Sowing Perennials Indoors

Progress was slow over the last few weeks; I lost a lot of work time looking after a friend's hungry hair-generating quadruped for them while they were away (I'm getting a bit tired of the number of animals people feed with agricultural produce when this society won't even distribute it to all humans, can you tell?), but I have learned some more about what works in this region in the meantime.

Most of the fruit trees have started blooming, this damson tree was the earliest.

I got hold of some tree seeds to see if I can grow Siberian Pea Tree as a productive tree-legume, and a few other useful trees and shrubs such as Sugar Maple, Scots Pine, Strawberry Tree, Black Mulberry, Broom, Oleaster and most importantly, Monkey Puzzle. Monkey-Puzzle trees are a lifelong investment as they produce prolific amounts of large nuts in a temperate climate, but only after about 30-40 years of growth from seed, although Ken Fern of PFAF has reported some of his trees in Cornwall producing cones around 20 years old. A few of the large monkey-puzzle nuts each got their own pots after nearly two days of soaking in water.

Pre-soaking tree seeds to cold-stratify.

Most of those seeds need to be cold-stratified to simulate over-wintering before they will germinate in what the seed thinks is springtime, so I soaked a bunch of each in water for just over a day in small jars, then drained the water out, labelled them for their recommended chilling times and put them at the back of a refrigerator. For some of the couple of leguminous seeds, pea tree and broom, which should be able to germinate without chilling, I spotted a fererro-rocher tray from a previous winter's gift that made an excellent propagator tray for germinating the seeds in. With a teaspoonful of wet potting mix in each slot, after piercing the inner tray for drainage, I planted a dozen pea-tree seeds, three broom seeds and a few of the others that looked like they might germinate easily just after their soak, then covered the tray over.

That's not chocolate in that pretentious yet thankfully re-usable acrylic packaging.

One month after putting those seeds in soil, none of them have yet germinated, and a couple of the prized monkey-puzzle seeds appeared to have flecks of mould growing on the upper sides of them every time that I watered them in the last couple of weeks, which makes me worry whether they will germinate at all. I've scraped it off each time it appears, but it keeps coming back whenever there is some moisture in the pot.

Fluffy white (and in some places, green) mould growing around damp monkey-puzzle seeds. Is this a penicillum mould? Any tips would be appreciated.

There are several perennial herbs that I want to try and grow in some of the sunniest spots on the hillside, most of which are usually more suited to a mediterranean climate. I want them both for delicious food and because they make great companions for nightshade plants, some of which (tomato, aubergine) are already very difficult to grow in the local climate without pest infestations. I sowed seeds for a few herbs (oregano, marjoram, rosemary, thyme, along with chamomile, fennel and a couple of artichoke and squash seeds) in an old seedling tray I found, and kept them indoors for a few weeks so that they could germinate in some shelter while there was still a bit of frost, which those herbs can be sentitive to when young, while giving me time to prepare a patch for them to grow on.
The rosemary seems to have been the most stubborn to germinate out of the whole bunch, showing no sign of greenery after a full month (although I wonder whether the peaty potting mix I sowed them on was too acidic), while the chamomile seemed to spring up within a couple of days and the rest of the herbs did ok within a couple of weeks.

Seedling identification: Counting left-to-right from the top row (starting at blue marker) down, I sowed Rosemary in 1, 2 and 19, Oregano in 7 and 13, Thyme in 8, 14 and 20, 'Cinnamon' Basil in 3, 9, 15 and 21, Globe Artichoke in 4 and 24, Chamomile in 10 and 16, Luffa Gourds in 5 and 6, Spaghetti Squash in 11 and 12, Marjoram in 22 and 23, and Fennel in 17 and 18. All were sown at the same time and pictured here after 2 weeks.

At the same time I dedicated some old margarine tubs to germinating seeds of a couple of my favourite edible temperate perennial shrubs, asparagus and rhubarb.

