Stacking wood, gardening, foraging and nature stuff!
Since we moved to Nova Scotia and finally have a huge space for a garden we have been taking advantage of the sunny days to get as much yardwork done as possible. Since we have a wood stove and want to use it to heat next winter as much as possible we ordered 3 cords of wood last Thursday. Since then we have been figuring out the best way to deal with it.
When the pile came it looked like this:
It was pretty tough work, there were tons of FLIES attacking us and thank goodness I wore gloves, both of us managed to destroy a pair of leather ones in the process.
I had to stop and appreciate the beauty of the wood once in a while, isn't nature amazing?
Once all the wood was stacked there were massive piles of bark and small bits of wood that I scraped up by hand and used to add all around our work table to hopefully suffocate the grass so we can work in pot plants and seedlings in peace without so many ticks bothering us :/
I also used a lot of the wood shavings and bark to line the pathways of another garden bed (not pictured here) to make a kind of lazy compost!
We have 7 garden beds all ready to go, no dig style, we managed to get a few things in the ground, snap peas, green beans, potato, garlic, onion and sunflowers. It should be well past the last frost but the weather is quite a gamble here. Hopefully over the next week or 2 we will get the rest of our seedlings outside.
I also direct seeded chives, dill and parsley as a barrier around the edges to hopefully satisfy / deter the slugs?
The foraging here has been interesting as there are lots of plants already growing on the property. There are wild strawberries literally everywhere, so many that I can't stop walking all over them. We uprooted a few batches and potted them and will do an experiment to see if they do any better or if it's best to just leave them where they were:
We also found a huge bunch of chives and divided them, left half in the original location and planted the other half in a garden bed. I am waiting for some of these flowers to pop so I can harvest more seeds!
We have a big blackberry bush around back and a few smaller ones scattered around the property, buds are just starting to popup:
We have fern fiddleheads everywhere as well, they may be the poisonous kind so I am not chancing it but they are pretty! Last time I had checked they were kind of furry which led me to that conclusion but undetermined.
The most interesting forage discovery is SPRUCE TIPS! I had no idea these were edible and they are everywhere here! They are the new growth in spring on the tips of spruce trees:
They are apparently only available for a short time in spring, they have a nice taste, like spruce tree but with a lemony taste, I made some tea with them. I will forage a few bags to freeze for the year.
Apparently these red cones full of pollen are edible too but I haven't tried those yet.
Another cool thing I found I believe is a rhubarb, I looked through some identification sites and it doesn't appear to be burdock or skunk cabbage, it's quite small so I'll leave it for now and investigate later!
Last up is ginger. I was walking nest to the road with my mother a while back and found these and pulled them up.
I replanted them in a wild area of our yard that is a bit boggy and similar to the area where I found them and the other day I noticed that I have three huge sprouts. They have been doing well with 0 intervention or watering so I'm pretty pleased about that!
Excited to see if these flower and how big the roots get :)
We also have a lot of mystery plants around, the owner of this place made a perennial garden around the back, supposed to be blueberries and some other stuff. What I can spot are bleeding hearts, and maybe forget me nots?
This is farmer Julia, signing off, will be back to the art content soon :D
To follow on twitter, personal account, Alien Community account <3
WOW! What amazing edible plant finds you are discovering on your farm.
Yeah it's pretty incredible I wasn't expecting to find so much already here! The spruce tips are especially surprising because they are literally everywhere lol
Farmer Julia looks happy :^)
I enjoy reading - and seeing - all of this. You're doing great and it sounds like a lovely place.
Abraço
Loving it here, I was just walking around and may have found an apple tree!
Awesome, I have one here too and it has a couple of baby apples.
I'm just not sure whether I'll still be at this place when they'll be ripe, as I'm renting and the owners seem to want to sell this house and land, in the near future.
I didn't know that. Bummer. But at least you can tend the garden ready for next tenant...
Maybe you can get an apple or two for the road
Oh wow this is so exciting for you. Certainly looks wildly abundant.
I love a good winter stack of wood.. must be the 🐿️ squirrel in me. It's so satisfying.
It was definitely weirdly satisfying to stack, like playing Tetris lol, it smelled really great too 😊
The more human side to the most amazing Alien I know <3
Your diversity never stops amazing me.
