Orchard Planting

Planting fruit trees is a long term investment. It's a sort of act of faith, and a gesture of commitment to your location. It's a declaration of your intention to settle down. I ordered our fruit trees as soon as our bid on the house was accepted. All twelve trees in the "orchard" are semi dwarf, and we also planted 4 dwarf citrus in a separate area near the house. We have (in addition to two orange, a lemon and a lime) almond, cherry, fig, peach, nectarine, pear, plum, apricot, pluot and three apples. We also planted two hundred daffodils beneath the trees just for fun. Since I was still in a "delicate" state, our friends again came to our rescue with the understanding that if the doctor gave the the OK to have the baby at the last minute, I would run the machinery alone to bring on labor, and they could all just go inside and boil water or something.

Herb garden construction, or: Will work for beer

You can plant an herb garden just about anywhere, and it's fantastically rewarding. I have had good luck in the past making raised beds out of salvaged cinder blocks. I haven't needed to reinforce the beds with concrete or rebar, and a little rosemary planted in the holes around the edge looks snappy! In this case I decided to go big and indulge my love of formal French gardens with their swanky geometric lay outs. I decided on eight beds, two blocks deep, lined with gopher wire, and arranged around a central fountain. It looked good on paper.

You know what will throw a kink into the best laid garden construction plan? A rapidly growing fetus in your lower abdomen, and repeated admonitions from your doctor to STOP picking up heavy stuff. Fortunately people love coming to the rescue of pregnant ladies; And they love beer. We got our six or seven hundred cinder blocks arranged in about four hours, thanks to our amazing friends and the genius of work parties.

Now we begin the process of building soil in the beds through lasagna gardening and cover cropping. And hey - it looks good in person too!

Tree removal ("why did they have to die?!")

The lot has many (non native) trees that interfere with sunlight, so we hired a permaculture design specialist from Terra Nova to talk to us about which trees to remove and how to control topsoil erosion. We're now in the process of removing the trees, which looks ghastly but will ultimately be both pleasant to look at and environmentally responsible. I have received some push back regarding the "murder" of the trees (I love you Santa Cruz!). But while the intentions of the tree people are virtuous, their understanding of the alternative (murdered trees elsewhere, and food shipped with fossil fuel) is flawed. I briefly considered posting a clever diagram about carbon footprint, but it turned out to be unnecessary . As word of our plans for an organic garden* spread through the neighborhood, the positive feedback began to roll in.

*We don't use the word "farm" with the neighbors yet - too scary. After we have won them over with beautiful flowers and free produce, we'll be able to use the F-word.

In the beginning..

We purchased our house and 2/3 acre in January 2011 after 3 years of scouring the real estate listings each week. We wanted enough space and light to produce our own food, but we didn't want to leave the area and the people we love. Finally we found "the one," and got our little place in the Santa Cruz mountains. Our area has an active Transition community, and we're walking distance from friends, a seasonal farmers market, and the small community garden that we coordinate.

Welcome

I'll be blogging about our family's experiments in home-scale, sustainable, subsistence farming. We're embarking on this little adventure for a whole slew of reasons ranging from simple pleasure to social and environmental responsibility. I'm hoping to keep the content here practical rather than political - what we build, grow and raise, what works and what doesn't. But suffice it to say that while I am not a doomer, I am also not a fool. For our family, consuming to the point of necessitating the deprivation of others (now or in the future) felt irresponsible, and I suspect that change is coming whether we adapt to it gracefully or not.