The Never Ending (Story of Our) Fence

First some history.    The Castle was built in a series of big efforts over about 50 years.  It is primarily poured concrete and somewhat ingenious scavenging.    Case in point... our steel garden fences.    We are near an old army base that was overhauled after world war II so from time to time when we look at a particular component of the place we say 'ah.. that must of been salvage from the base.

We have hundreds and hundreds of feet of this fence.  And our goal was to dress it up to look like a proper garden fence.     So we got several different toppers for the fence poles which had to be attached.   We settled on pineapple toppers for our main fence posts and we picked a beautiful hammered copper color to replace the never rust galvanized aluminum.   Yes we will have to repaint it from time to time... but we don't like the battleship grey of the various 'fence parts' that are here...

Choosing Toppers

The scale of our restoration project shows in this photo above.  At one point there were beautiful gardens, lawns and ivy covered towers.  We are bringing it back stone by stone.

Final fence

More to come on our never ending story... and  fence...

Turn your Garden into a Food Forest

Everyone has a dream to walk out their door and pick delicious things to serve their family.  The reality can be harder and takes a bit of planning.  BUT there is good news... there are simple things you CAN do that make your regular gardening and landscaping take on part of the work.

Start with Fruit Trees...

Our community and school has an annual fruit tree sale that is a fund raiser.  Frankly in our town it has now taken on a life of its own and it just makes sense.  Once established, fruit trees are easy... and within a few years our community now has producing Fruit Trees everywhere.    By design they are in our parks, mediums and of course in every yard who has a school age child since they report on their trees  progress year after year as they go through the grades.

What we do on our farm...

We had an old orchard on terraces that just needed a bit of pruning, a few replacement trees and we had a bit of unused space.  We decided to tackle a grand experiment.    Our goal was to figure out this container growing thing once and for all with a test set of dwarf peach and nectarine trees.  We wanted to see if they really did grow better in the ground or in Containers.    The hope is that the container growing really does pan out which means you can move those trees with you everywhere you live...

We planted dwarf peaches and nectarines in the ground to
replace trees that had died

AND we planted the same Dwarf varieties
in containers where they can live basically forever

Citrus loves pots...

And of course the citrus love pots.  Our choice of long term  indestructible pots (non BPA food grade quality)  is strong enough to let us haul the citrus in and out of the orangery if needed.  But, we keep simplifying and finding better ways.  So with the citrus we chose a location where, in our California Climate, we could just throw a citrus blanket over the fence they are up against and tent them for the few nights needed.    The iron fence that acts as a tent pole was a 'duh' moment....it is open to let all day sun through and it is pretty....

Next up... our garden  ..

again lots of it is in containers cuz we can control the organic soil that everything is growing in...

Stay tuned...

Survival Chic

Stone Does Endure

When we first arrived at the ranch it had been neglected for over 25 years.   Cows graze the 320 acre ranch for 6 months from Nov to May in the California foothills and when they leave the place looks like a newly mowed lawn.   At some point ranchers had decided to just let the cows graze through the castle grounds and had opened many of the gardens placing cow fencing here and there where they didn't want the cows to go. We actually didn't know some of the elements and 'bones' of the gardens were here till the cows grazed down the grass that first year.

Our first job was to remove all the old cattle gates that boxed off the porches to the houses but let the cows go right through the courtyards and gardens.  Then we slowly figured out where old garden gates, walks and plan used to be,

Garden Bones of Stone Endure

We removed a cattle squeeze right in the middle of the sunken garden (we can only assume they used the sunken garden to doctor cows?) and removed a holding containment area along the the Curved Garden wall.

Sunken Gardens Stone Walls made a Cattle 
Corral at one Point

Once some of the vistas opened  you could look down them and make out the old path and lawns to the Meditation Garden and above that the Woodland Garden.    Even with the place stripped back there were mysteries...

Gardens beckon in the Distance

People Walked this Land  Before us