Expanding a tree mound

The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Expanding a tree mound

Expanding a tree's raised bed mound My kitchen forest garden island gets all the love while the peach tree just one year younger is out of sight and out of mind. No wonder my favorite peach's younger sister has a canopy spread barely half the width of my darling kitchen peach.

I decided to begin to remedy matters by expanding the little sister's raised bed. I wheelbarrowed some partially decomposed weeds from the compost pile in the chicken pasture to line one of the bed's edges, then added another wheelbarrow load of deep bedding, lightly sprinkled atop the soil all around.

Meanwhile, I ripped up the mushroom rafts (which I wasn't very pleased with) and rearranged the aging logs in a big square around the peach. A friend and I weeded the areas that were mulched last year, then I laid down a newspaper kill mulch atop the parts of the square that were lawn. (I would have preferred corrugated cardboard to newspaper, but you have to use what you've got. Mom kindly saved all of these newspapers to be firestarters, and I never ended up burning them since I had too much junk mail.)

Finally, I topped it all off with leaves and promised little sister peach to pay more attention to her needs. With fruit trees, you don't really see the full results of your actions until two seasons later, so I'll be waiting for baskets of peaches in the summer of 2013.

Are you starting baby chicks? Our chicken waterer keeps them from drowning during the toddler stage.