Widening the Lower Turn Around

I wanted the turn around down by the muscadines to be a complete loop so I widened the Northern side of the road to allow for turning without having to reverse. The top pictures are from the muscadines facing West up the path back to the front. The lower pictures are facing East down the path to the clearing and muscadines. The rest of the turn around is to the left in the top pictures, to the right in the bottom pictures. It was pretty straight forward, anything in this area has to go. Had to remove a few oaks which was sad, but most of it was privet.

Tilling the Beds

In the top picture there are still wildflowers growing in what will become the garden beds. I let them grow all summer, having last cut them back in May. The butterflies and bees appreciated it and they were easier to pull. Over the course of two weeks, one day each week we prepared and tilled the beds, cleared the blackberries and removed the lattice. I pulled the "weeds", and Meredithe and I cut back the blackberries in early October.

The next week I removed the lattice and ran the Gravely over a section of the North bed that had a lot of blackberries and tall grasses in it and was difficult to pull. I'd say it was only about a third of the one bed. It only took 30 minutes or so. After the beds were clear I began tilling.

I rented a Honda FRC800 8HP rear tine tiller from my friends over at Madison Rentals. They're a locally owned and operated tool rental business. I also ordered the Gravely from them earlier this year. They're conveniently located right off of I-20 on my way to the farm on Eatonton Rd 129/441 just on the other side of the lake.

The tiller worked great! On the first pass I was a little apprehensive because it seemed like the tines were just skipping along the top of the dirt and I had to hang on tight to keep the thing from running away from me. By the third pass I was dug in a few inches and running along smoothly. I ran it straight through with the exception of just one short break from about 9:30 am until 2:30 pm. The beds were originally marked at 60' x 5', but I'm an overachiever so the tilled area is realistically more like two 60 'x 8' beds, almost 1,000 square feet!  I'd estimate the average completed depth is somewhere between 6" and 8". Not sure if 200 sq/ft per hour is a good work rate or not, but that's about what it was.

In the bottom picture, the four larger white posts mark the corners of a small compost pile. Just to the left the disc harrow is visible, completely freed from the blackberries. The white blob in the middle is the wellhead covered by an old billboard used as a tarp and weighed down by cinder blocks. Hopefully we'll construct housings for both the wellhead and the compost before the wedding. The bushes in the middle near the back of the wedding garden are a butterfly bush and an unidentified bush that we liked, so we kept. The planted azaleas and gardenias are barely visible along the inside edges of the beds. They all got fried in our brutally hot and dry July. Four of the six gardenias have bounced back nicely. I think the other two are toast, but we'll see if anything happens this spring. The four azaleas lost all of their leaves, and look like they're in better shape than the two iffy gardenias, but they're all on the iffy list until this coming Spring.

Clearing in the Back

I cleared out the back area down by the muscadines with my Gravely Pro 24 Brush Cutter! It really helps you see what's going on down there. The two saplings on the left of the clearing are apples (red wrap on base), one Mollies Delicious, one Fuji. Not sure which is which at the moment, mixed up the tags during planting this Spring. On the right are two native paw paw saplings that we planted earlier, in late winter. The trees in the clearing ahead to the left are a few assorted saplings that I left to provide broken shade for the wild persimmons underneath. The persimmons are native understory trees that prefer a little bit of shade. They're also everywhere. The brush on the left is interspersed with wild blackberries, privet, tall grasses and a mimosa tree just out of view. I plan to clear this area by hand to better control the blackberries for next season.

In the third picture you can see on the far side of the mimosa where there are the two rows of muscadines, an unidentified red variety and Carlos Bronze. Three rows of blueberries are planted between the muscadine rows. The tree in front of the center row of blueberries is a Bradford Pear. It still has multiple trunks and is partially shading the muscadines, so I'm planning on trimming it back even farther this winter. Along the edges I've identified a few small Oaks that I'm going to promote by trimming out their competition, mostly pine.

Before

After

After

Butterfly Bush

Butterfly bush, Buddleja davidii, is not native to the southeastern United States and can become invasive, so we're going to have to keep it contained, but it's so darn pretty!

Those white conical shaped flowers lasted all summer long with no pruning, but pruning off older flowers can encourage new flowers to form. With very little maintenance they should keep flowering right up until the first frost. We planted two of them at the "back" of the wedding garden figuring they'd be easy to keep alive and should get fairly large, fairly fast... up to 16 feet tall! Well, one of the two didn't make it through our brutally hot and dry July, but this one appears to be doing great and we could spread it from cuttings if we wanted. However, these bushes will out compete a lot of the native species so the plan is to limit them to two massive specimens.

They are great nectar producers and attract butterflies, as demonstrated by this gulf fritillary. But not all species of butterfly like the same thing so we'll be encouraging the native species to hang around as well, goldenrod being a prime example.

Home Grown Luffa

Did you know you could grow your own luffa (AKA Loofah)? Well, surprise surprise, you can! Luffa are in the gourd family and crawl on a vine that sometimes reaches up to 30 feet in length. Luffa are edible when young and only a few inches long, you could eat the one being highlighted in this picture. At this stage they're kinda like okra, most often used in Chinese and Vietnamese dishes. When allowed to continue growing toward maturity they become increasingly fibrous.

When growing them for use as a bath sponge, which is what Meredithe is doing with them, you can let them grow until the first frost hits them. They take a while to grow, requiring 150 to 200 warm days to reach full maturity. Once hit by frost, however, they become susceptible to rot. We're going to let them grow until the end of fall, and hopefully time it perfectly so we can just peel the skin off and enjoy our new bath sponges!