It has been amazing to look at the forecast and see that e v e r y day is the exact same. I especially love it when it’s supposed to rain the least on the day of the farmers market and then Friday night rolls around and now there’s a 90% chance with 10mph winds for Saturday.
I know bitching about the rain is kind of silly because my garden and surrounding woods have been finally thriving now that it’s be consistently warm. And considering there’s serious droughts cooking folks down in Texas and such, our dreary weather doesn’t seems so bad. However, I will continue to complain in the next few paragraphs~
We have finally drafted and agreed on our backyard hugelkultur build and I have been itching to get the tractor back to tractor-ing. Last week, Mike and I spent a buggy evening measuring and spraying out the general shapes of the hugelkultur beds and where the patio and paths would fit in between them. Seeing our plan on paper was fun but seeing it start to physically manifest itself in gravel was even more exciting~
Half these lines I started with are now gone, a general shape is forming. In a few hours I was able to dig out the shape of the top right bed, fill it with a bunch of brush and downed trees around the yard and piled more soil/clay (and gravel too tbh, this shit is literally everywhere~).
I then moved onto the top left bed that was pre-dug from when I yanked out a stump or three and several large stones.
After cooking myself most of the day, I retired the tractor and did a couple little things I had the energy for. That big-ass boulder is staying where it’s at, hence the sunbaked mosses and lichen, so I’m using all the the rocks I’ve been unearthing to outline a rock garden. Making this location a hugelkultur mound is a bit challenging but I think it’ll be a fun way to fill a weird space with a bunch of herbs and creeping plants. I imagine as I establish a proper garden out here, that rock may get another coat of moss which would be extra fun~
There was some work I was able to get done today, since this past week has been another wash and I’ve been able to make very little progress. Which sucks! I have so many plants ready to spread their roots and their homes aren’t built yet and summer is just chugging along. I’m really hoping I can get this finished this season cause it would be such a relief to get an honest-to-Dog full grow season here on the homestead. I made progress today though, adding a ton of great mushy downed limbs, some mosses and huge roots from trees further in the woods. I will say this hugel project is a great excuse to use all the downed brush from the winter, not that I think we’ll be at a fire risk this summer, but it’s a chore that’ll serve me and Mike and our silly homestead in the coming years~