Just a few days ago I thought I should order some plantain.  Probably because of the mosquitos that like me.  When I saw photos of it I went out side because I swore I saw some growing.
Looks like I have some at the new homestead.  Anyone think this is not Narrow Leaf Plantain?

The long leaf with lines running down it

The flower (made me rather certain that it is plantain)

The long leaf plantain plant.

Other updates –

Hazel Nut Bushes
I noticed how dry the soil was around the hazel nuts that were planted this year so I added them to the drip irrigation of the 2013 food forest.  Since I premade the 1/4 inch micro tubing pieces with dripper and connector the process for 20 plus bushes went rather quickly.  Both at the farm and the home stead I’ve been surprised by seeing plants that are totally leafed out drop all their leaves.  I then think they are dead only to find a new shoot coming up most of the time.  The “champion” plant at the home stead was about 18 inches tall and died back to the ground and has a new stem coming up now.

Bees
The bee hive now has a ‘honey super’ on it.  I was told that once the bees fill in a second box that I could put a honey super on the hive for a while.  The honey super is for honey for us.  To get only honey on these smaller frames I put a queen excluder in between the top box and the super.  I think I’m supposed to remove it by the end of the month to make sure the bees have plenty of honey for the winter.  I’m tempted to buy some hives with bees for the farm.  Originally I didn’t think there would be enough flowers out here for them but now that I see all the flowers I realize they would do great out here.  So at some level I see the farm producing honey.  Oh seeing pallets of bees in an empty field the other day gave me even more confidence in having bees at the farm.

Condensation
I was a bit surprised to see so much condensation at the home stead a few mornings in a row.  As I learned in the Permaculture PDC, condensation can add a significant amount to total condensation for an area.  These berry leaves has the water droplets around the edges.

Sun Flowers
The sun flowers are in full bloom.  Bumblebees, small bees and some other kind of bugs are enjoying them.

Other Flowers
Other flower seeds were also thrown on the swales along with some vegetables.

Goji berries at RegenFarms.  Mature but small goji bare root plants were planted this spring and this one is already producing fruit.  Probably 10 so far.

Vegetable on the food forest swale, we seeded the swale with some vegetables as well as clovers, wild flowers and sunflowers.

And I now know what a split head of cabbage looks like.

I found some more wood for the other half of the 2014 swale that is above the 2nd food forest.  Hopefully I can get about twice this much before covering it up as it becomes part of the swale.

In front of my middle finger is a goji berry flower. It had a faint purple color. This plant was bought and planted this year so I’m surprised that it is flowering after the transplant shock. It was a plant that was shipped with fruit on it but the leaves all died after planting.

And a better photo of another flower.

The plant to the rights has some holes in it from some hale.

And here is the fruit from that first flower. This is the first goji berry. Impressive to have fruit the first year. I’m considering knocking the rest of the flowers off to promote growth over fruit.

These photos were taken July 8th mostly from the farm in Watkins.  The cabbage was grown in Denver).

Comfrey Bocking 4 root cuttings the spring after planting, they have really grown the past few weeks.  They are over 6 inches tall at this point.  Coe’s recommended letting them grow one year and then moving them.  I think they recommend planting them somewhere where you can make sure they stay moist.  I smile at that thought because moving them will probably still leave some roots here which will grow into plants again.

Sheet Mulched Potato Patch with Flowers.  This was taken July 8th 2014 of this years potato patch.  A few onions were planted with the potatoes as well.  Benefits of planting these on top of cardboard is that the picking of the potatoes should be easy since they should be above the cardboard.

Cabbage Planted last year that overwintered and came back better than last year since it is bug free.  The aphids really did damage to the cabbage last year.  For some reason there are no aphids this year.  A couple of thoughts for less aphids: the great number of lady bugs I’ve seen every where including the garden in the city, or maybe having Comfrey planted between and around the cabbage.  Good bugs like comfrey like to overwinter in Comfrey so maybe that has helped as well.

2014 the year of the lady bug in Colorado.  I’ve been seeing lady bugs everywhere this year.  Is it all the rain we’ve had?  I’ve noticed them at all three properties.

2014 Food Forest Swale with cover crops including sunflowers, common vetch and clovers. I am going to add quite a bit of straw to help cover the soil. The common vetch has purple flowers and they attracted a larger bumble bee.

Sunflower seed head before bloom July 2014. Sunflowers were planted as a productive cover crop for the new swale. The animals should enjoy them and some will surely reseed for next year.

Common Vetch with purple flowers which the bumble bee checked out.

watered when planted. 2014 has been a great year for rain. Again this week a lot of rain fell. Enough for the neighbors field to have very large ponds again.

I weeded another row of Asparagus today and noticed some with seed pods balls on them. And this plant had an orange bug which looked like a lady bug but it was solid orange.

The chickens were happy to get to scratch in the shade under the apple tree!  The chicken tractor isn’t here yet but we changed the fencing again to give them a new area for the day.

We also picked up organic and thus non gmo feed for the chickens along with organic scratch as a treat for them.

I dug up two of my largest comfrey plants that were planted as 1 or 2 year old crowns last year.  They were huge this year as in over 2 feet tall and 3 feet wide.  I split each plant into two plants and cut off some of the longer and larger roots to produce more plants since that is the only way to propagate the sterile bocking 4 variety of comfrey.  I cut most all of the leaves off of the plants and blended them in a blender to speed up the process of making comfrey tea fertilizer.  This will be my first batch of bocking 4 comfrey tea.  I started a batch of common comfrey tea a week or so ago.

