|
|
 Wedding Ceremony on Creekside's Wedding Island Trent and Elizabeth enjoy being outdoors and knew that they wanted an outdoor country wedding in West Virginia, their home state. They picked Creekside Resort in Greenville for their small destination wedding of eighty because it offered the combination of relaxed charm and elegance that they were seeking. It also offered a place where their closest family and friends could stay for the weekend and enjoy being together for more than just the ceremony and reception.
Their wedding weekend event started on Friday evening with their rehearsal on the wedding island, after which the wedding party walked to dinner at the Farmhouse overlooking Indian Creek. After dinner the party enjoyed a bonfire by the creek, toasting marshmallows and sharing stories under a beautiful starry sky.
On Saturday everyone enjoyed breakfast at the Farmhouse and spent the hours before the wedding visiting, hiking or gathering by the pool. Guests began coming to the island for the wedding ceremony at 4:00 and were seated under the trees to the strains of traditional melodies on the violin by WV musician, and Vandalia champion fiddler, Chance McCoy. The bride and bride’s maids got ready at Creekhouse cottage, located right by the island. At the appropriate time they processed over the walk bridge for the ceremony. The ceremony took place under a cherry arch decorated with simple sprays of wisteria and the soft music of Indian Creek in the background.
After the ceremony, guests proceeded to the Creekside Mountain Lodge for the reception. Drinks and appetizers were served on the decks, before everyone was seated in the Sky Room for dinner. Local delicacies like smoked trout and goat cheese crostini were a big hit and guests relaxed and enjoyed the sunset from the decks overlooking the valley. Twinkle lights, candles and outdoor torches were lit as the evening progressed.
On Sunday morning everyone was able to meet again for breakfast at the Farmhouse and to say their goodbyes. The bride and groom were thrilled that this weekend gave them time to enjoy being with their family and closest friends. People from the two families who had not even met before came away good friends.
 Creekside Resort Organic Orchard in Bloom Once fruit has set on the trees we spray with sulphur, a natural fungicide that helps prevent diseases, mixed with a fine powdered clay that is harmless but deters insects that bore into the trees and fruit. The trees need to be sprayed weekly with these substances until harvest. After petal fall the fruit on the trees needs to be thinned. Depending on the amount of fruit that has set and the kind and capacity of the tree, a sixth to a half of the fruit may need to be removed to insure that the fruit that matures is not small and that the trees are not overburdened, which can lead to broken branches. One thing that affects the amount of fruit a tree will set is how much it produced the previous year. If it bore heavily the previous year it will not set as much fruit this year. If it bore no fruit last year (like our peaches, which got frosted while blooming last spring) it will set a lot of fruit—much more than it should bring to harvest for premium quality fruit and the tree’s well-being. Since our pears and apples bore fruit last year, we do not expect to have to thin them much. However, we expect to have to remove about half of the fruit from the peach trees.
We are now past the time when the trees are most vulnerable to lower temperatures and are hopeful for a good crop this year. If Mother Nature cooperates and we work diligently we hope to have a bountiful harvest to share with our summer and fall guests.
 - Creekside Orchard in Bloom
The orchard, when blossoming in April, looks like girls dressed for a dance in pink and white, dancing and swaying in the spring breezes. I always think of Anne of Green Gables’ “White Way of Delight” when I walk through the spring orchard. An orchard in bloom is full of beauty and promise. But warm spring days in the mountains can be deceptive when night temperatures suddenly turn freezing, ruining the promised harvest and turning those beautiful blossoms brown. West Virginia is a challenging place to be an orchardist and being an organic orchardist means being constantly vigilant. Every season has its tasks.
The organic orchard at Creekside was established in 1998 on land that was pasture and hayfield for over a hundred years with no exposure to chemical fertilizers or pesticides. The grass under the trees grows thick and deep green. When it reaches a height of twelve inches, we mow it and let it lie as a green fertilizer and mulch. We also add a ring of rotted manure around each tree for added nitrogen.
January and February are the pruning months. This past January we trimmed some of the apple trees to a modified central leader or open vase style to bring more sun and air to the fruit and to maximize the branches at an easy picking height. In spring the real work begins. In my next blog I will describe the tasks we undertake in the orchard as the orchard awakens each spring.
