2010: Your Goals

[TimSaupe]

Since we're all eagerly looking forward to the spring and planning for our gardens I thought to start a thread where we list what our goals are. We could then refer to it throughout the year and track our progress and share what we're doing.

My goals for 2010:

• I just read an excerpt from Tallamy's Bringing Nature Home (how I don't own this is beyond me) and he pointed out that the 'nature' I may have been defending all this time on the other side of our fence and beyond the creek may in fact be overrun with aliens. So, as soon as things start to go green my wife may get her wish and I will head into the brush on a seek and destroy mission: if it's native it stays, if it's not it's gone.

• Add a block patio to the Habitat, removing a chunk of lawn.

• Plant a native shade garden.

• Expand the butterfly garden and offer fruit.

• Place a chickadee house that I received as a Christmas gift.

• Possibly add another feeding station for woodpeckers and use an anti-squirrel feeder.

• Add a hummingbird feeder to handle traffic before my Monarda, Lonicera and Lobelia come into bloom.

• Plant raised bed gardens for fruit and vegetables for the kids

That's all for now; a good full year of things to do What are your plans?

[hazelnut]

Ha. Ha. I am reading this without my glasses and I read it as "Your Goats". O.K. That is one of my goals this year to get some goats and get the invasives on my placed cleaned up.

[TimSaupe]

I would love to own a few dwarf goats - maybe they would keep our dog in line . . .

[hazelnut]

When I did have the goat here, she did keep my border collie in line. Every time the dog tried to dominate the goat she would lower her head and but the dog with her horns. The goat definitely was the queen of the property. Her favorite thing to do was tip over a 55 g. drum and ride it all accross the back yard by keeping it rolling with her feet. She eventually ate all the scrub bushes I had around the property and got down to wisteria and camellias, both of which are poisonous to goats. A vomiting goat is no fun at all. I had to give her up.

[Equilibrium]

First up for me is building a chicken tractor and having a line of electric run to it. Next up is going to the county fair and buying some chickens. I am undecided on whether I want 3 or 5 based on comments made by backwoods. Then I need to work on a raised bed vegetable garden that is fully enclosed following Quietman's example. I'd like this year to be the year the raised bed is completed but I've been having trouble getting my hands on the materials and am on a waiting list of all things for boards in the lengths I need. Go figure... if that isn't the equivalent of being all dressed up with nowhere to go... I don't know what is. After that I am going to focus on starting and finishing a vermicomposter, removing another 1/4 acre of phragmites, purchasing the native plants I couldn't get my hands on last year for several round planters, buying and planting another Honey Crisp apple, constructing another wood pile, increasing existing brush piles, increasing the expanse of my slate pile, removing all buckthorn stumps that didn't resucker, reducing more of my lawn, adding a vulture feeding platform on the north side of the house, learn how to use my pressure canner to put up beans, do more research on adding solar panels to our house, spot checking for garlic mustard, mechanically pulling the Norway maple and burning bush and Siberian dogwood seedlings coming from the neighbors' plants, and taking an inventory of what's native that made it. I keep saying I'm going to take an inventory and never get to it... maybe this will be the year I really do it. I've had heavy losses from the honeysuckles that weren't removed in a timely manner. Hindsight is always 20/20... I should have gone for the Asian honeysuckles first instead of the thousands of buckthorns that were here. The buckthorn isn't allelopathic like the garlic mustard and honeysuckle. I'm sure I'll get side tracked removing more buckthorn seedlings and saplings... I always do. Thank God there are no more fruiting mature buckthorns on this property. The buckthorn was almost the death of me. I removed thousands. Oh ya, I want to meet the shroom man... jpdenk and the creator of the gnome home... Gloria. They both live within a few hours of me.

[TimSaupe]

Gardening! Doggone it, I have to add *that one* to my own list, I forgot about the raised bed veg/fruit gardens I have to do for the wife and kids!

A vulture platform?!? Now that would be cool - we have plenty of turkey vultures around. What would you place on this to attract vultures? House sparrow corpses?

[Equilibrium]

I know I forgot lots of little things... like starting tomatoes. House sparrows AND starlings can be dispatched and plopped into little ziplock baggies to make frozen Swanson TV (nyuk nyuk nyuk) dinners. My husband does the dispatching and I do the bagging. When we have a surplus, I take them to the rehab center which was an education in itself for our boys. You can put roadkill up on a platform too or toss it out on the ground. My neighbor puts it on a platform. He's the one I got the idea from. He has a TV feedling plat form. I keep tall kitchen garbage bags, a shovel, and gloves in my trunk to bring home TV treats. Leave the road kill where it is and the crews come and "beautify" our roads removing it so it goes to waste unless you claim it. Won't your wife love that you ran into me the first time you come home with a cat reduced to a postage size thickness on the road to toss out into your yard or to hoist up onto a platform for TVs. You'll be a hero to your kids the first time they see a TV land to feed. Hint... you can use an apple picker to hoist lighter weight road kill up to a platform without having to touch it. We toss out whole turkeys after we're done eating them. The TVs pick at what's left and then the little critters of the woods use the bones to keep their teeth in check. There's nothing left of a turkey or chicken in a month after it's tossed out into the woods. Waste not want not!!!

[hazelnut]

Rasied beds. Yes. Me too. I found a garage sale where a guy tore down a cement block wall. The blocks were just stacked so there is not much cement to clean up. I brought all I could and had them dumped in my yard. Now I have to stack them all on my little green wagon and move them to the back yard for my raised beds.

Henry Rabbit has been busy mixing rabbit poop, shredded junk mail, timothy hay and sprinklings of his alfalfa pellets. All of this goes in the beds along with pine bark mulch and cut down saplings of invasives in the bottom of the beds.

[TimSaupe]

Equi - actual conversation just moments ago with my wife:

"So, there's someone on the board that is putting up a feeding platform for turkey vultures! Wouldn't that be -"

"No - don't even think about it."

Darn wife - she's always holding me back

hazelnut - I'm going to have to get educated on raised beds really quick methinks . . .

[hazelnut]

TimSaupe: Here's a start. No till gardening.

No-till Gardening: Sustainable Alternative to the Rototiller

And you can search "Lasagna Gardening". The potato barrels in the above article are a great way to grow potatoes though. I have just discovered Yukon Gold and there is an Adirondak Blue that I will also grow if I can find it. I am making these into potato chips in my dehydrator.

And here is a video to go with it.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer...01754864235132