Rhubarb seedlings, 2 weeks from sowing. A three-leaved mutant seedling on the right of this picture didn't survive.

I have seen rhubarb growing very well in large clumps here in all sorts of locations, from full-sun exposure on a south facing hill, to shaded spots around the side of buildings and even growing between a couple of rocks on a roadside.

A healthy old local rhubarb patch, those leaves can get huge, as in 2-3 feet long not counting the stalk, so that you could fan yourself or a loved one with it on a hot day.

Rhubarb makes a lovely spring/summer pie or jam, but asparagus, which can put lots of nutrition in some lovely savoury dishes, I have yet to spot growing anywhere nearby. The asparagus seeds that I potted took a few weeks to germinate, but then all sprung up at roughly the same time, making a nice surprise. The first thing to germinate in one of the pots was a mystery weed, which left me confused until the tiny asparagus heads appeared a few days later and I now think it might be a thistle, but I didn't pull it up since an asparagus shoot growing directly next to it ended up doing very well, so I guess it isn't doing much harm.

One of two asparagus trays, 25 days after sowing.

To save a bit more time in creating vegetable and herb beds between the windbreak, and since I ran out of spare stuff to cover the ground with, I'm doing a little of something that I really want to minimise, which is tilling the topsoil. I've found that my attempt to smother some of the grass by a month of covering it with various opaque sheets followed by spreading compost on the top, has been a semi-success/failure depending on how you look at it.

Grass and other well-established weeds busting through a thin layer of mulch.

The grass is shooting up through the compost in a few locations, and one particularly lively clump simply lifted the compost on it right up after a few weeks of regrowth. Initially I thought this was a bigger problem than it actually is, since I mistook some of the chives and onions growing there for tufts of grass, until I plucked one up; it seems I missed the initial seedling stage that I mainly found pictures of online, where the black seed shells have been pushed above the surface. Disregard that, I just thoroughly inspected the area and practically all of them really are very slender grass shoots, so my onion and chive seeds don't seem to have germinated for unknown reasons, though the packet instructions said they could be sown straight outdoors.
There are some other seedlings growing in the compost that I laid down, but their progress is slow, the 'green manure' plants haven't established much at all in the way of ground cover, and some of the things I sowed straight outside quite early, such as broccoli and artichokes, don't even appear to have germinated, although there are still a few seedlings or possible weeds that I haven't been able to identify, I'm thinking of dedicating a blog post to them since there are so many. I'm quite worried that the nasturtium seeds I planted out early in the year might have rotted before they could germinate, so I might have to plant some more.

Carrot seedling in the centre having already developed a couple of branches.

When a nearby ash tree needed to have a branch cut back that was getting in the way, I was able to take several cuttings that might root into new trees, so I used those to extend the treeline for windbreak around the north-east a bit, since some quite strong and very cold winds had been coming in unblocked from north europe/asia in previous weeks. Hopefully this layout can approach an ideal model that Mollison recommended for a temperate-zone windbreak in his permaculture designer's manual, which is roughly a horseshoe shape, where the thick bend of the horseshoe faces the nearest pole.

Here I put some of the cuttings into rows of holes made with a garden fork. Almost none of the buds had opened on the branch that I took cuttings from, while they had across most of the rest of the tree, so clearly it didn't need the extra bit that just made it more susceptible to wind.

The areas where I wanted to lay out some more vegetable patches had too much rock at a shallow level for me to invert cubes of sod with a spade, not that I wanted to break up and expose soil at that depth anyway; ploughing soil up a foot deep often leaves a lot of earthworms out as a smörgåsbord for the birds (as I saw a couple of years ago in the documentary A Farm for the Future by Rebecca Hosking), which doesn't exactly help with soil fertility in the following years.
To try and suppress the grass roots even faster here without ruining the soil too much, I first raked away as much of the dead grass as possible, which from the patch I started making around the plum tree was enough to loosely half-fill a compost bin that I had recently re-assembled after moving it from a previous home (that went to the top of the hill in the hope that nutrients would flow downhill from its base). Next I would try and push a garden fork as close to horizontal as possible under a patch of moss and grass roots, but trying to keep high up on top of the mud and rocks, before levering the fork up and flipping over the shallow sods that resulted.

