Field trip to Shady Grove Farm

Loads of great garden ideas were shared by our host, Susi Palmrose, a former Master Gardener.  She's started up a beautiful vegetable garden complete with a small orchard, large raspberry hedge, goat and sheep pasture, bee hives, mason bee house, and plenty of beautiful flowering perennials to keep the pollinators happy.  She showed us her root cellar where she also keeps her freshly made goat cheese.

She grows hops on a trellis that can be easily lowered with a winch for harvest.

There was also a solar dehydrator made from a kit.  That will be very handy come harvest season!

She had planted a strawberry patch on a hugelkultur bed.  This is a great way to put woody debris to work for your garden.  If you're not familiar with the practice, this is the basics of how it is done:  first a trench is dug then logs or other woody debris is laid down.  Compostable materials such as leaves, kitchen scraps, and grass clippings can be added next.  Then cover all of that with the reserved soil from your trench.  Water well and you have a new planting bed!  Plenty of mulch is always a good idea, but especially with taller hugelkultur beds, to prevent erosion of all your hard work.  As the woody debris decomposes, it releases nutrients and moisture, with larger logs releasing it more slowly.  Be aware that initially, all that woody material could encourage soil microbes to tie up bit of nitrogen, so a little composted manure or other fairly high nitrogen amendments would be very helpful for your first planting. Susi says if she were to do it again, she'd dig a deeper trench first, so that she had more soil to put over the top.