Posts Tagged ‘transplanting trees’
Brothers All
In a single day, we were with all of Cyndie’s brothers as well as her mom yesterday. We started the day with Barry and Carlos in Maine and then had dinner in St. Paul, Minnesota, with the rest of the clan for Marie’s 88th birthday celebration.
The snapshot above is a photo I took when Barry was showing Cyndie where the many volunteer shoots of birch trees were available for pulling. Why would she pull up their baby birch trees?
Never one to be intimidated by logical limitations about packing live plants in a plastic bread bag to stuff into an already full carry-on bag that gets crammed below the seat in front of her on an airplane, Cyndie brought home trees from the garden in Maine to plant somewhere around Wintervale.
I will not fixate on the long odds for her success, but instead plan to help scout out a new location where we can nurse the new transplants toward some percentage of actually surviving.
After hugging Barry and Carlos one last time as we dropped them off at their condo, we returned the wildebeest to the car rental company and boarded a shuttle headed toward our gate. Have I mentioned how much I would prefer to avoid air travel?
Mike got a ping on his phone about a delay in our flight home. As he attempted to navigate the information on the app, Barb’s and his tickets mysteriously disappeared. Cyndie still had our boarding pass screens on her phone, so Mike called the Delta service for preferred customers to work on solving the mystery.
It was a good thing we had arrived with time to spare, because it took a nerve-wrackingly long time to fix whatever had just gone wrong. In the end, their seats were re-established, and we were safe to proceed. However, the flight delay remained, and we lost precious time on our tight schedule to leave Boston and get home in time for dinner with the family members who would be gathering to celebrate Marie’s birthday.
We got to our car in St. Paul roughly a half-hour after the time of our reservation at Holman’s Table restaurant. Luckily, we were only 15 minutes away. Our daughter, Elysa, texted that the appetizers were just arriving at their table.
We showed up before they had even given their dinner orders. A family birthday celebration for the matriarch is a pretty special finish to our adventures of the previous week.
Some silliness ensued. Happy Birthday, Marie!
Dinner with the family wasn’t the final treat of our big day, though. After driving another 50 minutes in the dark to get to our house, we were rewarded with the cutest puppy-like reception from Asher when we got inside.
Gee, but it’s great to be back home…
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Top Down
With a title like “Top Down,” you might suspect my mind is stuck on the incredible and a little bit crazy escapades of the Tour de France racers making their way down the sides of mountains at ridiculous speeds. I’ll admit, the thought did cross my mind but, no, this choice of words came from the way the tree in front of the house next door is dying.
When we were up here for Memorial Day weekend, the leaves all looked healthy, but Tom told me it was going to die because squirrels (the most likely culprits) had eaten away the bark over winter.
There is no denying the accuracy of his prediction now. I was startled to see how dramatically the demise was represented in the gradual decline of life from the top down.
In circumstances that echo our experience with the maple tree we transplanted to the center of our labyrinth at home, this was the fourth tree that Tom and his dad had tried growing in that spot. This one had finally proved a success but now that achievement has ended up being short-lived.
At least a half-dozen other similar-sized trees on the properties up here suffered the same fate over the winter. I don’t know what drove critters to devour so much tree bark up here last year, but now I want to wrap the trunk of our maple at home before next winter arrives.
It’s such a helpless feeling watching a tree slowly die.
Meanwhile, the number of little oak sprouts that appear on our beach every year (only to get plucked because… it is a beach!) is mind-boggling.
I’d like to volunteer to transplant a handful of those sprouts up to the vicinity of the dying maple of the Whitlock’s and we can see if one takes.
We’ve all been marveling over how unnoticeable it is that so many trees were cut down up here last November. The remaining trees have done well to fill in the gaps that were created by the removal of ailing ones.
If the planet hadn’t just set a new record for the hottest temperature ever recorded, I’d feel a bit more optimistic about the overall health of our forests up at the lake as well as at home.
