Big Foot Grew!

The Summer was amazing, mostly due to the experience of seeing all our plants, bugs, and fungi doing their exuberant Summer-thing: growing and multiplying.  Some plants shot into the air.  Others hung out more or less their initial size, but hopefully growing taproots or something to boost them more next year.
​    There is so much to share; here are just few before-and-after pairs to get started.

May: Baby pear tree with its ring of chives and garlic to keep away voles and vampires, and baby comfrey.

September: Pear grew more than a foot, giant comfrey, and strawberries everywhere.

May: Newspaper sheet mulch with manure and amendments beneath it, and tiny strawberry plants marked with sticks

September: grown-in double strawberry rows in rich soil (lots of worms and fungi!), with drip irrigation, and wood chip paths. Dana and me doing the monthly strawberry bed cleaning and weeding.

April: Izzy, John, and Ruby come for a day of sheetmulching around the baby paw-paw trees, and ostrich ferns transplanted from the back-forest.

September: the paw-paw grove with ferns, violets, currants, purple swamp milkweed, pine piles (amended with ashes to decrease acidity), and still-tiny paw-paw trees.

​April: piles of logs from the trees we removed to make space for hazelnuts and honey locust trees on the back hill.

September: logs incorporated into a big hugelkultur at the bottom of the hill to absorb run-off and act as water reservoir.

Making a pathway to the back in April

Same pathway going all the way back to the compost, with the new trellis for raspberries, New England Aster in bloom