2025 RATE Increase

2024 was a good year for Birch Meadow.  In addition to taking care of all of your beautiful gardens and doing numerous installations, we started the newsletter again at the beginning of the year, did a housecleaning on all things that were taking excessive administrative time, started training employees to provide backup for scheduling, planning and estimates to improve our resilience when someone was out sick or on vacation, clarified various policies and procedures that needed addressing and recently added Monday.com to help us keep track of maintenance tasks, designs, projects, and administrative work. We also came up with plans to remodel the nursery area, which means that the plants you receive from us will be better cared for while they are here and we will need to spend less time dealing with flooding, squirrels, rabbits, too much sunlight for shade loving plants and other issues that have plagued our operation.  

Unfortunately because the costs of our software support (Quickbooks, Squarespace and now Monday.com), bookkeeping, and insurance (workers comp, general liability and auto), and the Orange County living wage have all increased dramatically this year, we will need to raise our rates again.  In years past our employees have received their annual cost of living increase in February while our client rates have increased in July, which has always caused a bit of a struggle in spring to meet the gap.  As part of our general administrative housekeeping, I am permanently shifting our rate increase timing to match the timing of employee raises.  Our new rate will be $61/hour for labor and $77/hour for designs effective February 1.  The first invoices you receive at the new rate will go out in March.  Thank you for your support and for the opportunity to work in your beautiful yards.  We have learned so much from all of you!  

— Mary Beth Berkley

Redundancy

Last month we spoke of multitasking where each element in your yard performs multiple functions.  This month the focus changes to the functions themselves. Not only should each element perform multiple functions, but also each function should be performed by multiple elements, over time.  

A function is a specific role or benefit that an element provides.  There is a diverse range of functions that you might want for your yard: beauty, water collection, supporting local wildlife, microclimate control, supplies and inspiration for a cottage industry or hobby, food source, relaxation, and even promoting spiritual wellbeing are some common functions that people seek from their yards.

What often goes unnoticed is the fact that our yards can also participate in the functions that keep our planet healthy and thriving.  So even if you don’t want to grow your own food or even spend a lot of time in your yard, your yard can still be a powerful resource for supporting everyday needs like breathing and clean water.  While they may seem relatively small compared to all of the new (and much needed) housing and other buildings being built in our area, collectively our yards could be a powerful resource in regaining the health of the planet.  They can help with carbon sequestration, flooding and erosion prevention, purifying the local water supply, cooling the summer air, and giving you a sense of real participation in the systems that support life itself.

To apply this permaculture principle, you must first choose a function or functions  that you want to support in your yard.  In my yard the main functions that I have chosen are supporting local wildlife, growing food, water conservation, and healthy soil.  To keep this article a reasonable length, I will list out how multiple elements support the growing food function that I would like from my yard.

I am a lazy gardener, or maybe I just hate how hard it is to keep a traditional vegetable garden going in the NC summer heat.  Multiple elements to support the function of growing food is great for me because I can gather food from my yard every month of the year, but I don’t need to fight as hard with the weeds or keep up with the watering as much as I would with a traditional backyard vegetable garden. Below are the elements that support my food function:

• Fruit trees, bushes and brambles - these need pruning, fertilizing and mulching annually otherwise they do their own thing and I pick and preserve their fruits in season.  It takes a few years for the fruit to really start coming, but there are plenty of other things to do while you wait.  Note that I researched carefully and chose the fruit trees that do well in NC, like the (unripened) persimmon shown above, pawpaw, jujube, fig, and mulberry.  These trees may not be as familiar, but the fruits are definitely delicious.  

• Traditional vegetable garden - I love my vegetable garden from October until mid-June.  After that, I may or may not bother depending on how busy the rest of my life is.  

• Herbaceous perennials - I have beds for asparagus, strawberries and hostas.  Perennials do not require as much weeding once they’ve been established and are more resilient, assuming you have a spot that is safe from deer.  

• Native meadow - In my quest for native species to fill out the meadow areas in my yard, I make sure to include plants that have been traditionally used for food.  

• Weeds! - I also make a practice of identifying weeds and eating them if they prove to be edible.  Knowing which weeds you can eat makes weeding a lot more fun!
  

Bringing all of this back around to last month’s article about multitasking, the fruit trees, vegetable garden, herbaceous perennials, native meadow, and even the cell phone that I use to ID my weeds are all elements that support the function of feeding me and my family.  Each of those elements also performs multiple functions.  The fruit trees provide shade, homes for birds, and help to hold water on my property.  The vegetable garden is laid out to follow the contours of the land so that it catches and sinks most of the water that would normally pass over it, thus conserving water and stopping erosion.  The herbaceous perennials require little to no working of the soil below the surface thus saving time and encouraging the soil biome in their area.  The native meadow also feeds and houses numerous species from beneficial soil dwellers below the ground to birds flying above.  By having each element  perform multiple functions and each function supported by multiple elements, we begin to form a tight web of resilience in an area that is being cared for using permaculture principles.

