honeyberry fish head glads

In addition to the (mostly native) edible fruits I have added to the Magic Summer Minifarm homestead, I have also decided to add a few more perennials and shrubs that will support native pollinators. I have added lilacs, mock oranges, witch hazel, mallow, sunchokes, forsythia, Russian sage, perennial sunflower, and a buckeye tree. Ultimately there should be at least three plants that bloom early, three that bloom mid-season, and three that bloom late in the growing season.  I don't think I have quite worked that part out, but I am working toward making my homestead a sanctuary for bees and other pollinators. I have decided not to keep European honeybees this year because I didn't feel completely prepared and I need to do a little more research on honeybee varieties and requirements for keeping them alive through the winter. I am also not completely sure that I want them now after learning more about native bees and how European honeybees can compete with them for nectar and the native bees are often better at pollinating native crops.  I have been learning a lot about native bees lately and how to support and protect them. They are experiencing similar declines to those of the honeybees due to overuse of pesticides and loss of habitat. You can support them by planting more native perennials on your property, allowing your hedgerows to get weedy, keeping brush piles, practicing no-till gardening/farming, leaving a patch of bare ground on your property, and by making mason bee nests (there are many designs-here is just one: http://www.instructables.com/id/Happy-Home-for-our-friends-the-Mason-Bees/). Below are some photos of the ground nesting bee nests in the garden. They look a little like ant hills with slightly larger openings, and the ones I have seen don't typically have piles of sand or dirt outside of the hole.

Yesterday I completed a blueberry patch. I removed the topsoil and vegetation from a circular area, mixed in some peat to bring the acidity up, planted 11 blueberry plants, and mulched the circle with leaf mold and pine needles. A biologist I work with told me that pine needles actually won't increase the acidity of soil, but I'm not entirely convinced that's true. Even if it is, the pine needles and leaves will at least help retain moisture in the soil.

Recently we experienced a serious flood on the reservation, but we were very fortunate not to have been affected by the damaging rains. The worst thing that happened was that some of the manure from my squash hill was washed out and a small puddle formed near the mounded row of cauliflower plants. The mounded rows definitely helped a great deal. This is an agricultural technique employed by the Ojibwe people for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. It allowed the farmers of yore to grow crops in wetlands and to grow corn as far north as Saskatchewan! Mounded rows heat up faster than flat vegetable beds, and they allow plants to put down deep roots into fluffy soil. They are definitely a great choice for wet areas!

Here are some recent garden pics:

 Here are some gladiolas interplanted with peas. The glads will support the peas as they grow larger.

 In the foreground you can see sunflowers and snapdragons. In the back left you can see the gladiolas again, plus a mounded row of fingerling potatoes and peas and the eastern leg of the arbor below. In the top center is this year's compost pile, most recently topped with scythed grass from the front yard. The white plastic gate serves to mark the place where several ground nesting bee holes exist.

 Here is an arbor that I had intended to support some Concord grapes that have yet to emerge from dormancy. To hedge my bets, I also planted 4 hardy kiwi females and one male (you need at least one female and one male to get fruit, which I have never tasted but I've been told they taste like grapes. Perhaps I'll get to try one this year or next.)

Honeyberry, fish head, and two glads. Honeyberries are a native fruit that are closely related to honeysuckle. They resemble elongated blueberries and are some of the first fruits to emerge in Minnesota. I have planted 5 of them in the garden. The fish head was dug out of the squash hill by some unknown animal. It is a remnant of spearing and netting season--some of my coworkers gave me the offal from their catches and now I have a bunch of dead fish in the backyard. The animals had stopped messing with the fish so I thought it would be safe to put it in the squash hill when I rebuilt it after the accidental tilling. I was wrong. They dug it out within a couple of days, leaving the scraps scattered around the garden. I have quite a few gladiolas this year, and I decided to fill in the garden space with them in the area not (yet) occupied by the young honeyberries.

 Here are the mounded rows that helped to save the garden from the flood. In the foreground are lumina white pumpkins in the squash row. Behind them are jalapeno and Anaheim chile peppers, and behind the peppers are Sungold and Roma tomatoes. Behind that you can see the yard is uncut and full of yarrow. There is also a young apple tree barely visible against the decrepit back portion of the garage.

Here are a few of the ageratum plants I am growing for a seed trial organized by the University of Minnesota. This is part of my volunteer service required to become a master gardener. The grass is starting to become a nuisance. I'll try to get to it soon while it is still an afternoon project...

 Here is another arbor near the entrance (from the house) of the garden. It has three legs, and each is planted with Cascade hops, Willamette hops, and chocolate vine (Akebia quinata). The fuschia is there for any hummingbirds who may be hanging around.

Here is another view of the garden. It doesn't look like much but soon it will be bursting with life and crops!

updates

This year's garden is shaping up to be quite beautiful and enchanting, and my part in creating it (and the seasonal demands of my day job) has been keeping me from posting to this blog. So I went a little buck wild with the mail order plants and ended up with a yard full of sand cherries, chokeberries, raspberries, blueberries, and Juneberries. I fulfilled my plan to stock up on edible perennials, many of which arrived as bare root plants. The volume of plants that I had to put in the ground was a bit overwhelming, and some of them waited a few weeks for a home. Some of them haven't yet come out of "dormancy" (or is it death?) yet, but the majority seem to be doing well so far.
I experienced a heart-wrenching setback last month when my garden, which was full of garlic, onions, rhubarb, irises, and other perennials, was accidentally tilled. One of the reservation's garden programs tills community members' gardens for free and I had signed up to get a new area tilled, but due to miscommunication last year's garden was tilled instead. Some of the plants survived the tilling, and it's great seeing them pop up now. I'm hoping to harvest some garlic next month, and I bought some replacements for the perennials that didn't come back. The new garden I wanted to be tilled was meant to hold the annuals, and i had planned to fill last year's garden with perennials, but since I only have the one now, I decided to mix the annuals and perennials. I planted peas around the grapes, beans around the honeyberries, and gladiolas between the different varieties of strawberries.
After learning that the most successful Ojibwe farmers of the past, the northernmost farmers of corn, used agricultural methods like corn hills and mounded rows, I decided to implement those methods into my garden. That has already helped save the life of many of the plants in my care, as we just experienced a severe flood in this area. The fact that many of the plants were put in mounded rows kept them out of the water. Of course the sandy soil helps for drainage also. My mom is visiting currently, and she just helped me transplant the last of the garden plants to the garden this afternoon. Now it's time to focus on the weeds....