I'd like to believe that I am rubbing off on people when I start seeing more and more people live off the land, plant & forage and all those fun stuff, I mean even r0n started a garden... Now I know that it's not a realistic belief - but that's my story and I am sticking to it 😂
Love you long time!!!
Definitely rubbed off, between you and Mcg how can I resist 😂❤️
Farmer Julia is a boss!
I was so confused why you are listed as a MOD then I remembered I posted this in the blessed lettuce community, I guess I made everyone a mod 😂
Well, Good for you! At my age, I'm really glad it's you not me-but that doesn't mean I'm not jealous. Seriously jealous. I'll hope for lots of reports from the 'frontier'.
I don't know with all of it, but that is Rhubarb. When I was just a kid the first job I remember was tending my grandmother's Rhubarb. She had a little patch at our place (right at the corner of the bunkhouse where there was water available). Anyway, I have a good feel for Rhubarb.
Periwinkle. The bluish flower. It makes a great ground cover and will tend to take over an area...
Oh. Head for a tractor store (in Nova Scotia?) and get deer or elk skin work gloves. They will last 10 to 100 x your dress gloves. A real secret is that you can turn them inside out and get the seams outside for the comfort. If what your doing isn't to needful of being tactile. Like piloting a hoe or riding a horse (or motorcycle).
I'm just getting ready to take Sam for his morning romp in the desert. I spray him with a mixture of lemongrass and eucalyptus oils. It REALLY helps with the ticks. There are several commercial mixes available (Amazon among others) and I also have the raw oil to mix (with water) myself.
Let the record show that Sam doesn't like being sprayed. He doesn't understand the benefits after we are out of the house, but I know that it works. Sam's other Dad used it on him the last summer he spent in Wisconsin. Erv dropped the ticks he plucked off Sam into a pop bottle with water in it and kept it for the whole season. The last summer there were notably less ticks in the bottle-the difference being using the spray.
You're the second person to recommend elk gloves, I really need to look into these! We do have a lemongrass tick repellant but to date I'm not sure it works very well because some days I wear it and some I don't and I haven't noticed a bitlg difference, maybe it just isn't very strong 🤔 I'd like to plant a lot more herbs directly in the yard, wondering if that might have some impact but maybe if they aren't concentrated it won't matter, but at least I'll have more herbs lol.
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Wonderful. We are thinking of selling our house in Ontario and moving out to Cape Breton Island.
Cape Breton is so pretty and the real estate seems to be a bit cheaper than closer to Halifax 💯
I found some land there for Free.
Oh wow, even better!
Good one friend.. you brought back my old days memories with this pictures you posted
Great work Julia, keep it up.
Lots of lettuces here, and one or two already going to seed, so they should have babies and be ready to eat again this year. i put lots of lettuce in my smoothie each morning, along with whatever is available, like melissa, dock, stinging nettles etc, + dates and banana and cacao usually :-)
i'll keep my out for some Spruce tips here.
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Wow! That's amazing dear! Is it cold in your place right now? How I wish that my place is the same as yours...
depends what you call cold, this time of year it's anywhere from 10 - 20 C during the day, can get kind of chilly at night :)
Oh my! How is the planting during that season? Do you have of what they called Green House?
We have a very tiny greenhouse outside for hardening off the plants, we also put some in the woodshed to get used to the cold a bit, they seem to be doing well :)
That was great! ^_^
Wow, that's nice!!! Congrats, we love this kind of project =)
Really inspiring!
Thank you!
I'm an avid forager myself and envy you your wild ginger. It's always great to read about what other folks forage in their area.
I couldn't believe I found that ginger TBH, I was waiting for my mother to grab some things from the car and looked down and saw it right away lol, very lucky because it didn't even have shoots
If it happens again, put a ticket in the lottery straight away!
I'm a little jealous of the wild ginger, omgosh.
And we use a combination of crushed egg shells and coffee grounds around some of the flowers and at the base of our garden beds to deter the slugs, but the BEST and by far the most interesting (smelly) trap for slugs is a small bowl of beer! They crawl into it and drown.
Lil monsters.