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Before and After: From Back Deck

I thought it would be fun to start a short little series of before and after shots of various parts of our property. Unfortunately, I don’t have good before shots for everything. But I have some cool ones to compare.

Here is the first one, a shot from our back deck looking back over the northwest corner of our property. Not the most interesting one, but some cool things happening never the less.

DeckOverMound

The before shot does have a cool rainbow going for it.

Here is the after shot, taken yesterday.

DeckOverMoundAfter

Biggest impact change is the solar panels of course. You can also see some hop poles along the edge of the yard. The t-posts in the back corner are where the raspberries are planted. We moved our raised beds over to this side of the garden and added a few. Btw, the gas grill is relatively new too. After many years of being a charcoal only purist, I finally gave in to the convenience that is a gas grill. Don’t worry, still using charcoal to grill and smoke stuff some of the time.

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Red, green and blue

After a very nice May for the most part, June has been nothing but rain. Sometimes terrible torrential downpours, sometimes just annoying bursts here and there to ruin the day. I hate to complain about water when other parts of the country are dry, but my plants are drowning over here. It’s a good thing we put in the swales in May or it would be even worse.

In spite of all that, we are somehow getting our first crop of the sweetest strawberries we could hope for.

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Don’t blink, you’ll miss them.

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At least the cooler weather plants like it. The greens are going nuts.

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Greens2

Onions seem much happier in a raised bed than in the garden, to no one’s great surprise.

onions

The hops have already made it nearly to the first wooden support.

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The fifteen raspberry plants all made it and are getting plenty of leaves now. Here are 10 of them, they are even bigger today.

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And finally a view of the orchard, where all of the trees seem to be relatively happy so far and surviving the onslaught of water.

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Snapshot of the seedlings on Sunday, May 17

Current state of some pumpkin, cucumber and squash seedlings, automatically posted from my Raspberry Pi 2

 

Edit: As you can see, the grow rack is emptying out. Everything is moved to the greenhouse now, so time to find something else to time lapse.

 

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Fixing some drainage issues

Our property has the opposite problem that California is facing right now, particularly in the spring. We get way too much water flowing over our property from snow melt and other run-off further up the slopes on the south and west sides of the property. At times in the spring we probably have 5-6 distinct streams running across various parts of the property, including right into the driveway. So we are constantly struggling with erosion and washout in our drive and the gardens stay wet for a long time. If we could even get them dried out a week or two earlier, we could get our cool season planting like peas, potatoes and brassicas done much sooner.

Excavate

So part of our landscape design is to build in some swales to help direct the water better. It’s not an insignificant expense and there are other things that would be more fun to spend the money on, but we’re hoping this work will pay dividends for years to come. Today our excavator is starting the work, so excited to see what kind of difference it makes. The main difference won’t be apparent until next spring, but even during big rain storms we sometimes have a limited version of the issues. So it should help with the drainage in general.