The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Expanding a tree mound

Expanding a tree's raised bed moundMy kitchen forest garden island gets all the love while the peach tree just one year younger is out of sight and out of mind.  No wonder my favorite peach's younger sister has a canopy spread barely half the width of my darling kitchen peach.

I decided to begin to remedy matters by expanding the little sister's raised bed.  I wheelbarrowed some partially decomposed weeds from the compost pile in the chicken pasture to line one of the bed's edges, then added another wheelbarrow load of deep bedding, lightly sprinkled atop the soil all around.

Newspaper kill mulchMeanwhile, I ripped up the mushroom rafts (which I wasn't very pleased with) and rearranged the aging logs in a big square around the peach.  A friend and I weeded the areas that were mulched last year, then I laid down a newspaper kill mulch atop the parts of the square that were lawn.  (I would have preferred corrugated cardboard to newspaper, but you have to use what you've got.  Mom kindly saved all of these newspapers to be firestarters, and I never ended up burning them since I had too much junk mail.)

Mulched tree bed

Finally, I topped it all off with leaves and promised little sister peach to pay more attention to her needs.  With fruit trees, you don't really see the full results of your actions until two seasons later, so I'll be waiting for baskets of peaches in the summer of 2013.

Are you starting baby chicks?  Our chicken waterer keeps them from drowning during the toddler stage.


Anna Hess's books
Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.


I love the way you lay your land. :)

So beautiful!

Comment by Maggie Tue Feb 7 10:08:14 2012
Not that you're the ignored little sister peach.... :-)
Comment by anna Tue Feb 7 10:22:31 2012
Me?

Either way. Sounds like some good attention was headed her way.

:)

Comment by Maggie Tue Feb 7 10:35:21 2012
Yup, and now off to take care of the real little sister peach who's only been in the ground a year.
Comment by anna Tue Feb 7 12:44:36 2012





profile counter myspace



Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.

Required disclosures:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn a few pennies every time you buy something using one of my affiliate links. Don't worry, though --- I only recommend products I thoroughly stand behind!

Also, this site has Google ads on it. Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to a website. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to various sites. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting this site.