It certainly has me appreciating what we have at this moment. Here’s to all the trees that are currently healthy from the top down.
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Flash Gorgeous
Why “Flash Gorgeous?” I saw a portion of a program on climate change last night, talking about the increasing incidents of flash flooding erupting out of our periodic thunderstorms. Yesterday’s weather was the opposite of a flash flood so I thought of flipping convention and describing the incredibly gorgeous day using a term we usually associate with the blast of a weather disaster.
We enjoyed a day-long flash of spectacular weather for working on projects outdoors. I cranked up the power trimmer and focused on cutting tall grass growing on both sides of the fence segments of the round pen and along the border of the back pasture that I mowed on Wednesday.
The air was as fresh and comfortable as ever and allowed for sweat-free exertion which is a rarity for the type of work I was doing under the high-angled sun.
Speaking of fresh, Delilah came home from a grooming appointment smelling so sweet and clean I almost didn’t want to let her outside again, where she tends to seek out the nastiest smells and then rolls in them.
The views during our treks through the woods are quickly growing shorter and shorter because of all the leaves that have burst forth in the last ten days. It really changes our woods dramatically during the peak of transitioning between the extremes of summer and winter.
One disadvantage of Cyndie and me getting away from home over our extended Memorial Day weekend is that transplanted trees didn’t get regular watering and they all looked really sad as a result. Time will tell if better attention now can prevent the loss of the mix of oak and maples we moved to a line just outside the paddock fences.
It makes me even more pleased to have also found a few saplings we could nurture right where they sprouted and not deal with the risks of transplanting. They haven’t suffered a bit since we last checked on them.
Maybe we will end up with a “flash-Forest” one of these days. I prefer looking for flashes of brilliant positives instead of the typical flash-flood of extreme weather disasters being visited upon us with ever-increasing intensities.
Give somebody a dose of “flash-friendliness” if you find an opportunity today. Happy Friday!
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New Idea
Every spring we discover so many unexpected sprouts of new maple and oak trees in places where they can’t be allowed to remain and every year we talk about transplanting a select few instead of just cutting them all down. Most often, time passes before we get around to taking appropriate action.
Last year we made a rather late-season attempt to transplant a maple and a pine and both failed miserably. With hope springing eternal, I spontaneously pulled up a young oak sapling on Saturday and moved it to the spot where last year’s pine attempt had been located.
Without knowing if that would even succeed, both Cyndie and I were inspired to make more attempts, so yesterday we suddenly set about moving both oaks and maples to the fence line beyond the paddocks where we have long dreamed of adding shade trees.
This is the same place we tried planting many acorns a couple years ago to avoid needing to transplant but not a single one sprouted. Alas, we are back to transplanting, but this time with a new idea for a compensation-in-advance in case none of the relocated trees survive the shock of being moved.
For every tree we attempt to transplant, we have vowed to find a different sapling that happens to have sprouted in an acceptable location and give equal nurturing attention to encourage robust growth right where it started. Without any disruption to the roots, logic dictates we should have a high percentage of success in these cases.
I’m considering them a backup plan to assuage my grief any time one of the transplanted trees don’t survive the shock of being moved.
The effort is minimal and primarily involves cutting away all surrounding competitors to the saplings we select. It’s not that different from what we are doing on a much larger scale to clear out competition beneath the towering mature oak trees in our woods.
With the saplings, we add a step of providing woodchip mulch around them to discourage competing weeds or grasses and also slow the surrounding soil from drying out.
It’s a good exercise for me to learn better acceptance of culling some young trees guilt-free with an eye toward the bigger goal of improving the healthy growth of sprouts that showed up where they are wanted and there will be room to flourish.
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Divided Passions
I am torn between two worlds this morning. As thrilled as I am to be able to spend the next four days up at the lake for the Memorial Day weekend, I’m struggling over a great desire to remain home to tend the property, grow our bonds with the horses, and work on transitioning our chicks from the brooder to the coop.
