Had to make a run up to Buffalo to grab 450 feet of remesh for making cages for trees up north. Stopped in at the Addickes farm, and got to see a sandpiper who has a nest in the garden up there. She is acclimated enough that their kids can touch her. Not sure if that is a good thing or not. She was not as accepting of me, but I got some good pics of her nest, and then her deciding I really was not a threat and her coming back to it.
I continue to be a delinquent as far as keeping not only things I am doing updated on the blog here, but getting the things I have in my mind, as things that need to be done, done.
The Bluebell grapes here at home, of which I lost nearly the entire crop in one day to birds last year, as of last week, had emerging bud clusters and looked wonderful
Guess I know this year to pick them the morning they are ripe, and not to wait until I am home from work that evening.
In the realm of mass plantings I have had to modify, down, how much I am doing. So far at the Adickes farm in Buffalo I have planted only a few things, and no seeds. Simply have not had the time. Shown above is one of 9 seed potatoes from a single TPS seedling grown last year from seed I got from Renville Tom. Have not eaten one yet, but the impressive size for TPS grown potatoes, plus that at room temperature they stored since last fall with only minimal sprouting while retaining firmness has me really pleased on two different levels as far as permanent viability as a future food crop source. 8 of them went in the ground, 1 went back to Renville Tom. They also grew in a relatively tight cluster in the ground immediately under the plant which is great for digging with minimal effort. They are a part of a 130 foot row of potatoes I put in. The only row I plan on doing this year.
They have a hand raised young hen who is rather personable.
Another first for me this year is sweet potatoes. Dont know the variety, but one that Renville Tom has been maintaining for years, and gave me 8 rooted slips to try. Early to have these in the ground, but unlike last year, it appears we are going to have a good & hot summer and daytime temps are in the 70s and 80s. They should do fine.
The cuttings I got From Great River Vineyard just went into the soil two weekends ago. Also up at Buffalo. These I had simply stored with the butt ends in water in mason jars above the sink. About 80% of them leafed out or swelled buds, while the rest just ended up as dead sticks. 37 wine grape plants that will become a part of the vineyard we will start next year up north at our own farm.
I honestly do not know if these are going to do better than the ones I just stuck directly in the ground without soaking in water first.
But they do look pretty.
Here at home the clematis is flowering beautifully.
The Swenson Seedless grapes on the frame in the backyard look good, though of the three I had on there, one died this last winter. No idea why, but the other two there, and the two in other places, all are showing good flower bud clusters.
This is a Bluebell Grape that was a cutting that was packed in potting soil in a ziplock bag in our crisper for two months before going into the ground. One of about 50.
This is a Swenson Seedless, that got the same treatment, and about the same number of those rooting as well.
This is a DM 8521-1 wine grape cutting, of which I have 8, from Dave McGreggor himself. Those spent no time packed in potting soil, and were placed directly in the ground. If there is something to be learned from this, it is that it appears you get earlier leaf emergence if you do. It remains to be seen if they have better or poorer root development.
The dozen Antonovka seedlings I stuck in the garden to do T-Bud grafting of my Kleffman & Cortland apple trees have all shot up to 2 feet tall already. Probably 6 inches of new growth. Looking forward to see if the 13 already placed in the orchard up north are showing similar growth.
We do plan on getting up to the farm this weekend. Weather (up there) has held us back a day as I do not relish camping wet with the family, but it will be limited planting, and cage building (deer protection) when we do get there. Shown above is another gift from Renville Tom. 5 sections of root cuttings from his wild plums.
Might be hard to tell, but that is about 50 seedling Manchurian Apricots from Renville as well.
And last but not least, Renville’s favorite sand cherry, which I had thought had given up the ghost, but is now showing new leaves. Might keep that home until later in the summer to make sure it is going to make it and is strong.
I have a bit over 50 tomato plants in the garden here. Still a lot to get done. Trying to keep my priorities as I have set them, straight with the rest of the demands on our lives.
