Hello My Friends
Here are a few snappies to show what a determined old Bozo can do with a tractor, shovel, and a rake. Also a few saplings.


This first photo was taken about five years ago. Pretty bare isn't it. This was when I first bought the property. In it we can plainly see the neighbors house. Also some holes dug for some trees. The very first thing was to get some trees in. Now I live in a place called sand canyon which is really a joke as there isn't much sand, mostly rock with a bit of clay between. Digging a hole can be a real challenge. This was before the tractor, pick and shovel! Now I have a back hoe, but it can still be a challenge. Off to the left I wanted a grove of trees but digging a hole there.....fat chance. About a foot of soil and then just rock. Not a great place for a tree.




Here is the same spot this last summer. As there wasn't much soil I built a little mountain. A tractor sure is a handy trinket to have. And as there is a lot of rock laying around a stone wall was plunked down to define a curvy little trail and hold back the mountain. Mountain is a relative term isn't it. This "mountain" dirt pile ranges from two to four feet deep. Then a gaggle of poplar and maple trees were planted and you have the start of a pretty good forest. The trail wiggles around and makes a u turn to the right to a place I call Chessie's grove, named after my dear departed cat. We used to hang out there in the evenings. You will also note that the neighbors house is much less apparent now. On the left we have more saplings, poplar, Arizona ash, and maples. I find that poplars, although very fast growing are not the best of trees.





Here we have the same view taken yesterday. The trees are bare. It's amazing how much smaller the area seems when the trees are bare, and how much closer the neighbors house looks. In the distance I planted a bunch of willows. These grew pretty good for a couple years and then they all up and died. I hate it when that happens! They were planted around the U turn in the trail and the idea was to have a sort of tree tunnel. This spring they will get taken out and something else planted, probably autumn blaze maples and Arizona ash trees, both of which grow really well here. You never really know what will thrive in your area until you try. I have about sixty cuttings in the garden, maples, Arizona ash, quaking aspens, and more poplars. Hopefully most will grow. I just love aspens and have a grove of them. The deer think they are delicious. Trees are a wonderful way to improve an area. No shortage of things to do here!
Happy gardening
Jack

Beautiful transformation!

Hello My Friends
Here are some photos of the aspen trees. I really think aspens are pretty trees, especially in the fall. They also make the most lovely rustling sound when there is a breeze. I saw some photos of groves of them in their fall colors and thought a gaggle of them would be a nice feature. They supposedly only grow to zone six. Well I'm in zone seven, and some charts say zone eight. Well, lets give them a try anyway. About a dozen were planted and they didn't do too well. The deer ate them and they just kind of sat there for a couple years. Then reading a US forestry guide it was learned that they like cool moist soil. So the ground was covered with several inches of mulch and the soil was kept moist. They were also given a few mild doses of liquid fertilizer throughout the summer. What a difference it made, they just took off. For the first few years I lived two hundred miles away and was only here a couple weekends a month so I couldn't really care for them properly. I have now lived here for two years and being here all the time makes a big difference.

Some are four years old and some are only one year old. The fellow on the right here is four. Of the original dozen only four survive. They were purchased as bare root trees. Some suppliers are really good like Gurneys. Everything I have bought from them was excellent. Other suppliers in my opinion are dishonest, as they sent me dried out dead sticks. I won't mention them by name. I now start most of my own trees from cuttings. This spring I plan on trying some redbuds and dogwoods. I will be sure to buy them from Gurneys. They are really pretty trees, especially in the spring. I planted some years ago before I lived here and they all died. But now that I live here I can fuss with them and hopefully have better results. Another excellent supplier is Fast Growing Trees. Everything I have gotten from them was excellent.






Here is another view. Planting trees here you must first put them in gopher baskets, otherwise they won't last a week. Then they have to be protected from the bunny rabbits with a cage. I usually make a cylinder of 1/2" hardware cloth or chicken wire that is at least two feet tall. Then I make a harness from strips of old tee shirt to prevent the cage from rubbing on the tree. I do this with all trees but it is really important with poplars. If the cage rubs on them and damages them it will cause a wound that will never heal and will introduce disease to the tree. As you can see it's pretty dry here as this is high mountain desert. I look upon my place as a little oasis. The wild life seem to think so too and I greatly enjoy them.




