Lorenzo Costa : Hi Jan, can you share some photo's? sounds great, and nice to see how nature took immediately the floor

Corey Schmidt : very exciting!

S. Symens : Wow, Jan, that's fantastic, you sure are steaming ahead! And thumbs up for the biodiversity increase at such short notice!

Cindy Madou : Must be great to be able to immediately put in suchan important element.

Jan Åberg : Lorentzo: photo added (see link above) Corey: yes! Saskia: it's very, very fun! But there was no steam (at least here). We did the digging by hand, and it took about 15 minutes per day during about 15 days. We also had to work on our day-jobs for a couple of days in order to afford the liner (i.e. digging is no problem as long as we have food, but liners for small water bodies...? Are they possible to make with local resources? I hope so, but do not know). Cindy, yes I think it can be important, especially for our own education about water and water plants, and also as a good conversation starter when we get visitors. If I were in a crisis, however, the strategy would have been to first dig more mini-swales with more berries, trees and bushes, and make the annual crop garden bigger.

Corey Schmidt : I love the picture! it seems we have fairly similar climates. have you got any caragana established yet? i started a bunch of hippophae rhamnoides and caragana arborescens from seed and planted them out already but they don't appear to be thriving yet. next spring i plan to get some of those honeysuckle plants (called haskap or honeyberry here). good luck

Jan Åberg : Corey: (our climate is an unstable slighty maritime Dfb-climate, with dryer, sunnier and more windy conditions than sites further in-land). We have two established caraganas (I bought them as small plants). They needed some care at first but grow fairly fast now (year 3). Earlier this year I also took some caragana cuttings, which seem to be a quite easy way to propagate them (I kept the cuttings inside at 10-15C in a north-facing window for about 2 months, with a plastic bag over the pot, with moist but not wet soil). Regarding hippophae rhamnoides, I plan to buy hardy plants in some weeks (when a renowned plant nursery from Finland is visiting our area). Our honeyberries seem to love the mini-Swale, and since they will yield more in a mix of several varieties, we now have 5 varietes in zone 1 (the plan is to multiply them next spring and expand into zone 2).

Corey Schmidt : Our climate here around Homer, AK is Dfc, subarctic, but at the mild extreme of this designation, close to Cfc, subpolar oceanic, we have a couple of months with average temps around -4 C, if they were above -3, we would be Cfc. Thanks for the clarifications!

Jan Åberg : Corey: I did a typo-error: our climate is also a Dfc (subarctic), although several summers in the last years have been more like in a summer-dry Dfb climate (the warming trend probably will lead us into Dfb quite soon). Ancorage, Alaska seems to be a climate analogue.