Last big weekend this year of digging holes. Not a lot of photos for various reasons. One was we misplaced our camera. So I did a weekend without it. Then I bought another one, which was promptly stolen out of the car while parked in a parking lot while I purchased fencing. Last reason is we are working too hard to take many pictures anyway.
So for the last 3 weekends, I have just a few photos, and all from this last week. Pic above is Nell finishing some pruning in one of the ancient apple trees on the property. It appears to be some sort of standard apple tree, though we do not know the variety yet. I thinned it out a lot, as far as I could reach from the ground, with a chainsaw and hand pruner. The last part was not the wisest decision I have ever made. Going through old hardwood with a hand pruner was a bit much for me apparently, as I found afterwards that the strain tore ligaments and tendons in my right wrist, which leaves me a one armed man for a while.
We have been using a trailer to haul things up there, built on an old 1950s front end truck frame, which is nice since we can drive simply highway speed. Lets us haul up bikes so the kids can explore the neighborhood. Different than neighborhoods here, as up there, everyone has 40 or more acres, so everyone is at least a quarter mile away from everyone else.
Kids are getting more daring climbing the windmill. It is about 50 feet to the top, and Phoebe was the first to go all the way up. Claire found her comfort level ended at about 30 feet, Nell kept at it until she was going up to the top on a regular basis.
Every evening has been cozy campfires we cook over, which has been everything from baked pork roasts to fried fish. Daytime the fire is kept going to burn the brush we have been clearing from the old homestead site.
It is starting to get light just after 5 am and apparently that is when my body feels it is time for me to get up, start a fire, and get tea going. Some mornings I am not the only person up that early, but most mornings it is just me, the grouse drumming, and wolf song.
Pike has been along every trip. He even ran a wolf off of the field one morning which scared me a bit as there were more back in the trees, but he circled back when called and did not leave me burying a dog. Have not had the wolves venture that close again yet. Hope they don’t.
We have seen wolves, coyotes, foxes, porcupines, turkeys, deer, ruffed grouse and geese out there so far, along with lots of other various birds and small mammals. No fisher or martins yet. Nor bears, though we have seen their tracks.
Did have a loose horse come to visit. Do not want horses grazing down the 100+ apple and various fruit trees out there, so made a run down to the farm he came from to give him a heads up to come get it.
Each weekend ends with us packing up and heading home, late usually, getting back down to the cities here close to midnight on Sundays. This is the only picture, where in the background, you can really see the sapling fruit trees. Each is marked with another long cut sapling we plan to tie orange flag tape to so when the local farmer comes by to mow for hay, he does not cut down and bale up the trees.
So, right now, about 100+ apples, 9 plums, 3 pears, 12 cherries, 4 apricots, 3 kinds of hops, and 50+ apricot seedlings yet to come. I gave the raspberry crowns back as I cannot get up there for a few weeks. Those bear quickly enough that I am not as concerned about getting those in as I was trees that take 5-6 years to truly start bearing (some longer). I will have more of my own grafted trees to plant there next year as well. Onward and upward. The first year’s main tree planting is done.
So last Friday, Pike, Nell and I headed up north to the property.
We had the Expedition loaded to the gills with 100+ rhubarb crowns, 200 apple trees, and everything we thought we needed for camping.
Original plan was for the whole family to be going, but due to factors beyond our control, things came up which necessitated Patti staying behind and needing help with Violet while she took care of other things.
Things seldom go as planned. I learned that a long time ago. The weekend prior the property had received 18 inches of snow. It had finished melting off the day prior to our arrival. The ground was soaking wet and working with it was difficult.
Nell and I did get 30 hills of rhubarb in, totaling about 70 crowns (depending on size) and about 60 apple trees.
It was good to see the buds pushing on grafts I had made. That means that for now, they have taken and I have a high percentage that were successful.