When I got home from work yesterday, we decided to take advantage of the wet weather to transplant another pine tree. This one had sprouted just beyond the deck in a spot where there was little room for future growth. While we were pulling up the roots, Cyndie also extracted a fair-sized maple sapling, so we transplanted that, as well.
They are both visible in the image above, despite also being mostly obscured by a similar colored background. Our spontaneous decision to jump into the unplanned project swallowed up over an hour of time that felt like mere minutes had passed. Completing the transplants fueled a strong urge to get right back outside managing the explosion of growth everywhere on our property.
It will need to wait for another day. We are headed north this morning. Lake place, here we come! It’s been far too long between visits.
I hope the chicks won’t miss us too much.
We looked in on the Rockettes last night before bed and found them looking hale and hearty. Their wing feathers are coming along nicely. They are doing a fair amount of my favorite chick leg-stretch/wing-stretch maneuvers that look so yoga-like. Cyndie added a cover grate to their tub to keep the little test-flyers within the confines of the bin.
We want to move them to the big brooder in the barn as soon as we can move the Buffalo Gals to the coop. I expect that will be a project for when we get home on Monday.
Our current animal-sitter, Anna, a student in her last year at UW River Falls, will be tending to animals while we are gone.
I’m pretty sure I’ll be gung-ho about being away as soon as we hit the road, but I am definitely torn about wanting to be in both places at the same time. Too bad we can’t bring some chicks with us to the lake.
They’re just so cyoooooouute!
Go to the lake, John.
Okay, okay. B’bye!
Oh, and bring back more trillium when you return…
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Most Rewarding
Planting trees is one of my favorite accomplishments. Yesterday, we transplanted a young pine tree that had unexpectedly sprouted near our front walkway where it had no room to grow into a full-size tree. There was a spot down by the driveway near the road where I had just removed a dead tree, so we chose that spot for the relocation.
This is another of the two-for-one tasks I am most fond of because we have removed a tree from a spot where it didn’t belong and we gained a new tree in a location that had just lost one.
Instead of both areas nagging at me every time I pass by them, each one now brings me new satisfaction.
Doubly rewarding!
Especially since the raccoon that I tried to chase from the tree out our front door reappeared Saturday evening. Two steps forward, one step back.
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Three Trees
Cyndie sent me this image yesterday and what caught my eye was the combination of three of the trees we have planted in our time here were all in the frame.
On the left is a crab apple in blossom.
On the right is a hydrangea that Cyndie planted beside her labyrinth. When we moved the gazebo last year, that tree needed to be relocated to the opposite perimeter.
In the background is a maple that we moved from beneath one of our big old maples a short distance away to the east. That little maple offspring is now all by itself in the center of the labyrinth.
All three trees have gone through a lot in these new locations. The hydrangea is showing some green this spring, but we think it is a last gasp before the end. We were thrilled to see it didn’t appear to look shocked after the last transplantation, but then, later in the summer, a limb dropped off and revealed a spongy wound that showed little sign of healthy life.
I didn’t expect to see any leaves this spring, so what did sprout has me curious to see what another year might bring.
The most rewarding of the three is that maple. It was our fourth try to get a maple of that size to survive the trauma of the move to the middle of the labyrinth. I like to imagine what it will look like in a hundred years when it towers over the circuitous garden.
I hope to live long enough to see what a 20-year-old tree looks like in the labyrinth.
In the meantime, we are thoroughly enjoying all of them, just the way they are each day.
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Final Touches
With the big job of moving the gazebo done, thanks to our kids’ help, Cyndie and I made some final tweaks yesterday to complete the new setup. As so often occurs, a plan with one thing in mind expands to several others that need to happen first, to reach the ultimate goal.
Our main objectives were to level the base beneath the bench seat and move the hydrangea tree by transplanting it to a different spot around the labyrinth. We quickly agreed that the place where we put a gracefully rotating section of a tree trunk to stand as a visual attraction would be ideal for the hydrangea.