Example of the thickness of a sod in my improvised 'rake and flip' method, which only requires you and a garden fork. See how rocky the soil is there without going an inch past the main root mass.

Some of the grass roots that I pulled up by hand were amazingly thick, showing the age of this well-established grass that was drawing up nutrients from deep into the rocks.

This grass root was so thick that I would forgive anyone for mistaking it for a parsnip, which is even what it smelled like when torn apart.

After emptying a few small compost heaps from around my friend's house, I put the partially decomposed food peelings etc. into the large reconstructed compost bin with the grass-hay, then spreading the small amount of good quality compost from the bottom over the turned patch of soil. The whole process from raking to spreading compost took a few hours of work to produce a patch about 10ft long by 4ft wide; a lot more toil than mulching the grass but a lot less waiting.

A long flipped-grass vegetable bed leading up to the plum tree, almost finished.

Near-disaster struck when my friend's pet knocked my tray of various seedlings off a window-sill, the very same day that I wanted to plant some of them out after waiting a month for some of them to establish, and I managed to rescue most of them, though I don't know how many will survive once they are planted outside. A couple of the rhubarb trays were merely knocked on their sides, and the soil was quite glued together at the time, so they kept growing fine, though one or two had injuries to leaves that were hanging over the tray edge.
I stuck the artichokes out at the windward (WSW, front of picture) end of the large patch above as soon as it was ready, with some bird seed directly behind for tall grain plants like sunflower, chamomile around the edge since it can grow amongst grass like daisy, cauliflower and cabbage (hopefully sheltered) in the middle, followed by rows of squashes, lettuce, radishes and turnips towards the plum tree, with a few chives directly around it.

One of the artichoke seedlings, just left of centre, with a bunch of chamomile to the top-right.

Further around on the south face of the hill I made a much smaller patch by the same method, sticking out the various herbs around the south edge along with some more seeds of the same generally all over the patch as companions for some tomatoes in the middle, with beans and squashes behind them that I intend to grow up some sticks like a trellis, if they will actually grow.

Tasty herbs, whether they can survive here only time will tell; I have seen oregano doing reasonably well in a raised-bed near here though.

I divided up a tray of asparagus and planted it in two blocks by the west end of the patch backed by some more sunflowers and stuck a few marigold seeds around the edge as general companions for the rest.

Half of an Asparagus seedling tray stuck out along with mystery weed. Maybe I should have thinned them out further, but any that survive shall inherit the earth.

Since rhubarb seemed to do so well in slightly raised mounds that it could spread its large leaves out over, I figured it would make a great element to place on the large back wall at the widest part of the water-harvesting swale that I dug out, since its shelter might lower evaporation of any collected water when the sun is lower in spring & autumn, so that's where I stuck a tray of seedlings out.

Several rhubarb seedlings from the larger tray planted out on the swale/pond wall. Some more peas were planted behind and anywhere else that I hadn't put any on the wall yet.

While doing some backround reading I re-discovered, having forgotten, that fennel, much like walnut, is quite toxic to almost all plants around it, save perhaps dill (which I don't like very much anyway), so I stuck seedlings of that in one small bit of turned soil right next to the compost bin, on the slim chance that it might discourage plants from growing in the heap, and because by a compost bin should be a fine position for any plant, since it supplies all different nutrients to the roots while attracting a variety of insects.

Barely visible are 3 fennel seedlings from left to right across the middle of this picture. I might chuck some more seeds straight on the patch to see if they take, I'm not terribly worried about this plant.

Tragically, the very next day after finishing that batch of working the soil and sowing seeds in sunny weather, an unexpected storm blew through that brought very harsh westerly winds for most of last weekend. While all the trees survived with minimal damage having rooted well now, most of the seedlings that I had just planted out were devastated.