We did some work on a campsite. Primarily getting a fire pit in that would double as a cooking surface. Involved hauling some rocks, which I was glad to find did not have any permanent detrimental effects on my back. That big one on the right side had me wondering if I had injured myself, but no, things still work fine.
This is the first camping I have done in nearly a decade. Had missed it. Was magical up there. No wolves howling or yotes yipping this time, but grouse were having a competitive drum off around us all night, and was a lot of fun seeing hundreds of woodcock flying around the field at twilight.
We did get 13 Antonovka apple trees in place where we hope they will grow to maturity. They are not large, but will have to be individually caged for some years. I do have a good number of older trees being delivered after this coming weekend and those will be larger, which is going to involve deeper holes and more work, but production on a shorter time frame.
Pike enjoyed two days of running himself silly.
The weekend left me with 140 little trees I still needed to get into the ground for doing more grafting work on later. Monday night I made a trip out to Buffalo Minnesota and Jerid and Katrina Adickes helped me get them into the ground on their farm. Means the grafting work on those will be done down here and the trees moved up to our property at some later point.
We finished those as it was getting dark and rain was starting to fall.
Back home things have gotten nicely warm, so I started putting in tomato plants this week.
Not tons yet, but 17 so far, being three varieties. Rumi Banjan, Terhune, and Lauerer.
Last night as I finished putting some in, the moon rose and I was able to get a good shot of it.
So that is the last 7 days. I will be back up on the property this weekend. Mostly to do chainsaw work and camp with Claire. I am tired, and from looking at the photos I am pretty convinced it is because over the winter I got fat. Hoping that how much we have to get done gets me back into shape.
The Real Farm. 4 Daughters farm.
We got up there Friday at about 6 pm. Plan was to get the 7 acre southwestern field frost seeded in dwarf clover before nightfall. Seeder only planted about 5′ to each side, and the field is a bit more than an 8th of a mile north-south. We finished as it was growing dark. We could hear howling wolves which was pretty cool. When we had first pulled into the property there had been 3 large bucks standing right in the middle near the old homestead. Honestly, I do not need the deer there right now.
Forecast was that Saturday morning was going to be spitting some snow, but above freezing. We thought we would let the kids hang around the hotel with friends at the waterpark, and be back working on the farm on Sunday. The forecast for Sunday was partly cloudy and 40 degrees.
Did not work out that way. Saturday ended up being 2″ of snow, and Sunday was another 6″ of snow. More time at the waterpark.
High winds and temperatures staying above freezing meant the snow was going, and we had used a trailer to haul things up there, so we had to go out to the property on Monday even though we could not run the seeder. On the way in we stopped to talk to Larry (had never met him before, introduced ourselves) and while talking to him, a person who he told us was the farmer who had previously hayed the property drove up. We stopped him as well, talked to him for a bit, but he had to run because he was meeting someone to sell them a truck, but would stop back out at the property around 4 pm. Wanted to talk to us about it.
So we just had a day of playing around.
Other than nights sleeping in the Expedition, Pike had a good time.
I cut up an innocent tree.
Hiked around the perimeter of the property. On the western edge the DNR has cut a road into forested areas of county land which have been logged here and there. Our side is all mature timber. Curiously, you have to cross either our land or the neighbor’s to get to the road they made. There is no street access to it.
That is the gorge down to the sand river, about a quarter of a mile off of the west side of our property.
By 4 pm the snow was gone except for in the woods, and we were done talking to the farmer and on our way home by 6. With stops along the way we got home close to midnight, and thankfully the kids are off this week for spring break, so the only person who had to haul their sorry ass out of bed early on Tuesday was me. My body held up ok. Legs are sore, but no injury for me or anyone else. I will be back up in 2 weeks with Nell and a chainsaw to work on a campsite, and maybe set up the high fence for the area we will drop in the rootstock to see if the grafts took. Onward and upward.
Sorry this is not real current. The peas are up now. Violet and I planted them in the front garden against the fence about 10 days ago.
