Part of Thriving is embracing both the wins, as well as the losses.
Homestead Update
My Spring garden has failed, for the most part.
I usually sow plants and then spread lettuce and kale seed around to act as a cover crop – hey, lettuce is a companion plant of everything.
This year hardly anything came up. The starter plants that I planted also did not thrive.
Why? Lots of rain.
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In Kansas we do not get “April showers bring May flowers.”
We get May and June thunderstorms. Almost all of our annual rain comes in May and June.
This year it rained almost every other day in May. We even had a mini-tornado pass just south of us and we got 8-10 inches of rain that week. Should have been a Spring bonanza of crops.
I added a couple of truckloads of compost from the nursery. The compost is worse-than-usual municipal compost. It nuked my garden.
The perennials saved the day – plantain, walking onion, bloody dock sorrel. They all did wonderfully.
Trees!
Some trees thrived. Some did not.
My apple grafts are all thriving. Nearly 80% success so far, which is rare.
But the chestnut seedlings from last year didn’t come out of dormancy. The 5 year chestnut trees are looking sickly, with half the branches with no leaves. I need to heavily fertilize and see if they recover.
Side Hustle Update
The good news:
Grow Nut Trees has already exceeded 2023 revenue (and most of the sales last year were in the Fall, not in the Spring). I majorly scaled up inventory.
The willow that I grew from cuttings has already grown up to my waist.
I put in a large nut and elderberry guild on a community member’s property based on this rough draft diagram that was barely readable.
We planted these guilds out as a local community building project.
Unfortunately, the chestnuts I planted for them did not come out of dormancy and I had to replace them with mulberry.
I scaled up this year! I sold most of my 2023 trees last Fall. So I bought trees from the Midwest to augment my stock.
But half of the hazelnuts and one batch of the red mulberry never came out of dormancy.
The surprising news –
I have sold hundreds of $$ of elderberry locally on FB Marketplace.
I had tremendous success restocking my elderberry by growing from cuttings and sprouts this Spring.
Shameless plug – I have hazelnut and elderberry available at Grow Nut Trees.
I grow chestnuts, hazelnuts, elderberry, mulberry, and comfrey that are adapted to the Midwest. They will do better on your place if you live in the Midwest.
GrowNutTrees.com
And I am expanding it to black lace elderberry for the Fall and next year.
Black lace elderberry has really nice darker, lacy leaves and pink flowers.
The morale of this story
So what’s the morale of this story?
Never give up. No two years are alike. So keep trying new things.
Want to Create a Food Forest and Grow 3-5X More Food?
🔎- Check out Will Horvath’s How to Create a Food Forest Guild in One Weekend course from Permaculture Apprentice:
Gear that I use and recommend: Meadow Creature Broadfork 14. I have used this to turn over sod for new Milpa garden beds, and even hand dug swales with it. Bulletproof.
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