Last one for now. This little guy in the foreground is typical of what must be done to grow an aspen tree here. A tree in a jail. I hate the way these jails look, but until a tree gets big enough, especially the aspens this is what you have to do. As mentioned earlier the deer think they are delicious and they will bust them down to strip all the leaves. The funny thing is when a tree gets bigger they will for the most part not touch them. Even tender leaves that they can reach. That is why the bigger trees have no jails around them. I love my trees and spend a great deal of time fussing with them summer evenings. My ex girlfriend would call and ask "watcha' doin' ? ". Playing with my trees. "do you talk to them?" she would ask. Why sure. I think she thought I was a bit tetched in the head. Perhaps she was right. She just didn't understand, I think most of you do. She is no longer my girlfriend When I was a youngster my parents had a giant back yard. Over the years I had filled it with fruit trees. I had wonderful parents. We sold that house and moved to Switzerland for a while. It just broke my heart to leave those trees and my garden behind. I won't be leaving my place here until they have to carry me out
Happy Gardening My Friends
Jack

Good luck with your trees Jack,I think you are doing a great job,Planting trees is the best thing anyone can do for our planet

Jack, you are doing a great job creating your oasis. BTW, where is your oasis located?

Creating a garden, especially in difficult conditions, brings a lot of joy and fills life with a special meaning. Therefore, I am sincerely happy for you, Jack, and I hope that this will be very successful.

Jack, please keep the dialog and pics coming - enjoy them so much. I really admire your energy and enthusiasm - really inspiring. I too like trees of all kinds but favor oaks and colorful maples. This from an old, old gardener who doesn't have much pep anymore, but still maintains his gardening enthusiasm. Due to advancing age (in fact have been there for some time now) , I have had to resort to much easier gardening tasks, mostly in containers as it is difficult to bend over or dig in the ground. Containers are also good for northwest Penna since sunshine is not our most predominant weather feature and they can be moved to capture whatever sunshine is available. Unfortunately perennials are a thing of the past and now resort to an assortment of flowers and some vegetables.

Received my first gardening catalog yesterday and my interest has been diverted from the winter doldrums and looking over some new possibilities for this spring planting. Probably
will be ordering some vegetables that can be grown in a container - such as bush cucumbers. Also going to order some onion sets (for green onions) - couldn't find any locally last year. Sweet peppers also on my list. Don't have much luck with tomato plants - so will visit local markets for ready-to-eat tomatoes.

Don - glad to meet you!

Hello My Friends
Thank you for the compliments and encouraging words. I will definitely continue posting. I feel truly blessed to have my little patch of dirt here in the mountains. I am at 4500 feet elevation near Tehachapi, California. Tehachapi is about 45 miles east of Bakersfield and north of Los Angeles. It is high mountain desert with native juniper trees and a few native pines, and oaks. I have junipers on my property but no native oaks or pines. The junipers are basically giant bushes but they get what I call the bonsai treatment. And then they look like giant bonsai trees. I consider tree pruning as an art form. I'll post some before and after photos sometime. We get snow in the winter but it's usually just a few inches and only lasts a day or so. Not enough to be a nuisance, more of a treat. As to gardening under challenging conditions.....

This was my garden in Grover Beach, on the central coast of California. I moved from there to Tehachapi two years ago. This garden was three blocks from the ocean. Mild climate, you could garden all year round. Fairly cool and moist so tomatoes, cucumbers, some other warm weather varieties could be a challenge. Powdery mildew and black spot. The worst pests here were snails. But a great spot to garden.
Now we come to Tehachapi. Lots of wild life. Squirrels, bunny rabbits, deer, chipmunks. I just love the chipmunks, how cute can you get. So I pretty much knew that any garden had to be in a jail.


