Long catkins

The asparagus soil is duplex – sawdusty, moist and full of worms in the top and hard, sticky soil underneath. The worms need to work their magic and incorporate it all together so I need to keep them happy. I know you can’t overfeed asparagus so I’d like to be giving it a liquid nitrogen weekly, ideally some liquid manure left to brew for a long time but until I’ve made some I could use some fish emulsion. I like thinking about how to provide all our garden’s needs from what we have. I’m trying to make potash rich compost using bracken; we’re increasing the size of our chook flock to provide us with some hot nitrogen fertilizer; we’re making regular batches of compost; we collect horse and cow manure; and we have a good working worm farm. We need to get in lime and rock dust, which if we buy in now hopefully we won’t have to do much again.

I’d like to have about a dozen compost bins. I think we need about half a dozen up at the top of the orchard just to use on the fruit trees. If we made a pile every two months we could let it break down properly over a year before using it. Woody compost giving the trees lots of fungi which they love. I could also use about half a dozen down here. Maybe a few more. I’d like two big bins over by the deciduous trees on the road so I can collect the fallen leaves and make leaf mold. Then I could use that instead of buying peat blocks to hold moisture for things like planting little seeds, making potting mix and seed raising mix. The other bins I’d use just for normal compost, once again trying to keep it for a year before using it so it really breaks down well and gets populated with lots of micro-organisms.


The pecan tree is covered in long catkins, male flowers, but no sign of the smaller female flowers yet.

“I’m grateful that I went to preschool.”
(Confused? Look)