The skies fell, rivers ran with blood... well, not quite, but there was enough rainfall in less than 24 hours to half-fill the swale that I dug, from really not a huge area to run-off from. Taking this picture in what I thought would be a decent lull in the weather resulted in me getting soaked when the rain came back.

The rhubarb was hit quite hard since the wind would have accellerated slightly over the swale wall with no plant life there yet to slow it.

The asparagus seedlings had their top third simply snapped right over.

This post could almost be re-named "How to do gardening wrong by experimentation and learn from it", but I've already learned in tactics to always keep something in reserve, while I realise that I have a better chance of something succeeding well if I try a little bit of everything, as goes the creative process. To that end I only planted out half of the rhubarb and asparagus seedlings that I grew, the other half I will try to very carefully split out into individual pots, to see if I can grow several single strong plants of each to then plant outside.

Reserve asparagus and rhubarb seedlings; if I can grow several strong plants from them, then I might even be able to give a few to friends.

It wasn't until after planting out blackberry bramble cuttings earlier in the year that I read that the opposite to what I found with willow tree cuttings was true, that thicker chunks of bramble cane are better for vegetative propagation, and so on examining the ones that I stuck out, I found only this one alive and well.

This spiky stick of awesome might one day grow into a hedge covered with delicious fruit.

Also, with blueberry seedlings that similar online instructions said should be quite easy to germinate once they have been cold-stratified for a few weeks, I could only get one to germinate here by surface-sowing stratified seeds onto ericaceous potting mix.

At first I wasn't sure if this was a weed or not, since it looked like others I had seen before and it doesn't help when a cannabis breeder names their unique strain 'blueberry', which then ends up being most of what shows up when I search for images online with the terms 'blueberry seedling'. I'm sure that cannabis strain is probably delicious, but could people please stop naming one curious plant after another? We have enough confusion with that already, what with 'strawberry trees', 'cinnamon basil', 'chocolate mint', etc. Rant aside, that's a grass shoot in the background, which was swiftly destroyed once I realised that.

Did you say shrubberies?

As I mentioned a few days ago, the elaeagnus pungens shrub that I planted from a pot looked quite unhealthy, since most of its leaves were turning pale and some dropping off though it should be an evergreen plant. The hybrid Elaeagnus x Ebbingei from a pot was doing very well by comparison:

Although a few of the leaves were turning that same way.

Elaeagnus Pungens Maculata, after covering the grass around it.

Seeing the other plant in this state was a bit disheartening since it is one of my favourite plants there at least from its reported qualities, although I am glad that I took a few cuttings of each elaeagnus shrub, as all those still seem to be healthy at least by leaf colour, although they haven't grown any noticable shoots in their windowsill location. I'm not sure what caused this shrub to suffer so much, but I have a few things in mind. The first thing proposed by a neighbour was that perhaps the strong coastal wind was too much for this plant, although I have doubts about that since plants from the whole genus are supposed to make a very strong hedge near coasts, and the shrub is very close to ground-level where the wind is cut down heavily by the boundary layer effect.

I was mildly suspicious about a bunch of caterpillars that I saw in a group several feet away by the fenceline; they most likely had recently crawled out from their little silk tents somewhere nearby, but at the size of them I was worried that they might have already chewed up the leaves of the shrub a bit, though I put that down as unlikely since only a couple looked at all mis-shapen or bitten. I first saw one of them on some grass near the swale back in March, and although it was the largest insect around at the time I didn't think much of it, just taking this picture of it so that I could identify it.

From this page it looks as if it's either a Fox Moth or a Browntail.