So here is my garden jail. I wanted a nice garden as the cat and I spend a lot of time there. So I built a sturdy enclosure. Painted lumber and chicken wire. Ha...no squirrels or bunny rabbits will get in here. I built raised beds and planned on more. Luxury gardening, Don would like this. I had some things I had started indoors, tomatoes, cukes, herbs, peppers, etc. Planted a variety of lettuce, beets, onions. Morning glory to grow over the doorways, ahh lovely. And then the mice came. Oh my lord did the mice come. I started setting traps, fifteen of them, every night. Every morning there would be eight to ten dead mice but they kept coming. Really fat little buggers, looked like mini hogs. They would zoom through that chicken wire forty miles an hour without slowing down. I really don't like killing little critters, even mice. They ate everything, right down to the ground. They even ate the jabenero peppers! Finally I just gave up. So now I have a couple rolls of one quarter inch mesh screen. I will enclose the garden in that and try again this spring. I am determined to have a garden. But, I do now to a degree.



Here is what I call the nursery, in the garden jail. All my tree cuttings. American red maple, autumn blaze maple, Arizona ash, quaking aspen, honey locust, and a few more poplars. We'll see what takes, always room for a few more. So thats what is happening, garden adventure!? More to come my friends.
Happy Gardening
Jack

Jack, you sure have a way with words. I only have to contend with one or two rabbits and a slew of chipmunks. All are fun to watch and don't see where they have done much damage. Had a couple of pots with hens and chickens planted in them and watch a chippie climbing in and out of them, but didn't seem to chew on them. Please keep us posted on your gardening adventures. Very good reading!

Wow, Jack, you do great work! Can't wait to see flowers blooming!

Jack, where do you get fertile soil?
Do you make compost or buy composted manure?
When I started the garden, there was only clay.
That was the problem. But I was lucky that there is a farm nearby and I was able to buy enough composted manure to start gardening.

Do you think a cat could help you scare off mice?

Jack, have you ever considered recreating a blog on ATG? Your writings are mighty interesting to me and I'm sure would be to many others. If you do, please let me know so that I can follow it.

Wow! What a transformation. You've been working hard and have the results to show for it. Makes my back ache just to look at the before and after pictures! Love your garden jail - you gotta do what you gotta do to keep the critters away.

Hello My Friends
First I must thank you for your generous compliments, you are much too kind. I had never considered a blog or anything like that. I have had some discussions with one of my bright young friends about showing me how to edit and post you tube videos. As for now I seem to be up to my hubcaps with the plates I already have spinning. I may get tired, but I never get bored. As to my garden soil I just make it. I start with dirt. It's run through a half inch mesh screen into the wheel barrow to get the rocks out. The soil here has a lot of clay and it can turn to concrete when it dries out. So then I will get some sand from the dry creek bed on my property. This creek will flow occasionally when we have serious rain which isn't very often. Then this sand dirt mixture will be combined with some commercial compost and blood and bone meal. I have some in my raised beds now and have been working it and turning it over from time to time. It should be in pretty good condition by planting time this spring. I wish I had access to some rotted manure as Larissa has. Go with what you got! Last spring I didn't have time to prepare the soil and just bought some bags of commercial garden soil. It was really poor soil as it was mainly sawdust and wouldn't hold moisture. I plan on building a few more raised beds before spring and I'll post some photos of how I do that. This fall a compost pile was started and a lot of leaves from the trees and chips from the chipper were put in but there will never be enough. Here is a photo from this last spring.

This is a blossom from one of my fruit trees. I'm not sure what it is, perhaps a peach blossom. The fruit trees are another story of frustration as the deer descended on them kind of like the mice. I tried several ways of discouraging them and they worked pretty good until the fall when the deer got really hungry. So this summer I will be setting up a double layer electric deer fence. I really don't like the way this fence will look but.....My brother tells a wonderful story from his childhood about grandpa's farm. After dinner they would wander out into the fruit orchard and pick their desert from the fruit trees. I hope to do this someday. As we all know there is nothing like fruit, tree ripened and just picked. Delicious! That's all for now, happy gardening my friends.
Jack

Have you thought about raising a few laying hens Jack? Farm fresh eggs and a real boost to the compost pile. (If you ever need one more project.)