 Deer in the Creekside Orchard... Making our gardens less tempting to deer continues to influence our plantings at Creekside. This year we will be replacing some of our evergreens that were subject to serious deer munching over the winter. Fortunately boxwood does well here and most pieris and mahonia seem to be uninteresting to deer, as well as juniper and cotoneaster. Our sedum borders will be replaced with lavender and even more catmint and salvias will be added to shield the daylilies at the back of the perennial border. A wide swath of fragrant plants that deer don’t like will often act as a deterrent to keep them from checking out what lies beyond.
Fortunately deer do not like most culinary herbs; I have never seen them eat basil or rosemary or thyme. But they will eat parsley if we don’t cover it with a net. Nasturtiums had seemed like a good bet—and they don’t seem to be a deer favorite— but the end of last summer proved deer would eat them, too. The calendula, however, they did not eat.
Visit anytime to view the test gardens in action!
 Daffodils above Indian Creek Deer grazing in the fields with little fawns following their mothers in the spring is a lovely sight. But why they have to leave fields of green grass and forests with young shrubs and come and eat the plants of the gardens that we have, with great effort, cultivated is harder to accept. However, they do—evidently many of those cultivated plants are tasty— and it has changed how we garden.
In my experience, the ways to prevent deer from destroying your plantings more or less reduce to three: creating physical barriers, applying sprays, or making plantings that deer find unpalatable. Of the three, the first two are sometimes necessary (unless you are willing to grow only vegetables that deer don’t like, and I have yet to find any, you must have a fenced vegetable garden), but are costly in time and materials. The third, creating plantings that deer don’t find tasty, is the best and most sustainable plan for most of the landscape.
Creating plantings that deer find unpalatable can be an interesting challenge. It is like creating a painting with a limited palette—a discipline that encourages the artist to explore just what can be done with a few colors—or in the medium of gardening, a few plants. The bank of daffodils at Creekside, pictured above, shows how simple and beautiful deer-proof planting can be.
For the early spring garden hellebores, daffodils, aconite, and Siberian scilla are all safe bets. We think back fondly to the days when we used to have tulips our borders; if we want to have them now we must enjoy them in pots. The few that still try to come up in the borders usually get decapitated before they can bloom.
For later spring peonies, catmint, and salvia are gorgeous in the sunny border and very reliably unattractive to deer. Later in the summer the purples and blues of the buddleias (butterfly bush) and caryopteris (blue mist shrub) with ornamental grasses and some echinacea have also performed well and attract a multitude of butterflies.
How to keep yourself from planting those things that the deer will eat? Whenever I get tempted to plant something that the deer will probably eat I force myself to imagine what that plant will actually look like after the deer have munched on it (rather than the lovely flowering image in front of me in the catalog) and that usually curbs the impulse to buy it.
 Crocus blooms at Creekside The first spring flowers in the garden are always most welcome. After a winter of sustained cold, snow and ice, we are all especially ready this year for warm weather and the sight of growing things. The spring blooming bulbs also seem to be over-ready for the first warm days. As soon as bitter cold ceased and before the seemingly unending snow had entirely melted the winter aconite, hellebores, and crocus came bursting out of the ground and began blooming.
The winter must have been hard for the wild animals too. The deer came right up to the office door to eat the dwarf spruces, which are not even something they usually like. Of course discovering what deer will eat is an on-going education that continues to change our gardens. Each growing season we edit out, or move to a less vulnerable location, the plants that we have newly discovered deer will eat and replace them with those that we have found to be more reliably unpalatable to our deer. The spruce will be replaced with some ornamental grasses, probably some clumps of feather reed grass. Besides being unpalatable to deer it gives a beautiful vertical accent and brings movement to the garden when breezes blow.
Yesterday I planted nasturtium seeds in window boxes in the greenhouse, imagining their lovely draping vines in May with orange, yellow and mahogany blooms. Today am looking forward to hiking up our Woodland Trail to see what has fallen during the winter that needs to be cleaned up. Perhaps I will even see the waxy white bloodroot emerging. Then we will clear debris from the perennial borders by the Farmhouse and prune the grapes, akebia and autumn clematis vines.
But I will take a few moments to just sit and enjoy the beauty of the sun shining through those translucent lavender crocus petals—they won’t be here for long.
Welcome to Creekside Resort and Spa
|
|