The milk jug cloches act as mini green houses. Between each cloche is another cluster of seeds which will germinate at a later period. Just gives us a more drawn out harvesting time of the peas. Dwarf Grey Sugarsnap in this case.
She is still a cutie. We also planted chard and kale. With weather like this, there was no reason not to.
So, the next part of our journey starts.
200 Apple root stocks. 150 seedling Antonovka and 50 MM 111 semi-dwarfs. Some of the Antonovka will be allowed to just grow into their own trees. 14 for me, 10 for my friend David for his start on an orchard, and 10 for my friend the Adickes for their start on an orchard. The rest of them are getting grafted into something else. For the MM 111 I will set up 10 for “stooling” which you can google as far as creating more root stock. 3 will go to another friend who wants to do just that for making his own, and the remaining I will graft onto.
box was about 10X20x30. 24 pounds.
That is what it looked like first opened.
Might do a posting on the grafting side of things. Will have to see how it goes. Knowing how to do a thing, and being proficient at a thing, are two vastly different things.
Patti and I had an Adult Day, being that the kids were dropped off with Grandma Nelda and Auntie Cindy at 1030 am, after which we drove 90 miles west to Fairhaven Farm ( see their website at http://fairhaven-farm.com/ ) where we spent the entirety of the afternoon absorbing knowledge in exchange for a case of wine.
Principally, I was learning his past methods of managing semi-dwarf trees for a pick-your-own orchard with fairly intensive planting. I cannot do things exactly the way he has things set up down here, up north where we bought property. Primarily because there are bears up there, and it can get colder, so larger trees are necessary, but the principals of pruning and tree management should be comparable.
Started out with me watching and listening to him, as he worked his way through a Harelson Apple tree, explaining the hows and whys of what he was doing.
Then it was my turn. The tree to the right of the one I am working on, is what his looked like once it was done.
Took me a while. I have to work through the rationale for each cut, (and don’t necessarily make the correct decisions) while when he does it he already knows the why for everything.
After several hours of learning how to manage different types of growth habits (was amazing how differently an apple like Harelson grows compared to Cortland) he gave me a crash course in how to do field grafting of scions.
Here is an example of one of his field grafts from last year. You can see the V shape of the grafting joint where the trunk wood has fused with the scion wood.
Then it was my turn.
No idea if it will take, since this is usually done later in the year, but was good to do while getting pointers about what I was doing correctly, and incorrectly as I worked through it.
Then it was time to concentrate on collecting scion wood for bench grafting. I have 200 apple tree rootstock showing up at my house in less than 2 weeks. Most of it I am going to try to turn into specific varieties of apple. While Dave McGreggor was teaching me pruning techniques I got a bit of wood from those tree varieties, but he has quite a collection. Our pruning work was on Harelson, Cortland and Honeycrisp. He had other varieties for me as well.
Tumanga (German long keeper from around 1930)
Keepsake (U of M introduction in the mid 70s, great eating and long keeping apple)
Alkmene (Early Windsor)
Kindercrisp (an apple Dave McGreggor developed himself, which you can now find at select nurseries)
Clivia (Developed in Germany about 55 years ago)
Fantasia (Cold hardy variety from Switzerland)
Karmijn de Sonnaville (I was really interested in this one. I have tried a lot of apples in my time, but this one knocked my socks off last fall. Not a long keeper, being needs to be eaten within 6 weeks of picking, but absolutely incredible. Puts Honeycrisp to shame. Commercial viability is limited due to short storage life. From the Netherlands where it is considered the best of the eating apples.)
So 10 different types of apples, for most of them enough wood to make at least 20 trees. Of the more rare types, at least a couple.
Dave McGreggor also has the distinction of having bred, years ago, one of the most disease resistant cold hardy red wine grapes. You can google search it as DM 8521-1. He gave me nearly a dozen cuttings of that for growing up there as well.
Just showing all of the scion wood of the 10 apple and wine grape.