Wow ! Jack ! Glad I came by this thread, you are a true gardener.
We, too, bought a track of open land, bought a wreck of a bull dozer & backhoe, fixed them and worked our land - cut drainage furrows, leveled and mounded and planted and built. Those were the days! We sold the equipment long ago for more than we bought it for - then bought other tractors and implements for day to day use. When we look back on it we realize we would never take on that work today, which makes what we have much more cherished and appreciated.
Enjoy learning what you are doing - thank you for sharing.

Hello My Friends
Thanks again for the compliments. Also thank you to Laurie for the suggestion of some laying hens. I will give that some serious consideration. As Kathy spoke about there is a lot of satisfaction in taking a raw piece of land and transforming it into a garden. Tractors and bulldozers are handy trinkets, but it eventually gets down to you and your shovel and rake. I also really resent time spent on the tractor and don't consider it gardening. Gardening is when you have your hands in the dirt and are planting seeds and green things. When making a garden like this a lot of time is spent just wandering around and brainstorming. There are areas that I didn't know what to do with so I just let them set and worked on everything around them. Then one day the little light went on in my head and it was suddenly apparent what was to be done. Its been raining and snowing here for a while, not much gardening has been happening. So here are a few more before and after photos from 2015 and 2018

Here on the left we have the little mountain in progress. It's pretty raw, just bare dirt and rock. The mountain is just getting started. It's probably about four feet tall at it's highest point now and probably forty feet long with the wall separating it from the trail. I purposely made it a crooked wiggly trail as you don't usually have straight lines in nature, and besides straight lines are boring. This trail goes down past the mountain for thirty feet or so and makes a U turn to the right where you can see some poplar trees. This would have been the summer of 2015.



Now we are getting somewhere. This photo was taken fall of 2018. It's starting to look like a mature woodland. Now this is no happy accident. You would never guess that this little forest is only two years old.There has been a lot of branches and twigs and even a couple small dead trees brought in from other "undeveloped parts of the property". Go with what you got! Many bags of mulch have been spread around also. The branches and twigs do multiple things. They make it look like the aforementioned mature woodland which is strictly for esthetic reasons. But there is also a very practical reason. They keep the leaves that fall from the trees from blowing away which would happen if it was just bare dirt. It can get pretty windy here. These leaves will decompose and create a natural looking and moisture retaining layer.



And in this last photo we have my little knot head Ginger, hanging out next to another dead tree (bush), that was moved here from another area. Tree sounds so much more impressive than bush, doesn't it? I believe it is a dead example of rabbit brush ( chamisa) that is native to this area. Chamisa is a valuable native plant that once established needs no water or fussing with. Its a pretty evergreen that is covered with lovely fragrant yellow blossoms in the fall. This is the hill that the grove of quaking aspens is planted on. This was also made with the tractor and it's really big. Probably six feet deep at the highest point and forty to fifty feet long and twenty feet wide. Lots of bucket loads! This pile of dirt was really bare and at first had no trees, so once again sneaky underhandedness was applied. Several dead trees were planted here and there and a lot of branches and brush was brought in along with many bags of much. Also a lot of rocks. One area of the property has a lot of volcanic rock and this was used in this area. This was all arranged so as to look as natural as possible. Then aspens started going in. Most of the bare root aspens I bought last spring were no good and this is really irritating as an entire year of growth was lost. And as we all know time is the most valuable commodity we have. Hopefully the aspen cuttings in the garden jail will grow and I will also buy some larger ones from Fast Growing Trees. These larger aspens will be planted in some strategic places. More to come, happy gardening my friends.
Jack

It is looking fantastic. You are doing a great job naturalizing your mountains. Love it. Can't wait to see more pictures as it progresses.

I really like!
Looks very natural! Especially the cat.