The photos are of the original largest plant in the ground, then dug up, then with the roots cleaned.  Between the two plants I took over 10 root cuttings which were all a bit larger than the root cuttings I bought last year.

In the ground originally

Trimmed but not separated.

Lots of roots and I bet some broke off when I dug it up.

Root cuttings from the two Bocking 4 Comfrey plants.  Planted mostly horizontal.

I put half of the plant here along with 10 root cuttings near the chicken coop to catch the rain and here because we interact with the chickens often.  The dirt was amended with steer manure and the dirt from the chicken area.  Comfrey grows in most any soil but we want to have it thrive thus the amendments.

This weekend I weeded just over 500 feet of asparagus we planted this year.  I enjoyed pulling out the young tumble weeds.  They are great and appearing  where I’ve disturbed the soil.  I should have had a longer shirt or sunscreen.  I ended up with about a 1 inch sunburn across my lower back since I weeded on my hands and knees.

I dug up two if the bocking 4 comfrey plants that I planted last year to move them to our new house.  I cut away most of their stems and leaves which I will use to make comfrey tea.  About a week ago I picked a lot of the common comfrey from the new house and put it in a bucket with water and it is already stinky and turning the  water black.  So far so good.

This year we got our first hive so we are learning a lot about bees.  The top box only has the gallon of sugar water.  The middle box is the box we just added.  It took the bees a little less than two months to fill the first box.

The bees arrived on May 3rd.   They were placed in a 10 frame hive.  Their shipping container was placed in the hive rater than knocking them into the hive.  I thought that was nicer for them and I didn’t want to irritate them.  You could also note I was scared of them.

I they were giver sugar water as well as a bee patty.  The queen was placed in her shipping g cage with a marsh mellow keeping her in place for a few days.

A week or so later I removed the shipping container and inserted the other frames.  Then only their sugar water was replenished.  The mix is 5 pounds of sugar in a one gallon container.

Fast forward to June 27th.  The bees now have another 10 frame box on top of their original box.  And it looked like they were ready for it since they had build comb on all the original frames and now were building comb on the bottom of the separator panel.

Sugar water was sprayed in the air.  The bees were rather calm with the hive being open and the extra comb being scraped off.

A little bit of honey was in the comb so we had our first taste of local honey.

This is the package of the food forest we planted in 2014 along a swale in the middle of the property.  This package contains a combination of 64 bare root trees and shrubs.  This is the 2nd year in a row that I ordered trees from St Lawrence Nurseries. For perspective the each of the wood planks are 6 inches wide.

Regen Farms is farming the land in a way that regenerates the land.  The first farm project is on 20 acres on the eastern plains of Colorado. The goal is to have a productive farm where people come to learn about permaculture and farming for the high plains. We are finding ways to regenerate pasture land to be much more productive with improved soils. Many different fruit, nut and herb species have been planted to trial their productivity in the environment.

The site is on the easter plains of Colorado about 30 minutes east of Denver.  Average rain fall is listed as 15 inches a year.  Since beginnin the project there have been days a weeks with over 2 inches of rain.  The soil is very sandy so most rain fall soakes in rather quickly.  The land was mostly open pasture which had been cut for hay for several years.

As of May 2014 the site inlcudes:

3 hugel swales supporting 2 food forests
1000 asparagus plants on contour below a food forest
25 hybrid hazel bushes on the south side of the asparagus to be a productive wind block.

Over 130 trees were planted along the north side of the property for a wind blocking forest.  These trees include bur oak, pinion pine and ponderosa pines.  Native plum, wax currant and willow were planted around the site for wild life and wind blocking.

The first food forest was planted in 2013 along two swales and includes:
3 Bur Oak
3 Black Walnut
3 Black Cherry
2 Mulberry Northrop Morus alba
5 Apple Trees
2 Smoky June Berries
2 Prince William June Berries
10 Gooseberries Pixwell
3 Sumac
8 Elder

The second food forest was planted in the spring of 2014 and includes 33 trees with every third tree being a nitrogen fixing siberian peashrub or honey locust.
Melba Apple
Siberian Pea Shrub
Hudar Pear
Meteor Cherry
Siberian Pea Shrub
Lobo Apple
Mt Royal Plum
Siberian Pea Shrub
Adirondack Gold Apricot
Southworth Pear
Siberian Pea Shrub
State Fair Apple
North Star Cherry
Sierian Pea Shrub
Northern Blue Plum
Adirondack Gold Apricot
Siberian Pea Shrub
Sharon Apple
Nova Pear
Siberian Pea Shrub
Bali Cherry
Native American Plum
Thornless Honey Locust
Red Baron Apple
Adirondack Gold Apricot
Thornless Honey Locust
Hudar Pear
Montmorency Cherry
Thornless Honey Locust
Regent Apple
Northern Blue Plum
Thornless Honey Locust
Adirondack Gold Apricot

An estimated 13,000 pounds of leaves were brought to the site in the fall of 2013 past year to help cover bare soil and to improve the soil.  5 dump loads of composted manure were also brought to the site.

We make some biochar and have bought biochar to amend the soil when planting plants.