Fall Tree Planting Part 2

We added six fruit trees to the eastern walkway this fall.  First we designed the layout.  In this picture, the proposed locations of the trees and benches are marked with yellow stakes.

Marking the locations like this made it easier to check the overhead clearance (both now and when that mesquite is fully grown) and to check the sun exposure (for all four seasons).  The mulberry, curry leaf, and plum will get the full sun they like for three seasons, and the plum (a Burgundy, which may grow up to 30 ft tall) has plenty of headroom.  The avocado and guava will get partial shade in summer, and we located the apple where cold air will sink in winter.  By the time the picture above was taken, we had cleared away the rock and grass.  The plan included a berm around the trees on north side of the sidewalk (in the foreground of the picture).  The berm isn't for irrigation (all six trees will be drip-watered), but just to keep the mulch from scattering.  The whole section of yard on the south side is already mulched, so no need for a berm on that side.

After clearing the rock and grass, the next step was to run irrigation tubing on the north side.  Once that was in place, we dug the six holes. 

Half of the dirt from the holes was used to build the berm (and this is why we ran the tubing on the north side first, so it would lie under the berm).  The other half of the dirt was mixed with some compost that has been aging since this spring.
Look at the beautiful black compost in that shovel.  Kitchen scraps, fallen leaves, and shredded junk mail.  This mixture is for backfilling around the trees once they're in place.
We dug the holes twice as wide as the pots and placed all six trees (pot and all) in their holes for a final visual check and some minor adjustments.

 

After running the irrigation tubing on the other side of the sidewalk, we popped the trees out of their pots and filled the holes with the dirt / compost mix.
Then we spread mulch and set up each of the trees with a set of drippers "tuned" for the size of its root zone.  The tallest ones (the apple and the plum) have 3 drippers @ 4 gal/hr; the medium ones (the mulberry and avocado) have 3 drippers @ 2 gal/hr; and the small shrubby ones (the curry leaf and the guava) have 4 drippers @ 1/2 gal/hr.We left crucial parts of the drip system unburied until we were ready to test it out.
And that's all for today.  Now these trees are ready to spread some roots and rest up for the spring.

Fall Tree Planting

Seems like fall weather has taken its time coming to central Arizona, but it's finally time to plant deciduous trees.  Our docket this fall includes an apple, a dwarf mulberry, a moringa, a dwarf avocado, a curry leaf, and a pineapple guava.

These trees will line the walkway to the mailbox, leaving room for two rocking benches, one on each side of the sidewalk.  (One will go about where the chair is in the picture below.)

I have a sheltered location picked out for the avocado, where it will be shaded by a mesquite in summer and by an olive and an orange in winter.

I was pleasantly surprised this year to find desert hackberries at Boyce Thompson Arboretum's fall plant sale.  These are native bushy trees that produce a striking orange (and edible) berry in the fall.  Yes, you can have fall colors in the desert.  I've picked a location for one of these near the northeast corner of the house, where eventually it will give summer shade to that corner and part of the sidewalk.

The other will probably go somewhere in the "sonoran biome" region of the front yard.

Elsewhere in the yard, the luffa vines are sprinting up one of the olive trees.  Today I found a flower 10 ft off the ground.

And the bananas and peanuts are still doing their thing in the chunky monkey patch.

September's Olive Harvest

The recent olive harvest event at sage garden ecovillas was a success on many fronts.  I learned a lot from it, and really enjoyed the chance to meet and work shoulder-to-shoulder with some local gardeners and urban farmers.  I think everyone had a good time, and hopefully took away a little deeper appreciation and feeling of connection with the olive trees and the ancient practices of harvesting and preparing olives.

There are some things I think we did well, that I'd like to do again next time, and some things I'd like to do different.

