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Ask the Chuckster...
Winter tasks

What are the winter tasks for a useful plant enthusiast?

Here are some ideas about winter tasks. Use winter as a time to:

• Plan your landscape – Identify areas to devote to vegetable gardens, berry bushes, fruiting vines, and fruit trees. Get some graph paper and draw out your new or expanding food production plans.
• Clean up your site – In preparation for spring planting, remove exotic invasives (by the roots for best results), fruit drop, excess mulch around tree trunks, fallen limbs, etc.
• Prune – Clean up any snow damaged branches but save major fruit tree pruning for late winter or early summer.
• Soil testing - If you haven't got one yet, do so now. While the test is free in NC, it can sometimes take up to six weeks for results. Get yours in before the spring rush so you'll have the data on hand for spring planting.
  
• Apply fertilization – If you haven’t yet fertilized your fall berries, do so in January. Broadcast the fertilizer onto the surface of the snow and let it percolate down slowly.
• Apply mulch – Same as above. If you haven’t gotten to it, do so now.
• Create sunlight – In order to get good fruit and vegetable production, you need at least six hours of sunlight per day during the growing season. Use winter to prune limbs and fell trees that are shading your production areas. Winter is the best time for this kind of work. If you aren't knowledgeable, you might want to hire some help. Contact us for tree felling referrals.
  
• Build arbors or trellises – Once spring hits you’ll be too busy planting and tending to do much building. Warmish winter days are perfect for this type of construction.
• Research – Winter is the ideal time to browse our website for plant choice ideas. Call us for more info if you need to.
• Consulting – Are you stuck on what to do in that little corner of your yard? Not sure what type of soil you have? If you’re going to have some consulting done, don’t wait until the busy season. Now is a really good time to get some advice so that you can incorporate it into your planning for spring planting. Contact us for edible landscaping and design work.
  
• Dream up neighborhood orchards – Sit around with a cup of tea with neighbors and friends and plan your neighborhood orchard.

How do you approach site assessment from a Permaculture perspective?

When doing site assessment, on any size property from city lot to wide open spaces, it’s important to understand the Permaculture theory of zones. There are five zones which help place plants and elements in the landscape according to how often you need to visit them. Good zone planning will not only save you time, money, and valuable energy by getting everything in the best functional place the first time.

Zone 1 is a grazing zone for intensive domestic production. This area is right around your house where you want to plant things that need regular harvest such as salad vegetables and herbs as well as berries and fruits like strawberries or blueberries, which have a long production cycle. Mind the Permaculture maxim: “Start at the kitchen door and work outward from a controlled front.” Place plants that need constant harvesting along pathways and near entrances so that you’ll visit them often.

Zone 2 is also a zone of domestic sufficiency where you would plant staple crops that need less regular attention such as corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, etc. This is also the place for locating the chicken house and yard, a place you’ll visit more often but don’t want right up against the house due to noise and smell constraints. Also located in this zone are home orchards, berry patches, and vineyards.

Zone 3 is the commercial or income generating production area. In a small urban lot this area might be offsite in a nearby community garden, neighborhood orchard, or regional foraging. On a larger site, you'd be amazed at what kind of economic returns are possible from an expanded garden and orchard areas.

Zone 4 is the area of managed woodlands or forest gardens where firewood crops and nontimber forest products such as mushrooms or medicinal plants are grown. This is an area to plant nut trees that need more space or harvest acorns that grow naturally in this area. In the city this would be found in parks, edges or woodlands.

Zone 5 is the area of the wild where we leave nature alone. This is the place where we go to learn and observe. The types of human intervention here might include wild harvesting or controlling exotic invasive plants. In the city this might occur in abandoned lots, riparian zones, or even alleyways where things are growing wild.