I have been harvesting about a quart of fruit from the yard every week since early may, including my first harvest of pears that I planted two years ago. One of my chestnut trees is also producing, though I'm going to have trim back the mature maple so my other chestnut tree can get enough light.

In an effort to expand the fertile of my yard I had five yards of organic cow manure + wood shavings delivered by Soil Builders. Initially I thought I would have two days to spread the mulch but the storm system moved in early so I had to move all five yards of mulch in about 7 hours. In the front yard I spread the mulch in the blueberry and rose/salal strips on either side of the drive way and a wheelbarrow load where I plan to plant the Olive trees and around the two new chestnut trees.

In the backyard I spread the mulch around the two pear trees, the strawberry patch, around the fig/cherry/fennel area, around the russian quince/boysenberry patch and along the east and south sides. I'm hoping to have tomato plants around the russian quince patch, along the east side. I also spotted several ripe strawberries among in the main strawberry patch and the smaller colonies scattered around the pear, cherry and russian quince. I should mention that I intentionally didn't put any of this mulch in my existing garden at least for now as this is the first time I've worked with Soil Builders and simply don't have much bare ground in the garden. When I sheet mulch in the fall I'll likely have another five yards delivered.

After spending 14 hours a day for a week on Oracle, Oracle and a pinch of PostgreSQL I decided to spend the three days afterwards on something as low tech as I could find, the garden.  Actually I did spend sometime processing my e-mail and getting the flash export from freemind of Mollison's guide for bioregional organization, which is really cool, check it out.

Anyway, the backyard is looking so much better now and the dogs spent most of the being my entourage. I had to break out the a gas lawn mower as the grass was too tall for the push mower.  I don't remember how many bags of grass clippings but I filled two compost bins and used a lot of grass clippings as mulch.

I weeded the three strawberry beds which were pretty badly over grown, pulled a lot of morning glory fragments from the garden and long roots from the berry patch.  I also staked some of the new raspberry stalks and cut out quite a bit of blackberry starts.

The other big task that I finally completed was to clear the back yard and porch of nearly all of the equipment that I had scattered about.  I finally have a back porch and most of the yard looking pretty good and should be pretty easy to maintain.  Of course the first time I used the table on the porch for eaching breakfast, George christened the morning by wandering into the backyard  and poop with his butt pointed towards the back of the house.

With the help of a friend, I planted two chestnuts on either side of the maple in the front yard, four jostaberries along the north side of the yard and a big russian quince in the backyard.

My hope is that the chestnuts are offset enough from the maple to allow enough sunlight in and as they grow trim the maple; with the eventual result of cutting down the maple. The jostaberries should also have enough sunlight and be able to handle the wind in the winter and help define the yard. The russian quince's placement should allow for nearly constant sun as it is tall enough to be out the roof's morning shadow and conversely throw a nice afternoon shadow on the back of the house.

I still need to build a kiwi trellis, plant the kiwis (blake, hayward and fuzzy male), the two pawpaws and a persimmon.

Over this wonderful four day weekend I managed to get a handle on a number of gardening and house projects that I didn't really have a good feel on what was needed. I finally got around to removing the dead arbor vitae but in place of cutting them down I managed to push them over and I'm planning on mounting them upside down in the garden and use them as a bean and pea trellis. In other bean related news I discovered/noticed that the fava beans I planted next to the garage are doing wonderful and I'm thinking about giving away the rose bushes to make room for more fava beans.

I finally figured out why the back porch was leaking and managed to get away from the hornets while scampering from oneside of the roof to the other. The back porch has a fairly strange design and I haven't yet figured how what they were thinking. They built it on a cement pad with untreated wood and the have this funky strip of foam between the hanger mounted where the gutter would usually be and the corrugated sheet metal which makes up the porch roof. The problem is the foam has broken down so whenever enough pine needles build up on the porch roof water overtops the foam and leaks down onto the cement pad. Of course you can't easily get at the foam because of a foot wide strip of sheetmetal that covers the funky strip of foam that is partially under the roof tiles. So you have to lay down on the roof of my house and then pull up the strip of sheet metal to see the foam and this is about the time I discovered the hornet's nest.