That old trunk was starting to disintegrate anyway, under the combined pressure of many woodpeckers and natural decay. When we struggled to pick it up, we discovered it hadn’t lost as much mass as appearance led us to suspect, but it looked beat up enough that we didn’t feel bad booting it from its prominent spot.
In the image above, you can see the trunk is now farther out on the left. The hydrangea tree is front and center, garnished with a fresh mulch of wood chips I made on Friday.
Before we transplanted the tree, we wanted to have water available, so I needed to get a hose and turn on the spigot up at the house. That required that the four-way splitter that was removed from the spigot last fall needed to be found. I’m sure we thought we were being obvious when we stowed it away eight months ago.
I was proud of myself when I remembered to grab a level for the bench at the same time I was retrieving a hose from the shop garage. Unfortunately, I needed to send Cyndie back up to find the hose splitter for the spigot.
While she was gone, I trimmed the golden weigela bushes that were on either side of the bench, and now being crowded by the gazebo.
Relocating the hydrangea tree was the most rewarding, as that completely opened up the primary access to the gazebo and bench, which also just happens to serve as an archway entrance to one of our trails into the woods.
It looks odd to no longer see the gazebo in its old spot above the round pen, but we are very happy with the new location beside the labyrinth where it is bound to get much more use.
In addition, this opens up the old spot to easier cutting and raking for hay. We have connected with neighbors who were thrilled with the opportunity to cut and bale our fields for their growing herd of llamas. For a while there, we were a little worried that all the effort we had put into improving our fields would be lost if the weeds were given a chance to return unchallenged.
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Early Success
Part of me is hesitant to claim success about a recent transplanted tree, well, trees, but we have decided to enjoy it while it lasts. The truth really won’t be revealed until next summer, as to whether the four oaks we hastily decided to dig up and move out in the open field beyond the paddock ultimately survive the transplantation.
In the weeks since we moved them, these four oak trees have barely showed a symptom of shock. Now they are displaying the best of fall color, just as if nothing had happened to disrupt normal routine.
I don’t know if this apparent good health is a valid indicator of the overall success of our bold plan. I am prepared to discover otherwise next spring, but for now, we are tickled to see the normal fall behavior playing out.
If these work out, I will definitely be emboldened to do more of this to expand the range of oak trees on our property in the years ahead. There are so many little volunteer sprouts that show up every spring where they aren’t wanted or can’t be allowed to grow to maturity, we always have many opportunities from which to choose.
It is part of a long game, dreaming someday of tall trees that will provide natural cooling shade under which our horses can benefit.
It all starts with acorns and involves a little effort to nurture young trees in new locations.
Here’s hoping for success.
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Rock Work
Yesterday was one of those days when the things we thought we might do when we talked about it at breakfast, ended up being different than what we chose to do after stepping out into the day. It was funny that both Cyndie and I lobbied for a refocus to something different.
I wanted to do some rock work and she wanted to transplant some trees.
We started out by the road where the recent tree clearing by the township maintenance crew had uncovered an old rock pile and decaying fence post that marked our property boundary. I wanted to stack a cairn of stones to more purposefully indicate the spot.
We also dug up a couple of rocks that were pushing their way above ground enough to become a nuisance when mowing. What do I do with extra rocks? Find somewhere to balance them.
I picked Cyndie’s perennial garden.
We moved from there to transplanting volunteer oak trees from places they shouldn’t be to just outside the fence line of the paddock. If they take, the ultimate goal would be for them to provide natural shade for the horses. It’ll take a year to see if they survive the shock we put them through today, but it will take a lot of years to become tall enough to offer real shade.
I’m honestly skeptical about the chances, but if we never try, we’ll never have even a possibility.
The biggest hurdle is the soil. The trees were extricated from sandy soil at the high point of our property and replanted into heavy clay soil by the drainage ditch that crosses our back field.
Time will tell.
Maybe I should think about stacking rocks to make a wall high enough to offer shade. It would probably take as much time as growing trees, but the odds of success are probably better.
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Relative Something 