We all finished the day at the Spilled Grain Brew House in Annandale. I will personally attest to the wonderfullness of their Highest Point IPA. The place is set up to only serve beer brewed on site, but you are welcome to bring anything you want to eat. If you are making a trip west of the cities on 55, I do recommend stopping in there for a pint or three.
*****
As per Patti’s request: this is the mop springer that followed us out there the whole day. Deaf as a post, just wanted to be near us. Sweet dog.
It warmed up. Fast. We went from daytime highs below 0 degrees F, to 50 and rain inside of a week. Lake Minnetonka has turned into a slush covered mess, and the snowpack in our yards is compacted ice. Last night I figured I should do a test tap on the big maple in our yard just in case they had started running. Glad I did. Took the time to get all of the trees in our yard tapped after that drip drip drip started as soon as the spile was driven.
It was nice to wake up this morning and find that there were a few inches of sap in the buckets too. They did not fill up overnight, as they will when it really gets going, but with the extended forecast showing freeze-thaw cycles every day into March, this could be a really good sugar run on the trees.
This morning I was up early to get to work on the grape vines. I have two varieties in my yard here. Bluebell and Swenson’s Seedless. We are going to try propagating them out for plants we can move up to the property we bought this last summer. Hoping for 40 strong plants by fall. Vines needed pruning anyway as that is an annual thing that just needs doing.
Nell had the camera so I ended up in a lot of the shots, which is a change. She is better looking than I am, but this morning she was wearing her pajamas, crocks on bare feet, and a stocking cap and jacket. So probably better I was the one being photographed.
With the vine cuttings I wanted 8-12″ pieces without winter damage, and at least two buds. The lower buds set roots, and the upper buds will push out leaves (hopefully). They are sorted and soaking in 2 gallon ziplock backs in the sink right now. This evening I will pack the lower side of the bags with peat moss and root growth hormone, and then those bags will be placed into another bag and they go into the fridge until the ground thaws out.
The fridge is filling up with things. I have apple wood scion cuttings for grafting new trees wrapped in wet paper towels and sealed in bags, filling about half of the crisper drawer. Next weekend I am making another trip to an orchard to gather more of some specific varieties. Around March 10th there will be delivered 150 Antonovka apple trees which are used both as a standard root stock and make a nice apple all on their own, with the great benefit of being able to handle temperatures down to -50 f. With that order will also be 50 MM 111 rootstock, a semi-dwarfing rootstock that can handle cold, and will produce apples in fewer years than a standard. Downside to those is that trees grafted to those root stocks do not live as long. Long term plan is to make about 30 trees from those, and to use the other root stocks to create a more commercial type orchard on the northern half of the property up north. The 150 standards will become a permanent orchard, being it will outlive me, my kids, and hopefully well into several generations in the future. This is the year we really start work on our forever home/legacy/future for the kids, with the kids. And we are all really excited about it.
I have not posted since November. Primary reason is that garden things were pretty much done, hunting was done, and I have posted before about the things we were doing, which in December is primarily eating the things we grew/caught/killed prior to that month.
So here we are in a new year, and what am I doing? Still making jellies and fruit preserves. This is not one day’s work in the picture above, but is about half of what I have done, and does not include all that was given away for holiday presents. We got a lot of cherry preserves done, along with a wonderful hot pepper/sour cherry jelly which is already nearly gone, after giving away most of that as gifts. (people expect it)
As an FYI, 8 lemon drop peppers pureed into a standard batch of sour cherry jelly. Cherries were a mix of Nanking and North Star.
I have about 2 gallons of fruit and purees to work through yet, so maybe another 24 pints to go. Will end the year with about 60 pints put away, which I feel is a good amount, even if I was a bit late finishing it up.
Fruit list is as follows: Sour Cherries, Wild Blueberries, Strawberries, Blackberries, Raspberries, Currants, Raspberries, and Mangoes (they were on sale and I could not resist)
