Thursday, April 19, 2012

Addendum to the backyard and Dream Orchard

So we meet again, springtime.

Last weekend, I spent some hours painting the backyard fence.  The girls and I went to Home Depot to see what colors were in the OOPS PAINT shelf.  There happened to be a dented can of "house and fence paint" for $7, and it was not yet tinted.  SCORE!  I let the girls pick what color our fence should be, and they gave varied answers from blue to black.  We settled on a chestnut, and so it was tinted.

Fast forward a few hours, and the white primer is on the fence, and the tendinitis is kicking in.  Wow, hey, the fence sure looks good white.  I should just leave it.  Why change perfection, y'know!?
Since we bought the can of Chestnut, I negotiated with myself to paint the posts Chestnut.
I also bought a package of eye screws, and every single post (8' apart) will have an eye screw put into it.

  It aint much, but it's home ^____________^
also: you can see that I don't have a big back yard at all.

Then, I'll plant a red, black, or yellow raspberry at the bottom of every post.  I'm hoping that'll be some way to tame them, and keep them a relative distance from one another. 
Speaking of taming the shrew... er shrub, I saw at my buddy Ed's house, he twists the stems together so the raspberry or blackberry plant is a freestanding tower.  Pretty cool!  Knowledge is power, kids!


Ah knowledge, let's use that segue to discuss MidFEx.   
I found out about MidFEx a couple years ago while googling home orchards.  It's a community of very knowledgeable gardeners who are deeply involved in grafting, pruning, and most importantly experimental fruit trees.  That means, raising natives and rare species, grafting/root stocks, or making five fruits on one tree.  I'm sure there's a great deal more to glean that just those topics, but I will soon find out, for I am sending in my membership monies on the morrow.  I can't wait to learn how to graft and prune my way to gardening greatness!  Case in point, the neighbor's crab apple tree has sent a sucker underground to my side of the fence. While at first, I was somewhat annoyed and planned to chop/dig it out, I thought...woah woah wait!  I could totally graft apple scions to that crab-apple root stock.  HELL YES!   That would be SO PUNK! So guerrilla grafting! So.... aaaawesome! ::evil cackle::  yes, yes, it's all coming to plan swimmingly.




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