We've completed our grapevine trellis! After prepping the soil we'll be ready to bring in some two-year-old muscadine vines in early spring. We'll plant nine, as these vigorous plants need a lot of space. Muscadines are native and much more resistant to disease than the more familiar bunch grapes. Here's some info if you'd like to plant some, too.
Marcos found these notched logs rather human-like.
We built three trellises, each about 60 feet in length.
In the fall we laid out a pollinator garden strictly for native plants. (We'll have non-natives that bees and wasps love, on the property, too, of course.) We put down cardboard and covered it with about five inches of leaf mold/mulch. Darned if that fescue didn't make its way through the cracks. The weeding never seems to end on an organic farm!
We'll do a good number of plantings soon, purchased from the North Carolina Botanical Garden, but for right now we just have climbing aster against the fence line and a cluster of "Quaker ladies," possibly the cutest winter flowering plant in existence.
We've also set up the first round of mushroom logs and created our "mushroom village," to steal a name from Wild Scallions Farm in Person County. The mulched area in the background is growing Blewit mushroom (edible), with a lasagna layout of cardboard and spawn/leaf mold mix.
And lastly, a big development was the installation of a solar panel array to power our well.