Things that went well:
1) I really like the basic idea of harvesting and curing olives as a group activity.  Of course, this idea isn't new - it's a long-standing tradition in some families and cultures.  And maybe it's something you have to experience firsthand to appreciate.
2) The popup canopy and card table worked well as a gathering point, a place for sign-in sheets and name tags, and a place to taste finished olives.
3) The comination sign-in sheet and waiver was a paper-saver.
4) Doing the processing (rinsing, cutting, pitting, curing) inside where it was cool was a good idea.
5) Food grade buckets worked well for processing.
6) The basic format worked well, starting with personal introductions and explanations, then start harvesting, then start processing, then tasting, and finally the sharing circle.
7) Finishing the olives with malt vinegar was a clear win.

Things to try or do different next time:
1) Use shoulder straps to hold the buckets while picking (thanks for that idea, Charles).
2) Leave the small olives on the tree (thanks for that suggestion, PJ).
3) Set up a number of finishing stations before the event.
4) Get more Westmark olive pitters.  The Westmark was the universal favorite, hands down.  And don't bother trying to use the Press2Pit cherry pitter to pit olives.
5) I learned that some olive afficionados really like eating their olives with the pit in (thanks, Jacqueline).

6) Abe suggested several different flavorings, including Mediterranean style, using lemon juice and jalapenos.  I did a little research, and I have some of the olives we picked finishing Mediterranean style right now.  I'm also experimenting with just substituting lemon juice in place of vinegar in the finishing solution, and using crushed red pepper.
7) Take more pictures next time.

Bottom line, this olive harvest event was a fun, enriching experience, for me, and I appreciate everyone who participated. 

Gratuitous Camera Roll

Even when it's completely unplanned, it's good to see local fauna making use of the trees and gardens.  I've been seeing quite a few collared doves.  I don't know what they get out of the purslane, but they seem to like grazing in it.

I see them often in the olive trees, too.

Or perched on the shade next to this pomegranate.




We're also seeing a lot of geckos this year.

I think they're feasting on ants.  We have more ants than I want, so keep it up, geckos.  While I appreciate the ants' work in the garden, they are problematic in some places because they like biting so much.  With any luck, using coffee grounds in those places will convince them to move.  I've started collecting coffee grounds from the cafeteria at work.  I get about 4 gallons a day.

Back on the subject of purslane, we had a zealous purslane overgrowing the sidewalk, so I cut it back and blanched and froze it - mostly as an experiment to see how it would turn out.

Haven't tried it yet, but next time we make a soup or something that calls for purslane, we'll see how well it kept.

 And finally, here's a recent picture of the Chunky Monkey patch (so called because it's where we grow bananas and peanuts).  The bananas are doing well, and I'm pleasantly surprised how well the peanuts have grown (most of the ground cover in the picture is peanuts).  The taro is struggling with the heat, but I think they'll make it through to the fall.  The mystery volunteer tomato in the middle is still producing tomatoes, and the turmeric is slowly stretching up.

Preparing for Olive Harvest

 We tried our new DIY olive picker today, in preparation for the olive harvest event coming up on Sept 10.

It worked like a charm.

It's handy to have a three-person team: a "picker," a "catcher" (to find the olives that are shaken loose and drop to the ground), and a "holder" (to carry a container for the picker to empty into).

We picked some black olives (to keep them from over-ripening) and started curing them in salt.

We also picked some green olives and started curing them in water.

I'm hoping that the green olives will be ready to taste during the event.

Crop Report - Perennials

The fig trees we planted two years ago are starting to produce more than the birds can eat.

Last year, they produced what I thought was a good sized crop, but the ants and the birds ate almost all of them, leaving us with a meager handful of figs for the whole year.  This year, I denied the ants their share.  I wrapped the trunks of the trees and then brushed the wraps with a sticky tangle trap goo to keep the ants from marching up and helping themselves.  I also had bird nets at the ready, but I decided to wait and see how many figs they would eat.

