Posts Tagged ‘trees’
Flower Blossoms
Our crab apple tree is fuzzy with flowers today, and the giant allium beneath it is making its way to spectacular. The changes at this time of year are noticeable almost by the hour. A little rain, followed by warm sunshine, and growth practically explodes in every direction.
At the same time, I am discovering that we have a few late-blooming trees, maples, I believe, that look dead next to others that have already leafed out completely. This is our third spring here, and I am becoming aware of more and more about our property that escaped my attention the first two years, due to my being overwhelmed by it all. Does that imply I am becoming dulled to some of the glories of this place? That would be sad.
No, I don’t think that is the case, although there are certain aspects of managing 20-acres that tend to take less mental space when you gain the experience of a couple years. Even though I’ve seen trees die every year, I’ve seen so many more sprout, some of them at a surprising rate of growth. I am less inclined to fret over individual incidents now that I have gained the perspective of a few cycles of the growing seasons.
Even the snapping branches during previous storms, which caused me significant trauma to witness at the time, has been revealed to me to be a common and often recoverable situation. I have come across trees in our woods that look to have been severely damaged years ago, but which have simply sprouted new growth off the fractured limb and although funky looking, are functioning as much like a normal tree as all the other damage-free trees around them.
Our late-blooming maple trees are sporting buds now and will catch up in a blink. I don’t have to worry about them, which allows me to better absorb the beauty and wonder of all the blossoms decorating or fields and forest this year.
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Still Hoping
I wrote earlier about being on my third attempt to successfully transplant a young maple sapling to the center of our labyrinth. Each time, we have tried something a bit different from the time before, hoping to eliminate issues that contributed to those failures. This time, our method was to dig out as big a root ball as possible and transfer as much intact soil as we could, and to do so before the tree had leafed out.
We were a few days later than I had wanted, as the buds were just starting to open, but it was still better timing than the previous two attempts we had made. I was greatly relieved to see the buds continue to open and full leaves unfold about a week after we moved it.
I’m a bit like a nervous parent now, checking on it every chance I get, as if peeking in to see if our little baby is safe and sound while she naps. I thought the leaves looked a little droopy yesterday afternoon, but looking around at all the other trees of that size, plenty of them have that same look. I wondered if it might be a result of the shift back to colder temperatures.
There were frost warnings posted last night for central Wisconsin. No wonder the leaves are experiencing a little shrinkage!
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Creatively Repurposed
We lost 8 long-needle pines in the last couple of years due to a combination of dry summers that sandwiched one long and very harsh winter. It was pretty obvious last fall that they were beyond recovery, but I just didn’t have the heart to take them down until this spring.
When the time came to finally face that chore, I decided to see if I couldn’t find some creative way to honor the memory of the pines. It just didn’t feel right to cut them all off at the ground. Of course, I have some history with this ploy of not cutting a tree to the ground and then using the remaining stump for something new.
At our home in Eden Prairie, I saved the 2-3 inch diameter trunks of a cluster of 3 choke cherry trees that had sprouted in an unwelcome spot of our yard, and then balanced rocks on them to create an interesting visual display. I liked the results enough to resurrect the concept again. In this instance, however, I have one item that will be more functional than a rock. It’s a birdhouse (Thank you, Mel & Greg!).
We have some really nice rocks here, so putting a few up on tree stumps is irresistible to me. While I was cutting down this tree which was leaning significantly, I discovered a twiggy young oak tree growing beside it. If that oak survives the abuse that some critter has enacted on the bark of its skinny little trunk, someday it may tower over the end of our house beside our bedroom in the spot where this pine was unable to survive.
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Third Try
I have not been mentioning the sad lack of progress toward my dream of having a transplanted maple tree growing in the center of our labyrinth, in large part because I’m choosing to avoid framing the previous two tries as failures. Basically, if I don’t talk about them or write about them, it becomes as though they didn’t exist.
However, failure is what happened, and I am obviously now writing about it, so it is not as though I mean to pretend it didn’t occur. I just haven’t been dwelling on it publicly. The attempt we made last year involved pulling a tree up by the roots and transplanting it “bare-root” to the hole in the center of the labyrinth. The shock of the transplant caused it to lose all its leaves, but before the summer was over, it had sprouted new leaves.
I’m not sure what went wrong, but after a while the new leaves drooped and then shriveled, and I figured we lost it. I held off on ripping it out of the ground last fall in the off-hand chance all the energy was being put into the roots so it could sprout leaves this spring in a return to the normal seasonal pattern.
That didn’t happen.
When I was mowing the labyrinth last Friday, I spotted the bark on the trunk was dried out and split open. Snapping off the end of a branch confirmed it was all dried out. No visible signs of life at all. I yanked the tree out.
Last fall, in preparation for the possibility I would need to try again —and while the trees still had leaves— I located another tree I liked in our woods. Following advice I received from my helpful landscape adviser, I flagged it for future reference. Yesterday we dug it up and transplanted it, taking as much dirt around it as we could in hopes of keeping as many of the small roots intact as possible.
