It has just reached noon as I begin writing this and apparently we’re at only 14C/57F out there. That can’t possibly be right, because it felt so much hotter while we worked outside!

Today, we made our newest addition to what will be our food forest area.

I picked up our Royalty raspberries from Veseys at the post office this morning. They’re even showing leaves already! Getting these in the ground became our top priority.

This is where I decided to start planting raspberries (we will be adding more, as we are able). You can see the remains of the row where we’ve been planting peas for the past two years.

Because there is a phone line buried nearby, we are keeping an area open that’s large enough to drive through on the north side, where I am standing to take this picture.. With that in mind, these first raspberries were lined up with the cranberries that mark the ends of the berry bush rows we planted last year. That sawhorse on the left is over one of the cranberries.

Of course, I was hitting a lot of rocks while I dug the holes! One of them had more roots than rocks. After this, I watered the holes a bit, then went and got some of the soil in the garden we sifted free of weeds and roots last fall. This is soil we’ve been working on and amending for a couple of years now. It’s been covered by black tarp since then, so I knew it was still clear.

My daughter, meanwhile, brought over the raspberry transplants – and a lopper to cut those roots out!

The canes were planted into new, root-free, soil, then given a bit of a watering. Each of them got a tomato cage to protect from the deer.

Last of all, a deep mulch of wood chips was placed around them, then a final watering. The sod that was removed got broken up and spread out, while the rocks from the holes, plus rocks that had been left at the ends of other rows we’d grown in last year, were collected. Thse all got dumped into the new groundhog hole we found next to the house when the snow melted. It still doesn’t look like it’s being used, nor does the original one beside the dining room door steps, just a few feet away. For now, we’re just going to block off the one. The other one is behind a mock orange bush, so I’ll want to fill that one with soil, first, if it keeps looking unused.

My daughter is quite happy with the raspberries. The ones we planted before, that I got her for her birthday, were eaten by deer and hit with drought in their first year, and never really recovered. It’s too early to tell for sure, but I don’t know if they survived this past winter. If they did, we’ll probably transplant them near these ones, in the fall. As we add more, the rows will extend to the south, with more rows added to the west, were we’d been planting beans and peas.

This is why we’ve been planting vegetables so far from the house for the past couple of years. To give the food trees we’ll be planting here a better chance of survival!

Oh, and while I was digging holes, my darling daughter fixed the sun room outer door that wouldn’t close. It turned out to be the latch plate was coming loose. The door does still stick at the top, but it at least closes now. It seems the wood is rotting, and that’s why it came loose. The main thing is that we can use the outer door for now, and leave the inner door open, for air circulation. When my daughter came out through the sun room, she noticed the windows were starting to steam up!

She’s so handy! 😊💛

The Re-Farmer.