Next I thought that maybe this particular shrub hadn't done well because it got a bit less water than the other, being more on top of the hill and on the high-side of the swale, while it was larger and so perhaps thirstier, but with the frequency that it rains around here I guess that is also unlikely. Nevertheless I watered it a lot just in case water was a factor.
I later found and read a more detailed page about the shrub on PFAF, 'Elaeagnus x Ebbingei, A Plant for all Reasons', where it said that "The plant is very tolerant of site conditions, the only situation that is a definite no-no is one that becomes waterlogged. It far prefers a well-drained soil, is capable of growing in very poor soils and, once established, is very drought resistant and will succeed in quite dry soils." So I hope that I didn't make a situation worse by giving the plant some more water. I really ought to do a soil test, which I still haven't got around to yet, only knowing that it consists of a few-inches smear of mud over quite a lot of rocks, supporting mostly grass and very little Heather (which prefers acidic soil), but not knowing the clay/sand/peat fraction.

Lastly, I wondered about root shock; upon examining every one of the trees planted, it seemed that they had all spread at least a couple of their buds into small leaves, with the exception of the Ash, Plum tree and the largest Willow cutting that I had taken, the latter two of which also happened to be the trees worst hit by the storm winds that came during the first time I was away since they were planted. I think that injury/damage to the plant roots might have something to do with the weakness of all these plants, however that doesn't explain why the elaeagnus cuttings that I planted straight outside were nowhere near as healthy as the ones inside (but water, soil quality and competition with nearby grass could explain that), the ash might just open its leaf buds quite late though.

A couple of cuttings indoors.

One of the two cuttings outside; they are both in similar shape.

Of course another possibility that I really hope isn't the case, since there would be little I can do about it, is that the shrub could have caught a disease here. If that were true, then it might spread in the soil and could even prevent me from successfully planting any of them in that area for years to come, and they might have to be kept only as pot-plants.
I can still give native shrubs like Gorse and Broom a try as inter-planted perennial legumes to support the fruit trees, although they wouldn't be anywhere near as useful as elaeagnus x ebbingei with its food crop. I may still be able to get a deciduous fall-fruiting Elaeagnus species, Angustifolia (Oleaster / Russian Olive), to grow here, and I'm interested in whether I can get Siberian Pea Tree to grow here.


Besides that, I've been slowly working my way around the patches that I intend to turn into a series of keyhole beds separating walkways, laying down what bits of cardboard, sacks, old tyres and rocks I have on hand to mulch down the soil for few weeks, before spreading some of the little home-made compost and rotted manure I have access to, on top of the then dead or dying grass, to plant seeds in.

Using the leftover pegs from plotting out a contour to mark out where keyhole plant-beds will be, then mulching some of those spots down.

The grass roots are quite stubborn and will try to re-grow through the compost if a gap is left for light (maybe there's a philosophical lesson in that), but I have scattered seeds of some so-called 'green manure' nitrogen-fixing ground-cover plants like Fiddleneck and Crimson Clover, to stop weeds from getting through.

Some of the first seeds I sowed back at the start of March are only just beginning to germinate.

I've heard that people round here usually go with leaving rolls of old carpet across strips of grass that they want to grow some crops on, for several months before taking them off to plant annual crops in the ground where the grass has completely mulched down. I just hope that my accelerated method with compost on top will still allow plant roots to establish into the space where the grass is breaking down. I doubt that carrots or parsnips would ever be able to grow to a good quality in soil of this depth anyway, but I'm still going to try in the softer spots where I can get a pitchfork deeper in before hitting rocks.

Filling the slots in the swale mound built from chunks of heavy soil.

One of the things I just tried in the last day was to patch in the slots between some of the blocks of sod that I turned over for my swale using a loosely forked compost/manure mix to make mini-seed-beds, and planted peas 'n' carrots (apparently they go well together) on top of most of those patches, hoping that the softer groove would give the roots an easy run, making for better carrots and hopefully rejuvenating some of the soil where the peas are.

The Rowan tree opening spring leaves.