Flashback: in late May or early June, we started hearing mockingbirds.  I've seen them in their favorite perches around the neighborhood, including several high points in our olive trees.  We hear their songs sporadically throughout the day, but they really seem to get going in the evening, and sing until morning.  Anyway, when I round the corner and catch birds in the act of snatching figs, it's usually mockingbirds.  So they're giving us their songs, and taking some figs.  Over the past month, we have harvested a couple handfuls of figs (6 - 12) for us humanfolk every five days or so.  I think that's a pretty good trade.  Yes, ants, I'm unfairly biased in favor of species that sing to me and make me wonder what it would feel like to fly.

If I were canning figs, though, I think I would net the trees.  Here's why: when we share figs with the birds, we get small harvests - no more than a dozen figs at a time.  The birds seem able and willing to eat about 90% of any given fig, but if an untouched fig is just as accessible on the tree as one that's, say, 50% eaten, they seem to prefer starting in on the new one.  So when I wait longer between harvests, I seem to get no more figs for myself, but I see more half-eaten figs on the tree.  So what I've been doing as I harvest the untouched figs is picking off the almost completely eaten, dried out figs to throw into the compost, but leaving the ones that are easy for birds to reach and barely pecked at, with the idea that they will finish those off, and let ripen the ones that are harder for them to reach.

One of the pomegranate trees we planted two years ago is maturing, too.  Last year, we picked maybe five pomegranates.  This year, it looks like we'll have about a dozen.

We'll have a lot more olives this year than last.  The olive trees were already here when I moved in 2013, and we've had a modest olive crop every fall.  Starting this past spring, I've been deep watering the olive trees to see if I can get them to hold more of their fruit until harvest, and I've been keeping a closer eye on them to see if they're dropping any.  I would say they dropped 1% - 3%, which I hope will leave us with a couple gallons of olives for this year.  If you're interested in seeing how we cure olives, look for our olive harvest(s) in late summer and early fall.

The native mesquite we planted two years ago is also starting to produce.  We recently harvested our first batch of pods, and experimented with several ways of making flour.

The winning method we settled on was to grind them briefly in our Vitamix blender and then sift out the chaff.  We also tried using a flour mill, but our Nutrimill isn't designed to separate the mesquite chaff, so we ended up with fine-ground flour plus coarse-ground chaff, which was poor quality and hard to separate.  The flour that came out of the Vitamix seemed just as fine, but the chaff was much larger, which made it easier to separate.

What I like about perennials is the input-to-yield ratio.  Plant once, harvest many times.

What could be better?

Well, to un-rhetoricalize that question, volunteers could be better.  How about plant nonce, harvest many times?  (OK, "nonce" isn't a word, but neither is "un-rhetoricalize.")  Some plants at Sage Garden pop up on their own, with no planting effort, and then we decide to tend them, or just politely ignore them and let them thrive.  Most of these are native "weeds" like purslane, which proliferate for a season, give us a few salads, and then subside.

Or a leftover seed from last year will decide to germinate, like this honeydew melon, which started growing beside our newly planted peach tree.

Mesquite trees will often pop up in less-than-optimal locations, but the one in the foreground of the picture to the right happens to be in just the right place for a shady, 15 ft tree in the middle of our future food forest.  And the fact that it fixes nitrogen in the soil is a bonus.  With some pruning and training this winter, it will be a real asset to this area.

But I can't leave the topic of volunteers without mentioning the tomato plant that mysteriously appeared in our Chunky Monkey patch (where we're growing bananas and peanuts).  I'm still baffled how this one showed up in this brand new plot, before I had planted a single tomato plant anywhere at Sage Garden.  Look for the pear-shaped yellow-orange tomatoes in the picture.

If you don't mind me getting metaphysical for a sec, I think there's a spiritual lesson in volunteer plants.  Anyone who relates to his garden as a thing to control will kill all the volunteers, because they are always unplanned.  And his garden will grow only "through painful toil" and "by the sweat of his brow will he eat his food" (Genesis 3).  Only someone who is willing to flex his plans (like what I call "this-or-better planning") and surrender to what his garden is doing on its own can reap the benefit of voluteer plants.

