The Summer was amazing, mostly due to the experience of seeing all our plants, bugs, and fungi doing their exuberant Summer-thing: growing and multiplying. Some plants shot into the air. Others hung out more or less their initial size, but hopefully growing taproots or something to boost them more next year.
There is so much to share; here are just few before-and-after pairs to get started.
Orchard rows
May: Baby pear tree with its ring of chives and garlic to keep away voles and vampires, and baby comfrey. September: Pear grew more than a foot, giant comfrey, and strawberries everywhere.
Strawberry beds
September: grown-in double strawberry rows in rich soil (lots of worms and fungi!), with drip irrigation, and wood chip paths. Dana and me doing the monthly strawberry bed cleaning and weeding.May: Newspaper sheet mulch with manure and amendments beneath it, and tiny strawberry plants marked with sticks.
Paw-paw grove
April: Izzy, John, and Ruby come for a day of sheetmulching around the baby paw-paw trees, and ostrich ferns transplanted from the back-forest.September: the paw-paw grove with ferns, violets, currants, purple swamp milkweed, pine piles (amended with ashes to decrease acidity), and still-tiny paw-paw trees.
Hugel-kulturs
April: piles of logs from the trees we removed to make space for hazelnuts and honey locust trees on the back hill.September: logs incorporated into a big hugelkultur at the bottom of the hill to absorb run-off and act as water reservoir.
Pathways
Making a pathway to the back in AprilSame pathway going all the way back to the compost, with the new trellis for raspberries, New England Aster in bloom
Big Foot Food Forest Gardens 