Currently the Rowan tree and the Katy Apple appear to be the healthiest trees, or at least have grown the most/earliest leaves, but time will tell which trees are strongest when they all present a bigger area for the wind to drag on. None of the brambles that I planted directly into the ground look very alive, but I don't know what's going on at the root level. On the beds of mulched ground I'm trying to roughly use the set of crop guilds that I sketched up here from mixed free online sources, and will be sure to report on what is growing well where.

A Brief Update

I hate moving house.

Some of the elaeagnus shrubs are struggling here.

Snow in April.

That is all.

Supporting Trees

Recently I noticed a quite old mini-documentary on forest gardening that I thought I had seen before, but hadn't as it turns out, having just seen a separate interview with one old fellow in it, the late Robert Hart, who started a quite famous forest garden halfway down England in Shropshire. This documentary was made up of a series of 3 interviews, which it turns out contain some great gems of knowledge on forest gardening in a temperate climate; the first being with Robert Hart about his 500m^2 labour of love, the second was with Ken Fern, who started and continues to maintain Plants For A Future, a project in Cornwall that has trialled thousands of different plants for their suitability in temperate climates, creating a database with detailed information and ratings based on things like hardiness, edibility, potential poisons, and other uses (you can tell this was filmed in the 90's when he mentions how 'big' a disk you needed to store the database). The last was on the subject of some applied urban permaculture with Mike & Julia Guerra.

I had used PFAF's website before when first reading about permaculture a year or two ago, when there were a collection of very handy general info pages, for instance on why we should be tending to use perennial plants, and some information on the forest layering system on a helpful page about forest gardening. There were some links to useful perennial food crops such as chestnut, walnut, brambles, et cetera, but otherwise the information wasn't very easy to navigate.
I noticed a while back when I looked it up again that the site was down for maintenance, and now that it is back up again, it's quite an amazing change. You should really go check it out sometime (if I didn't already make that clear :), and I think they could do with some support too, since it looks like they forked out a bit to have some people with a lot of talent fix their website up. Now there's a very effective database search function on the site that can let you search by any combination of your needs, such as plant uses, environmental conditions, or simply keywords.
For example, one of the plants that Ken showcased in the aforementioned video was a member of the genus Elaeagnus, sometimes called Oleaster, which had some amazing properties I was looking for all in one plant, and some I wasn't even looking for. It's a nitrogen-fixing perennial shrub that resists a cold windy maritime climate well, so I could plant it up north between our trees to support their growth, just as Acacia is recommended in warmer climes. Not only does it grow quite fast, a great novelty feature of the species that it seems Ken had there, Elaeagnus Pungens, is that it produces an edible fruit in springtime, usually around April, of which both the outer flesh and the oily seed (once hulled) make very useful foods.

I managed to get hold of a couple of such species, and as Ken said, if you can tell me any other fruit that you can get out of your garden in April, I'd like to know about it.

So while that's a great find, I really wanted to know what native shrub or tree species could be used as nitrogen-fixing legumes to support the regrowth of forests in harsh cold-temperate climates, so I popped a simple search into that new database interface, looking for perennials, trees, shrubs; nitrogen-fixing, wind-resistant and maritime-exposure tolerant in hardiness zones 4-7, and ended up with a short list on one page that included a few things I recognised. Notable natives included Broom, a prolifically-growing weed that I've noticed growing wild while in fruit in Perthshire about a year and a half ago, which I could identify through Wikipedia back then when wanting to know if its pea pods were edible (they aren't), and another plant, which is a very common sight in Scotland, Gorse.
Now while I know that Gorse can grow a very strong windbreak hedge, and those who have tried it tell me that you can make a very tasty wine from its flowers, I am reluctant to plant any, both for its ability to grow out of control, and due to a grudge formed against the plant during section and platoon attack exercises over the countryside a few years ago, when I learned exactly how nice it is to wade through the stuff. If I can find another place that someone will allow me to start replanting trees, I may use it as a support species and a hedge to keep winds and sheep out then, but won't be letting it take over some common food-growing ground any time soon.
On a related note, George Monbiot recently posted a very good article to the Permaculture Research Institute, on the problem of land mismanagement and deforestation that has been occuring in Scotland under careless wealthy landlords since the time of the Highland Clearances. It's my hope that we can get enough support in Scotland to start replanting the Caledonian Forest on a large scale, before any more biodiversity is lost.