The Search for a New Manager

I'm planning to start a new ecohousing venture in 2017 that will differ from Sage Garden Ecovillas in its vision and business model. When that venture starts, I'll move out of Sage Garden and turn over daily operation to a new on-site manager. There are many things I'll miss about living here: talking with the residents and neighbors, checking in on the trees and other plants, thinking about systemic suburban issues and solutions. But the time is coming for someone else to get the firsthand experience of managing this place, time for a fresh pair of eyes and fresh ideas, and time for me to start learning secondhand the lessons this place has to offer that I couldn't see firsthand – the forest for the trees, and all. In the meantime, I'm collecting logs of the kind of work I do here on a regular basis. This will help me find the right manager and define my expectations. Having a clear definition of expectations will not only help the new manager to succeed; it will also be an opportunity to put some cooperative agreement concepts into practice.

THE WHYS

Below is a motive map outlining the “whys” I just mentioned for defining expectations. (For an explanation of motive maps, see the earlier post called “Meet the Motive Map,” although there are some interesting differences between this motive map and the ones I talked about in that post, which I promise I'll go into before I end this post, because I can't resist talking theory.)

 

The white nodes outlined in dashed lines above are imported from the latest motive map of all the ongoing programs and practices at Sage Garden Ecovillas (the whole map is shown later in this post). By the way, the “RBP” in the rightmost node stands for regenerative business practices. The blue nodes are objectives that apply specifically to preparing for a new manager, and the black nodes are high-level tasks, which I'll decompose into more detail later.

As I think about moving out of Sage Garden and look over the motive map above, I can think of some other things I want to do while I still live here and have the opportunity to learn from direct experience. So I'll add them into the motive map like so:

THE WHENS

Now that the picture of the whats and the whys is starting to develop, let's make a schedule to show the whens. The schedule will include the high-level tasks (the black nodes) from the motive map, and while I'm at it, why not include the motives that are directly connected to them? Let's see what that looks like:

  

The rolled up task called “Motives” contains motives as milestones, and their (schedule) predecessors are the tasks motivated by them. Yes, it feels a little weird to include motives like this in a schedule, but then again, 1) seeing them alongside the more conventional schedule elements makes it easier to decompose those high-level tasks in a way that supports the motives, and 2) as new information emerges and the schedule changes over time, these embedded motives will serve as reminders of what is important and why. Here's an excerpt of the next draft of this schedule, where detail has been added, as guided by the motives.

This schedule isn't complete yet, but you can start to see how the motive map and the schedule work together as complementary planning artifacts. As I round out the schedule, I'll add details that have more to do with the new venture than with Sage Garden Ecovillas, but that's a blog for another time and place.

SOME ABSTRACT MUSINGS

I said I would show the latest version of the complete motive map for Sage Garden Ecovillas for reference, so here it is:

The nodes in brown are values, those in green are objectives, and those in white are programs or practices.

You probably noticed some fundamental differences between the motive map of preparations for a new manager and the motive map of Sage Garden Ecovillas. Some of these differences are due to the nature of the operation being mapped. The preparation for a new manager is time-bounded, while the operation of Sage Garden Ecovillas is perpetual. That's why in the former motive map contains tasks (the black nodes) which are inherently terminating, while the latter map has programs and practices (the white nodes) which are non-terminating. That's also why some of the objectives in the former map (the blue nodes) are bounded, while all the objectives in the latter map (the green nodes) are unbounded. For example, consider the objective “Reduce Consumption.” No matter how much we reduce our consumption at Sage Garden, we'll never be done – we'll always have the objective of reducing it further.

Here's a summary comparison of the two kinds of motive maps pictured in this post.

Preparations for on-site manager motive map	Sage Garden Ecovillas motive map
Time-bounded operation	Perpetual operation
Associated with a schedule	Not associated with a schedule
Nodes in map: - imported nodes - objectives (bounded and unbounded) - tasks	Nodes in map: - values - objectives (unbounded) - programs / practices

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Do you have any critical comments or suggestions about anything you see here? Or any questions? If so, let me hear them by commenting below.