing.
c) Aliantus Altissima – only asking for vindication here because I’ve already cut that shit down as it’s on the local blacklist of the ten most invasive and problematic species in the area.
d) Thuja – not sure what the previous owners’ aim was but it looks like they planted two single bushes in the corner of the garden and then let those fuckers skyrocket to a whopping ten meters. They’re actually really impressive looking and remind one more of cypress trees in the mediterranean. Actually come to think of it I should probably make sure they’re not actually cypress trees haha. Regardless, there’s pretty much nothing growing around them as they seem to really not tolerate anything besides the braves stinging nettle in their immediate vicinity. I hardly ever see a bird in them and I therefore question wether they oughtn’t to make way for a more habitable variety?

Thanks for your advice guys and let me know if there’s a book out there that deals with these things properly

I want to share results of an interesting (and completely accidental) experiment in growing asparagus!

I read online that asparagus and tomato are good for each other – so I had planned to plant them side by side as companion plants in our new house – Connecticut zone 7. We had moved mid-winter of 2023-4, and unsurprisingly, I bit off waaay more than I could chew plant-wise in the spring – and I ended up having to prioritize getting our new fruit trees in the ground. So the asparagus crowns went in a few weeks too late, after soaking for longer than they were supposed to soak. They weren’t anything fancy – just the 3-crown bags from Ocean State Job Lot.

I planted two patches of asparagus – purple and green. The purple came up as less-than-toothpick-size spindly things, but there were absolutely no signs of life with the green. I thought I had killed it. I planted a tomato plant right on top of my patch of green, so the spot wouldn’t be empty. Then green asparagus came up beside the tomato, and I had a hot mess of plants growing together all year.

I LOVE hiking and foraging, and I’ve always noticed that in the wild plants grow practically on top of each other, and seem to be super healthy that way. So the #1 traditional gardener wisdom I’ve always doubted is recommended plant spacing. I tend to see it as a guideline for how close to plant the same type of plant to another – but then figure I can put random OTHER plants in between however I like, willy nilly, so that my garden more resembles what I see in nature.

Because of that, I just shrugged and didn’t try to remove the tomato from on top of the asparagus. And my “companion” tomatoes were much closer than recommended (less than a foot away from the last crown in the patch).

Fast forward to spring this year. I failed to clear the dead tomatoes from last year due to an busy fall season in my creative small business. And I failed to even rake the approximately 3-6″ of maple leaves covering my garden – but lo and behold, come April, there are some shockingly huge asparagus spears poking out of the leaves. I cleared the leaves out, and the largest and earliest spears are in the EXACT spot where I planted that tomato on top of my green asparagus last year.

My neighbor (who also planted asparagus last year, but was much more on the ball than me about getting it in on time) has not had a single spear large enough to eat this year. We’ve gotten a whole meal for a family of 4 (with two teenage boys) of which about 90% came from the oops-tomato-plant spot.

Haha I can’t figure out what actually happened. But I need to move my asparagus patch – as actually living in the house and seeing the sun/wind patterns and where the invasive exotics are strongest has made me completely rethink my plan for what grows where. So I’m going to put the asparagus crowns farther apart than I did last time, and mark in between the crowns with a stick, and interplant tomatoes right on top of about half of each color of them next spring, and see what happens the following year. I will report the results back here when I do!

TLDR: Growing asparagus and tomato literally right on top of each other seems to have resulted in shockingly healthy asparagus in an accidental experiment. Plan is to repeat the experiment on a larger scale to see what happens.

I’m wondering if anyone has any experience in this?

I see this as an interesting concept, that paired with solar or other renewables, could be very helpful for people in certain climates.

I see barley is commonly used, and am investigating other grains.

Super cool idea, which imo besides obviously the solar panels/renewable energy, the Barley seeds or similar are inputs that need to be purchased. I guess one could grow Barley but I’m not sure if that works out economically.

Mostly, I want to know if people have done this and any experiences or knowledge they may have.

Zone 5b New Hampshire.

I’m considering putting a few blueberry bushes on the south/southwest side of my property. It’s the hottest part of the yard, right at the end of my property where the sun beats off the blacktop road pavement most of the day . The area starts getting sun around 11 and it’s in full exposure until sundown…I know blueberries like full sun but will this be too much?

I have a quite flat, clay piece of land with full sun in New Zealand, 1080mm of annual rainfall.
There is a very slight slope on the 0.25 hectare section in question.
I would like to develop a seasonal pond, with hopes to slowly develop to a year round pond, using slightly off-contour small shallow swales to direct water slowly towards the pond.
As we are right now, we do not have enough catchment to provide sufficient rainwater to beat the evaporation (no overhanging trees).
This means we would likely have a pond during the wet months and a bit outside of them (due to the pond’s water storage) (mid-April – mid-November).
I would intend to successively plant overshading plants, aquatic plants and water holding plants nearby to reduce evaporation and lower temperature.

Would it be a safe assumption that over time I would be able to approach a constant pond, by decreasing runoff and holding water for longer due to higher organic matter counts and more shade?

Is this expectation accurate? Why or why not?

Community Garden

Hey folks! I just started working on a ~0.07-acre community garden plot that’s been neglected and has compacted clay soil. I’m treating this as a fixer-upper and a chance to learn, since I don’t have land of my own—so I’d love to experiment and grow my permaculture skills here.

After working in the rain, I noticed a lot of standing water. A neighbor mentioned that both of our plots sit at the bottom of a subtle slope and have had persistent drainage issues for years.

That got me thinking: How can I improve drainage and make the most of this natural water flow using permaculture methods like swales, trenches, or maybe even a small catchment pond at the lowest point?

Are there any low-cost, beginner-friendly DIY strategies to transform this compacted, poorly-draining clay plot into a mini permaculture paradise?

Where I’m standing for the picture of my plot is pretty close to the highest point, the lowest point is directly across in the back corner with ~1-3 degree slope.

Any insight or suggestions are welcome!