As for my efforts to reverse the trend of vanishing boreal forest, I went back up north very briefly at the end of February to check on how the patch was doing and see what I could plant.
The first thing I noticed, which I was expecting to some extent due to some stormy weather in the weeks while I was away, was that several of the trees were leaning away from the prevailing wind. It's a common sight to see the few very sparse trees on the north end of Sutherland doing this as a growth habit when they have been beaten by strong winds over their lifetime, but what's not so nice is when a young newly-planted tree has rotated not in its trunk, but at the roots when it wasn't very well anchored.

The very-leaning one on top-left is the plum.

Not only were the trees not very well anchored in the ground since they were planted bare-root, but since they arrived after I left, my friend managed to put a couple of them in backward to the plan I sketched, which they also lost, so on the windward side of our damson (prune) tree with its very dwarfing rootstock, there's a slightly taller and weaker 'katy' eating apple tree. I guessed it would probably just do more damage to the root zone if I was to try and dig them up again to swap their positions, so I left them that way and hoped for the best, my next task being to give those trees some much-needed support.

It was easy enough to right that plum where it was slightly loose and tread the earth back down for a start.

It seemed that the local potted trees, while taller, suffered a lot less in the winds due to already having some stronger-established roots and a sort of counterweight from the pot soil.

The little Katy eating-apple tree only seemed to be managing because it was propped up slightly by a nearby tyre, which my friend had helpfully used to weigh down the cardboard box that the bare-rooted trees came in, as simple mulch to rot the grass down underneath.

I gave the tyre a gentle boot to set her upright again.

The worst-hit seemed to be one of the Willow cuttings that I took the last time, which I hadn't pruned enough to stop it blowing over.

While this needed to be cut back, the other, smaller branches that I planted did just fine.

Next to the bramble cuttings that I planted, which were doing fairly well, my friend had uncovered a couple of hawthorn bushes that were planted a couple of years ago and had grown quite slowly since then, probably because they were surrounded by grass.

Bramble cuttings in background near fencepost, Hawthorn in foreground.

Also I found out the hairy-looking cutting I took before was a rose cutting, which is useful as rose bushes provide rosehips that make a half decent jam, so keep an eye out for them in suburbs during autumn; I've even found them in retail-park car-parks before.
Inspired by the antics of Bill Mollison in yet another old permaculture documentary, I shoved a few hazelnuts into the ground between the brambles, to see if I can add yet more variety to this windbreak.

As for stopping the trees that didn't have tyres near them from blowing away, the bottom of the wider section of the mini swale that I dug gave me plenty of rocks to weigh the soil around their roots down with.

Hole from a big'un that I just pulled out.

...and that rock supporting a willow.

Another thing that's obvious in the next pic, which I noticed as soon as I turned up, is that there are no pea shoots growing on the swale, nor peas left to germinate into them, as I was a little hasty in the way I sowed them with limited time on my last visit.

'Howgate Wonder' cooking apple tree with some rock support at the back.

Following on from seeing Lawton and volunteers liberally tossing bacteria-inoculated peas from buckets onto a swale in the water-harvesting doc, I was silly and lazily applied the same method, when I was sowing onto cold rocky soil in pitch black while they had some quite large walls of soft soil to sow onto in autumn, forgetting that there were field mice hiding all around me, who probably had a feast on those peas over the last few weeks, not that I mind much with plenty of peas to spare for now, but it taught me a lesson to cover my seeds properly in future.

After unpacking those Elaeagnus shrubs, I took cuttings from the top of each one the next day, so that I could propagate them a little bit and since being tall isn't a great advantage in these winds.

