Well, deep winter is upon us.

That means more Winter Planning! The weather has been so volatile, up, down, snow, rain, warm, bone chilling cold and single digit temps to 0 degrees!

So what’s a heavy duty gardener to do??

Buy some Trees!

Brittany and I got our heads together for what we want on the homestead here, and that can be very dangerous.  We put together a list of trees and bushes we want on the property.   Without further ado, here it is:

North Star Dwarf Cherry, Carmen Jewel Dwarf Cherry, Nanking Cherry Bush, Hanson Bush Cherry, American Persimmon, FuYu Jiro Persimmon, 2 Hardy Pecan, 2 Hazelnut, Hannomaki Red Gooseberry, Pixwell Gooseberry, Standard Honeysweet Pear, Crisp and Sweet Pear, Goji Berry, American Elderberry, Sunrise Honeyberry. Early Blue Honeyberry, Red Lake Currant, Consort Black Currant.

We will be busy planting in March when these plants ship to us! Now we have to decide where all these will go. Thats the next step in our winter planning.  We have some very, very wet areas and certain plants do better with “wet feet” than others.

We also will be installing an invisible dog fence, digging two ponds on the higher end of the property. Then cutting berms and swales through out all the higher property to channel and retain water. And boy do we have a LOT of water all over.

In April we have even more plant/tree material coming in, including over 60 willow trees for fencing and basketry.

Check in on our post of the video of the 13 berry plants we planted last week along our hill outback and with the help of our friend AJ.  A bonus blooper, the wheel barrow going down the hill on its own half full of soil that was comical, but unfortunately not caught on film. Cliff had to run chasing after it!

On a sad note

We lost our beautiful blue-eyed Zephyr cat recently. He was 14 and like our Quartz cat in Nov, had some sort of tumor and his chest filled with fluid.  Zephyr fought vigilantly, but was unable to breath any longer.  He will be so missed and would have loved to garden with us.

In Memoriam.