This past weekend Dom, Anthony, Noah and I finished some major projects we’ve been working on. It has taken about three weekends to fill the pond and grade it to make it ready for planting. The photo above is the finished product.
Even though it is no longer a pond area, it will be an amazing area for passively harvesting water and holding it for watering trees that will be planted in the area.
Here’s what the pond area looked like before it was filled in:
I miss Dom’s big fluffy beard and long wild man hair. I can’t wait till he grows it back again! The area just behind him was also removed and graded. The wood was breaking apart and splitting from the sun. The sun down here is so intense that it pretty much shredded up pressure treated wood in just under three years.
Early Saturday morning Dom and I finished topping off the pond, and when the boys woke up they came out and joined us. Noah hauled dirt to grade the front of the concrete, while Anthony helped me layer the no-till garden beds in the north west quadrant:
Six beds were topped off with two more layers of straw and aged manure. We were thrilled to see the abundance of earthworms that somehow managed to make it into our garden last year and take up residence in our north west quadrant. We never put them in there…they just showed up and decided to stay. Lately they’ve been migrating all the way up to the front porch and hanging out near our compost bucket. Ya think they were hungry? LOL Anyway, they’ll have lots of good stuff to feast on with all the new additions to the garden.
Dom put the gate back up so the chickens and ducks can’t get into the garden. We kept it off all last year because the ducks and chickens weren’t adventurous enough to explore other parts of the property, but now that they love rummaging through the garden beds finding worms and bugs, we’ve had to remove them. Dom forgot to close the gate on Saturday night after we laid all the beds, and Sunday morning when we took a walk in the early morning, we saw the chickens and ducks sticking their heads up from the beds. The chickens did some minor damage to one of the garden beds, but it wasn’t too bad.
Everything is starting to bud or blossom
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We are seeing some blossoms on the apple trees we put in recently – yay!
Congrats on all you got done!
What kind of apple trees? We still haven’t seen any blossoms on ours yet. We have Golden delicious, Anna (just budding), Fuji, Jonathan, Granny Smith, two varieties of crab apple. I can’t wait to see them blossom this year. Last year the granny smith blossoms were devoured by aphids and they never set fruit.