Spare shrub cuttings, easy drill by now; cut just below a leaf node, clip that leaf off and about half of what's left, including a top leaf, soak in a wee bit of honey (or rooting hormone if you can get it) then stick each in potting soil, or in a propagator tray (essentially overpriced egg packaging) if for small plants. The brambles that I treated this way are doing fine.

Then I took the potted bushes out and planted them, plus a couple of extra cuttings that I didn't put in pots like the brambles, to see if they would take root outside while having potted ones as backups.

My planting method was essentially the same as for trees, sticking them in a hole slightly deeper than the potted soil, only this time I lined the hole bottom with some home-made compost instead of duck manure, then put the sods back in upside down as before, mulching the top with raked grass and rocks.

After sticking the rest of the cuttings down, I re-arranged some of the cardboard mulch and added some cupboard-backing fibreboard that I had previously salvaged from furniture dumped on the streets in Glasgow.

Three or four weeks with cardboard on top didn't completely rot the grass there, but it made a big difference.

The remaining compost I spread over the cardboard, starting to prepare a bed for planting a few things. As light faded I went round every tree and planted a few climbing Nasturtium seeds, which should out-compete the grasses and protect the trees with their creeping nature, while making a tasty salad addition (the seeds also look funnily brain-shaped).

The movement of cardboard for mulch was part of a plan I was forming while making up a new and more accurate sketch for the plot over those couple of days. It now also includes a rough plan to divide the ground up into a series of paths and keyhole beds, so as to maximise the surface area available for planting and harvesting crops, without having to tread over food to reach the middle of a patch, and a site to potentially test a turbine on a crest of the hill is marked.

There may be a small spot of hypocrisy here, as I suspect I might have confused the two Elaeagnus species that I got and planted them the opposite way round to what I wrote in this updated map, not that it matters much.

After reading over information and diagrams on companion planting for a while to get a feel for common relations, I decided a good way to help work out large arrangements for planting lots of different crops could be to draw up a list of small guilds of a few plants that strongly benefited each other, suited to a cold temperate climate, and then try to arrange a mosaic of those small guilds based upon the features of the landscape.

'Rosemary' is a bit hard to read in the middle with the flash; but other pictures had some of the outside diagrams fuzzy, so I might just try and replace this photo with a scan.

When I wanted to plant some vegetable and herb seeds on the last day I was there, I was unlucky that a quite constant 10-20mph breeze picked up for the whole day, plus intermittent gusts, which made sowing seeds a nightmare. I settled for just covering one small patch a couple of square metres in size with compost and some potting mix that had become waterlogged, though with the sun coming out to evaporate whatever was left of the previous day's rain, I worried slightly about that soil eroding in the wind once dry.
For the crop arrangement I stuck a few globe artichoke seeds on the windward end of the patch, a few chives around the eating-apple tree to help that, followed by some onions to repel the pests of a row of carrots and sprouting broccoli beyond that, then a patch of lavender in the hardest-to-reach bit that ought to attract some predatory insects, with some more chives behind to help the rowan tree. Where I expected some of the seeds to need deep roots, I jabbed a set of holes through the half-layer of cardboard with a pitchfork and put loose compost into them before sowing seeds. Afterwards I spread some raked grass over the patch to try and keep the soil down under the sun and wind.

I could only be bothered to stake down my little bottle-shelters on the most windward sowings of carrot and broccoli though, having not prepared a lot of stakes and finding them a bit small.

Around the area and some of the swale I scattered a little bit of clover seed to fix nitrogen in the soil, though I might see about getting some comfrey later.
As a little extra protection against the harsh wind and the nibbling rabbits that have plagued this land since the Romans brought them over, I then staked some spare chicken-wire around a few of the trees, which will also give an added benefit of catching wind-blown debris for mulch, while giving nasturtiums something to climb on.

When I ran out of chicken wire, I just used a bit of old string and piled up some grass cuttings into a mat.

Let me know if I cut out too much detail or rambled on too much, it sure seemed like less work before I tried to write about it!