"Five Apple Farm: Growing It Larrapin"
Geek adventures with honey bees, gardens & more on a Blue Ridge homestead
Getting to know the land: Hamamelis virginiana (Witch Hazel)
Back in early October we were exploring the edge of the creek on the land’s southern boundary.
Five Apple Farm
All spring and summer and early fall of 2013 Larrapin Garden has been without a home. We knew we were going to move for many months so as the time approached I didn’t put in a spring garden, mostly for lack of time but also lack of heart with the weight of leaving another place I loved so much. Eight years before we had made the difficult decision to leave our home in the South Toe Valley of the Black Mountain range of North Carolina due to an intractable neighbor situation. If all our things are going on a truck, we reasoned, wouldn’t it be a good chance to spend time closer to parents in Arkansas? So we rambled off to the Arkansas Ozarks for a life season. It turned out to be one of my favorite life seasons so far.
Home has a way of calling you back though. Even though we were each born in other states, the highest mountains of Southern Appalachia had drawn us both like a magnet. After I spent a summer as a farm intern in the South Toe Valley of the Black Mountain Range I knew I had found home and planned to be in that place forever. Sometimes when you fall in love, you know you are signing on for life. So at first, the sojourn to the Ozarks felt like a disorienting twist in the life I had imagined. Once there however, I discovered the most delightful community of friends and farmers I’d ever known. I learned more about all things garden and farm than ever before working with stony soil of my land and the challenging Ozark climate. There were a couple of severe droughts, a grasshopper plague, a killer heat-dome summer and a negative 18 winter that tested my mettle and proved that Ozarkers have a toughness that I probably don’t! But it built up some resilience I didn’t have before. Summers could be brutal. But how I loved that sunlight every other season! I love the time I spent there with the land and with the people. There is amazing energy in Fayetteville, Arkansas and I found there dear friends I’ll keep for life.
Then life shuffles things around again and the call of home is strong. We finally made the decision to return to the Blue Ridge and look for a home somewhere within four counties in Western North Carolina or maybe even Southwest Virginia. I packed a new roll of prayer flags I’d received as a gift and my seedling-cup maker as talismans to help remind me that at the end of all the dreaded leaving and moving, there would be need for both at some new homeplace and new garden site. The moving was harder even than I remembered and the leaving the hardest of all.
We settled in a funky rent house with a great view for the long search for an affordable little farm. That search was often depressing. There was right house-wrong land. Level or gently sloping land with southern exposure is very hard to find here and considered quite dear. Then there was right land-totally wrong house. And of course a lot of right land + right house but totally wrong price!
Then there’s that moment when you step out of the car with the real estate agent and your breath catches to see it. It took Mendy and I only a few minutes of walking around to realize we’d found what we were looking for: a sturdy brick rancher on five acres of mixed open field and forest, south facing. All good, even before counting the lovely little creek, the old apple orchard, chesnut and walnut trees, and the full-gravy bonus of a tiny old guesthouse for visiting friends and family. Pure joy followed by several grueling weeks of post-housing-crash bank loan process. My filing cabinet has never been thoroughly interrogated and tortured. I had set up a card table to find and sort all the obscure documents the bank requested. But finally, buyers, sellers, bankers and lawyers sat around a table and we signed over and over and over and happily.
We have a home back home. Really back home – the new place is only about a mile as the crow flies from the home we left eight years ago in the South Toe Valley of the Black Mountain Range of these old, old Appalachian mountains. We have named the new homeplace Five Apple Farm in honor of the little orchard as well as my lifelong connection to apple trees. With my tree planting habits there will likely be many more apple trees in the future..but the name feels perfect.
Thank you for stopping by this blog and I hope you’ll visit often and see what happens from the simple start of putting a shovel into the soil of former back lawn and envisioning a garden there — as well as a landscape surrounding it that is larrapin to the birds, butterflies, bees and wildlife and gardeners alike. We’ve been here since mid-October and it’s been a slow start to nesting, but we are starting that process now. Welcome to the new Larrapin Garden, beginning all over again.
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Sowing seeds of a future garden?
One thing you learn about fall gardening is if you are going to have greens like these through the winter, you should have started them in mid-August. If you did, you will thank yourself all winter. Your chickens will thank you too—as this Buckeye back at the old Larrapin Garden did.
Larrapin Garden has been in transition this year as we moved back home to North Carolina. This required getting a rental house and that has not been good for gardening as I am loathe to plant in a place I’ll only be a few months, even though my wiser inside-voice says to plant wherever you are, no matter how long you think you will be there. So here are some used deli containers I’m going to use to start some fall seeds.
