Hollow Garden

The view from the front porch to the potting shed is much improved without last year’s ice shelf and our soil looks better, too. There’s so much you can do when you don’t have to slog through 2 feet of snow.

Wood Ash

Over the winter we’ve  distributed old wood stove ashes (let them sit at least a week in a fireproof tub – no sparks!) on the vegetable garden, perennial beds and shrub borders. Our native clay will always be acidic because of the granite bedrock on this side of the mountain, unlike the limestone that underlays the Shenandoah Valley to the west.

Sweet or Sour?

Of course if you’re growing azaleas and rhododendrons and lots of wildflowers, they like their native soil just fine and but many of the old-fashioned ornamentals – like lilac, boxwood, bearded iris and herbs – prefer a non-acidic soil above 6.5 ph (7 is neutral and above that is “sweet” or alkaline). When I saw that moss was creeping into a bed of transplanted peonies and iris, I knew the wood ashes would be just the ticket.

From tree to firewood to heat for the house, to ash to organic potash to feed the soil and new roots – that’s a good closed cycle we try to repeat as much as possible here in the hollow.

We’ve spent the first weeks of ought eleven clearing brush and thanking God for the dry weather, so different from the claustrophobic ice-cave of last year’s Snowpocalypse. Severe times make us grateful for what we have. This winter storms have sped up the coast leaving us high and dry in our little Blue Ridge hollow. A good time to attack the old fence line along the road that’s finally rotted into a mass of honeysuckle, spindly posts and bits of wire. When things are bare down to the bone, it’s a good time to do some clearing.