11/20

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Nearly 60 degrees this morning. The forecast is for 3 days of thunderstorms with temperatures up into the 70's - barely below 60 at night. Then a long spell of cold. The last couple days have been moderately warm but very windy. Today the air is still.

We worked on fencing and mulching more perennials yesterday. The jujubes, persimmons, bush cherries, and goumis are now done. The little mulberry up by the coop got a tomato cage surrounded in chicken wire. So did the sassafras I'm trying to let grow off the path to the coop [beautiful understory trees with edible leaves]. I've got maybe half the property mowed so far.

The large mulberry and cornelian cherries will become part of the fenced-in cow pasture downhill from the barn - so they don't need protected immediately. All the small perennials down from the barn along the berm made from soil dug up behind the barn - hawthorns, juneberries, currents, a medlar - they didn't do very well last year and will all be transplanted. Either they didn't get enough sun, were too wet, or constantly fighting the tide of blackberry rising behind them . . . they will all be transplanted to what will become the fence line for the pasture from the barn to the oak by the fireplace to the stump by the blueberries. We'll wait till they're all completely dormant to transplant.

All of the blueberries still need protected from deer - fencing would be too expensive. There are about 40 blueberry shrubs. We're going to try throwing bird netting over them. If branches poke through everywhere, or the netting doesn't stay in place, we'll find a way to cage it or stake it down.

We cut and split another round of firewood today up past the upper blueberries. I also cleared some of the saplings and brush in the area where we were working because it was choked with growth. There was a large dead tree fallen a couple of feet off the ground - one end up on a log, the other wedged between a couple of trees. It looked like good wood so I had to figure out a way to bring it down and start cutting it up.

They call it bucking with the chainsaw when you're cutting logs laying horizontally - underbucking is where you cut from below. I made an underbuck cut about 1/4 of the way in, heard the tension break, then from above cut a large wedge with the saw so when the log caved the saw didn't get pinched.

It worked well - just like in framing, where a rafter or joist is in tension on the bottom, and compression along the top, once the area in tension is cut along the bottom of the log, like snipping a cord, it's just a matter of cutting out an area on the upper surface so either ends of the log can fall to the ground. A wedge cut keeps the logs from pinching the saw as they go down.

The garden has had a lot of frost damage from that 20 degree night. But it's still going. Hopefully once the low tunnels are in many plants will recover. I'm going to try bending 1/2" metal conduit for the hoops - I'll use plastic conduit over the bed to get the right size hoop, trace a template of it on OSB, cut this out and lay it on the ground, driving 3/8" rebar stakes every 18" along the arch. The first 2 stakes will have matching stakes 1/2" away from them, so I have a place for the metal conduit to get lodged as I slowly bend it around the rest of the stakes and arch. Though I'd prefer to use 1/2 rebar for the stakes, I don't think it will fit inside the tube of 1/2" conduit.

After a good bit of research on using caution tape to keep out deer, we're going to start with 2 runs of it at 2.5' and 5'. If it appears deer are leaping it, we'll do another run at 7.5'. It's more of a psychological barrier as the tape hums and whips and snaps, than an actual physical barrier. We've got 3,000 feet of tape, we'll see how far that goes.
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