I’d like to say I’ve overcome my dislike of rentals, but that would not be true. Instead, we have found and fallen in love with a home and the magical five acres around it in the high mountains above Burnsville, NC. If all the stars align and the fates allow, we hope to close on our new home this coming Friday, the day before my birthday.
Needless to say we’ve been asking everyone we know for good energy, thoughts and prayers that all will go as we hope. As a kind of ‘act of faith’ I’m starting seeds for some fall greens in a garden I hope to begin very soon.
This required getting out the big seed-stash box. Unlike most of my belongings that are still packed, I knew exactly where this box was.
So that’s lettuce on the left and my own “Larrapin Kale” on the right. I’ll use these little trays to start the seeds till they are about a half inch tall, then will pot up into newspaper cups. And if I get really really lucky, later this fall there will be some lovely raised beds in this pretty spot by the stream, the possible, hopeful future home of Larrapin Garden. I’ll keep you posted!
—A Larrapin Garden…on the cusp of new home in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina. Leigh’s posts on this blog may be boom or bust depending on the season, but if you subscribe here you’ll get one weekly email—usually on Wednesdays—to let you know what’s new. You are also invited to get garden related miscellany and recipes at the brand new Facebook page or on Twitter.
Read MoreSnapshot post: Local Since Forever
Spotted this in the grocery parking lot and even though I figure they are talking about place of residence…I like to think of this applied to eating local and supporting local!
Read MoreWhat every blogger wants…
On the phone with a friend and before we hang up she says, “By the way, when are you going to post again on your blog?!”
Thank you Diana for the prompt and the encouragement!
Leigh
Via iPhone
Photo: North Toe river, Spruce Pine, NC
Read MoreLove this plant! Panicle Hydrangea
Any plant that attracts this kind of beauty on a daily basis is going to win points with me!
Read MoreGood reason to let black snakes share your landscape…
Mendy and I have named all the various blacksnakes on the various farms where we’ve lived either “Snidely” or “Snidelina” depending on how large or how graceful and pretty they have been. Yes we’ve had pretty ones—long and slim with gleaming white undersides and shiny black scales. Ok, so it’s just me who thinks they are pretty and Mendy prefers not to see them at all. Still, we have not bothered them except in rare and tragic, chicken-related accidents…
Here’s a GREAT reason to tolerate black snakes: they prey on poisonous snakes! I’d always heard that said, but this blog post I came across thanks to Joy B shows a black snake in action with a rattler. Amazing.
NOT that I really want to see this wild-kingdom kind of action on my actual patio…..still, glad to know it’s not just a myth. Amazing photos. Check it out here. http://goo.gl/TeR24 at the blog Living Alongside Wildlife. (Photo, thankfully, by the blogger, not me.)
—A Larrapin Garden…currently in search of a new home in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina. Leigh’s posts on this blog may be boom or bust depending on the season, but if you subscribe here you’ll get one weekly email—usually on Wednesdays—to let you know what’s new. You are also invited to get garden related miscellany and recipes at the brand new Facebook page or on Twitter.
Read MoreSinging in the driveway…in the spring in the driveway…
This well-camouflaged little fella was singing up a storm but I couldn’t see him for the longest time.When I’d hear the song, I’d take a few steps toward it, song would stop, I’d wait.
Read MoreBee Bee Tree: Adding this to planting wish list
With a name like Bee Bee Tree, you know it is going to be of interest around here! Like the Chinese Golden Raintree, the Bee Bee Tree fills a late summer niche when there are few other nectar sources for bees and pollinators. For those in the WNC mountains, this bloom chart for beekeepers is handy: http://goo.gl/aMh0a For gardeners interested in bee-friendly plants, here’s a good list : http://goo.gl/56d6s and another one with a tree list included here: http://goo.gl/VRu3f
Will be shopping for a Bee Bee Tree as soon as I have a place to plant one….maybe before if that takes a long while. May have rows of buckets of plants ready for the future homestead long before I have a homestead! Haha. What are some things on your planting wish list? (Comment link is just above the picture.)
Leigh
—A Larrapin Garden…currently in search of a new home in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina. Leigh’s posts on this blog may be boom or bust depending on the season, but if you subscribe here you’ll get one weekly email—usually on Wednesdays—to let you know what’s new. You are also invited to get garden related miscellany and recipes at the brand new Facebook page or on Twitter.
Read MoreMountain Farm—South Toe Valley, Burnsville, North Carolina
After another disappointing day of homestead hunting last Saturday I headed over to Mountain Farm for the kind of consolation only a dreamy twenty-four acre lavender, blueberry and dairy goat farm on a mountaintop can give.
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