Posts Tagged ‘nurturing trees’
Shouldn’t Compare
We had a wonderful lunch opportunity yesterday. It was a first-time visit to the home of friends who live just a few miles north of our place. It’s not fair to compare our worlds, but it is hard not to, and it has given us a fresh perspective about everything that we have accomplished on our 20 acres.
It feels like they have achieved a dizzying amount more on their 40 acres, particularly in the realm of landscape plants and an incredible garden of vegetables and flowers. After lunch, we got a tour of their gorgeous log home –with an impressive finished basement that they did themselves– and then walked some of their property.
They hired a crew to burn one of their fields to replace it with a variety of healthy prairie plants. Many of the grasses and beneficial pollinator plants are as tall as me or taller. It is beautiful.
I am humbled by how many impressive improvements they have achieved on their land, even though they have lived there half as long as we have been at Wintervale.
I was particularly inspired to see the number of new plantings they’ve put in, including quite a few apple trees that are producing fruit for the first time this year. The produce in their garden, and the developing squash and pumpkins out beyond their modest stand of field corn, look bigger and better than anything I’ve seen in a grocery store.
When it came time for us to go, they loaded us up with pickles, green beans, carrots, purple cauliflower, basil, cucumbers, and two varieties of apples, plus an arrangement of flowers.
As soon as we got home, I went out and mowed some grass. Suddenly, that feels like much less of an accomplishment to me than it did the day before.
If it ever seems like we get a lot done around here in terms of upkeep, just know that it’s a drop in a bucket compared to what plenty of others around us out here in the country are doing.
The best takeaway for me from the revelations we saw yesterday is that I am not alone in tending to a little piece of this planet by nurturing nature. We are both helping desirable trees and plants succeed and controlling the spread of troublesome invasives.
It is great to have found such a close neighbor with a similar mindset. It will be good for me to keep in mind that it’s not a competition.
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North Loop
I spent a fair amount of time in our north loop field yesterday morning and made an energizing discovery about how many young volunteer trees are thriving there.
For years after we moved here, we mowed down the tall growth in that section to the north of the driveway to control troublesome weeds from going to seed. It seemed like the prudent thing to do. Time has brought a change of heart for me. By not mowing the field anymore, we intend to nurture a future forest. There is still an issue with weeds to be dealt with but balancing that with embracing the appearance of new trees is a challenge we’ve decided to accept.
I was wading through the chest-high growth on a quest to pull vines that were starting to climb the existing pine trees in the area.
Almost immediately, I spotted a young sprout of oak leaves.
After uprooting any vines I could see, my mission shifted to clearing space around all of the young trees I could find.
There were an impressive number of poplar shoots that didn’t need any help in reaching sunlight. I found an elm. There are a variety of long and short needle pine trees showing up.
Of particular interest to me is the appearance of two sprouts of cedar trees, of which there are none anywhere in the surrounding area. I have no idea where these seeds traveled from.
When I finished my impromptu tree survey, I felt inspired for the future of this field. I also felt a mild trepidation over having visibly served up these gorgeous young trees as enticing nibbles for the resident deer herds that frequently bed down in the surrounding tall growth. Since the trees all showed up naturally, I’ve decided to let nature take its course, and if deer munch the tops off of some of these, so be it.
The final project I undertook in the north loop field was to mow a new viewing area where we’ll keep a couple of chairs for taking in the vista looking south from this high spot.
This idea came about from our animal sitter, John Bramble who mentioned that spot was a favorite for pausing to observe the view. He said it would be well-served to have a place to sit. I couldn’t agree more.
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Relative Something 