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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.

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The orchard, year two

We’re continuing to build the orchard this year, adding four more apple trees and 3 cherry trees.

orchard1

The apple varieties for this year are:
Northern Spy
Wickson Crab
Newtown Pippin
Golden Russet

Most have multiple uses, but the primary purpose of these is to provide blending options for hard and sweet cider. Despite the tough skin, I really like the taste of the various Russets I’ve tried. Northern Spy is quite nice as well, although it takes a long time to start fruiting. Once it does though, these trees can last 100 or more years if they take off and find a good growing environment.

Orchard2

The cherries we got are some basic sour varieties:
Morello
Montmorency

There are a couple reasons we want cherries. Besides the obvious use in pies, we also like making our own maraschino cherries for Manhattans, Old Fashioneds, etc and eventually I would like to try using cherries in sour beers. We are also getting a sweet cherry separately from a local nursery that is a bit older and should start bearing a little sooner. That will be mainly for fresh eating and juice.

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First hatch

This spring we decided to try to hatch some of our own eggs since it turned out we had a rooster. Looks like we’ll end up with 9 chicks out of 16 eggs, which isn’t too bad. We might have gotten a couple more, but we had a power outage of all times right on hatch day. It was only for about 40 minutes, so I think the humidity stayed okay, but the temp might have dropped a bit too much. Can’t tell for sure. Could also be those chicks just weren’t viable to begin with.

What I didn’t realize with our Cuckoo Maran rooster is that all the chicks will have some bar/cuckoo patterning, so it’s going to be very hard to tell them apart. Hopefully as they get older and get their true feathers, there will be some distinctions. But we definitely didn’t get any of the stereotypical fuzzy yellow chicks. I still think they are really cool looking though.

ChicksDayOnetoTwo

We are hoping to get at least one or two “Olive Egger” hens out of this, since we crossed the Maran (which has dark brown eggs) with our three blue egg layers (two Araucana, 1 Lavender Ameraucana). That cross should give us some type of dark green egg.

As far as the roosters, we’ll probably throw them out on pasture and then they will be headed for freezer vacation. In the meantime I need to learn how to butcher my own chickens from someone around here.