In case you would like to catch up, or refresh your memory, all of the Permaculture principles that we have already covered are linked below:

What is Permaculture

Observation

Connections

Catch and Store Energy

– Mary Beth Berkley

BOOK REVIEW:
“Braiding Sweetgrass” - by Robin Wall Kimmerer

This book was 2025’s library choice of the year.  Although published in 2015, this book has caught fire in the minds and hearts of nature lovers everywhere.

Grandma’s Review:

Braiding Sweetgrass is about connections as well as interdependency. Connection to the earth, connection to plants, connection to wildlife and connection to ourselves and each other as exemplified by the Native Cultures.  I remember growing a garden once in a small space where I was able to utilize this indigenous knowledge by planting corn in hills with green bean vines growing up the cornstalks and squash plants growing out from the base of the corn stalks.  I remember also growing enough so the birds and deer could enjoy the fruits of the garden as well.  I realized that no fence is high enough to keep out the deer, so why not feed them as well?  The harvest was so large that I found a cookbook called "The Runaway Garden" to help cope with the output, as well as giving many vegetables away.  It is a very special feeling to be a co-conspirator with Mother Nature in producing nutritious food to share.

• Mary Wiley

Jamuary’s To-Do List

In January, daytime temperatures in North Carolina can vary widely by region, from around 40°F in the Appalachians to around 60°F in the coastal areas. Time to use that calm winter quiet to organize and plan the upcoming year in your garden.

• Plan

• • Look through catalogs to plan what vegetables and flowers to grow. 

  • Plant asparagus crowns this month when soil is dry enough to work.

  • Order your small fruit plants like strawberry, blueberry and blackberry for a mid-March planting.

  • Study your home landscape to see what additions or improvements can be made this spring.

  • Visit your local Extension Center for landscape and garden information.

  • Prepare a spot in the vegetable garden for early spring vegetables like English peas, cabbage, carrots, onions, Irish potatoes, radishes, rutabagas, spinach and turnips.

  • Study your seed catalogs and check for the open pollinated All-American Selections of flowers and vegetables.

  • Order fruit trees, if not done last fall.

• Plant: Start seeds indoors for cool season vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, carrots, and lettuce. You can also plant asparagus crowns if the soil is dry enough.

• Prune: Prune grape vines. Prune broken and undesired limbs on your shade trees.

  • Remove scrub trees.

  • Hardwood cuttings of many landscape plants like forsythia (yellow bells), flowering quince, weigela, crape myrtle, juniper, spirea and hydrangea can be taken this month.

• Maintain:

  • Leave dead plant matter and fallen leaves for beneficial insects to winter over.

  • Weed garden beds as needed, and add organic soil amendments.

  • Do not forget to care for holiday house plants like poinsettia, amaryllis, Christmas cactus, gloxinia and cyclamen.

• Mulch: If you really don’t like to leave your leaves, rake them into a pile or piles where they are less noticeable and allow them to compost in place.  Composted leaves make an excellent soil amendment full of nutrients, organic matter and soil microbes. If you have enough leaves, you can also cover beds with leaf mulch from your own yard instead of paying to have mulch delivered.

• Tools: Clean, repair, and replace tools.

Plant focus:

 - Ilex Vomitoria, Yaupon Holly

Yaupon Holly is often grown in residential landscapes and trimmed into hedges, with many cultivars popular: weeping forms, columnar forms, and dwarf forms. The ornamental twigs with shiny evergreen leaves and numerous red berries have been used as holiday decorations and make cheerful accents in the winter landscape. The leaves and twigs contain caffeine, and American Indians used them to prepare a tea, which they drank in large quantities ceremonially and then vomited back up, lending the plant its species name, vomitoria. The vomiting was self-induced or because of other ingredients added; it doesn't actually cause vomiting. Tribes from the interior traveled to the coast in large numbers each spring to partake of this tonic, and it was also a common hospitality drink among many groups. It remained popular as such among southeastern Americans into the 20th century and is still occasionally consumed today, with a flavor resembling another holly drink, the South American yerba mate, from Ilex paraguariensis. Yaupon is slow-growing and tends to get thick and twiggy on the inside, making it ideal for dense hedges but requiring careful pruning to shape it into a tree. You must have both a male and female plant to have berries. Nursery plants are typically female (fruiting) and are propagated by cuttings.

• From Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Plant Database

• Mary Beth

January

by John Updike

The days are short,

The sun a spark

Hung thin between

The dark and dark.

Fat snowy footsteps

Track the floor.

Milk bottles burst

Outside the door.

The river is

A frozen place

Held still beneath

The trees of lace.

The sky is low.

The wind is gray.

The radiator

Purrs all day.

Happy Gardening!