So, number three is now in place at the center of the labyrinth garden.
I have a plan to bury a water line from the house down to the garden, where I will install a valve and a hose spigot. The length of tubing required was not stocked at the store, so I had to order it. I sure hope it comes soon, so I don’t have to lug a half-dozen hoses out on the hill to string together like we’ve done for the last two years.
I’d like the third time to be the charm, so I certainly don’t want the poor thing to go thirsty for any length of time. It’s feeling too dry around here already this spring, which is a sad problem to have since our main complaint for the two previous years has been that this time of year had been way too wet.
Thunderstorms rolled through last night, but we barely received a measurable amount of water in our rain gauge. It’s going to take more than that to satisfy all the growing things currently sprouting forth with gusto, reaching toward the sun.
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So Windy
Not today, please. It’s too cold. All night long the wind has been making its presence known with gusts that cause our log home to creak.
With a little sunshine and calm air, the bitter cold of arctic high pressure systems is tolerable this time of year. Sure, we would prefer to bask in the warmth of mild waning winter days, but we are still in cold-mode around here, and it is February, after all. We can do extreme cold.
But the wind, that is another thing. It literally puts the bite in biting cold. Today, that bites.
We have company coming to soak up the vibes of Wintervale Ranch, be with our horses, maybe do a chore or two, and definitely play with Delilah. I’m afraid the wind may just push the activities indoors where we will sit by the fire or work in the kitchen on something that involves baking in a warm oven.
Since taking ownership of a property that involves multiple acres of wooded land, I have gained a new awareness of how significantly the blowing wind impacts trees in a forest. I feel an increased trepidation about the well-being of our trails and fences.
Not a day goes by that I don’t find evidence of new pieces of trees laying in the snow. Usually, they are small, probably snapped off by the activity of an aggressive squirrel. After a windy day, the size of branches finding their way to the ground increases dramatically.
There is no mystery as to the phrase “winds of change.” Our woods are changing constantly from the gusts of moving air. That is a new perspective for me. The growth of trees happens slow enough that we often don’t even notice. I tended to see forested land as protected space, preserved from development.
On the contrary, the woods are probably developing more than the grassy fields around them.
Even the dead and dying trees have a little life left in them. Outside our sunroom door on the side of our house that I refer to as the front, there is a tree that is folded over in two, after the upper half snapped in a fateful wind. In even the slightest breeze, that tree wails and moans from the wound. It makes a wide variety of eery sounds, especially at night.
The ability of wind to change the trees of a forest causes me to feel increased marvel over the majesty of the oldest and most grand of our trees. For a hundred years or more, these trees have braved countless gusts.
It occurred to me recently that in the years of life I have remaining, I will not see any new trees on our property achieve the grandeur and majesty of a hundred-year-old tree. What we have now is all I get. It makes them all the more precious.
It also makes the gusting wind all the more ominous.
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Never Question
Well, we have another classic canine carnivore story for Delilah’s scrapbook. I don’t know why I ever question her nose. Over and over again she has keyed on something when I see absolutely no evidence to support her suddenly manic focus. My tendency to doubt her level of excitement comes from the endless number of times she has torn up a good part of our grass in her quest for a mole or pocket gopher, and come up with nothing but a dirty nose and messy yard.
However, each time she surprises me with an unexpected success, I am led to believe the likelihood of a critter having been mere centimeters away from her bite all the other times is probably high.
Monday, it was her tenacity that had me fascinated enough to give her all the time she wanted as I stood patiently and observed. We were almost back to the house after a long walk around the property when she inexplicably diverted off the trail through some trees. There were no tracks in the snow and her nose wasn’t to the ground, so I couldn’t tell why she was straying course.
There was a portion of a tree trunk coming out of the ground at an angle that had been cut off about 5 feet up. The amount of bark that was sloughing off indicated there wasn’t much life to it. Wait a minute, that’s the wrong way to describe it, because according to Delilah, there was definitely some life there.
She got increasingly worked up over her find and searched for some access to the prize her nose indicated was inside. She started peeling the bark off, getting a flap in her teeth and ripping it loose, then spitting it out emphatically before going back for another piece.
There were two knot holes where branches had once been that she could stick her nose in while balancing on her hind legs. Doing so just fueled her zest for this conquest. There was definitely something in there.
I walked over to get a closer look. Sure enough, when Delilah put her nose in one hole, I spotted the face of a mouse as it peeked out of the other hole. I think it saw me and decided to retreat in hopes of riding out the attack.
Had Delilah seriously smelled this mouse from over on the trail? I can see why this breed is often used in police work for bomb or drug sniffing. Something kept her fixated on harassing that tree until the rodent had no other choice but to bail and make a run for it.
There was a frantic scramble as both creatures dashed, turned, leaped, and ran, but Delilah got her prize in the end after the mouse made an oddly fatal decision to loop back and head directly toward Delilah’s menacing jaws.
Yesterday, I gave her a chance to return to the scene, curious as to whether she would show the same interest. Nope. Not this time. I guess that tells me there were no more mice in there. I’m sure her nose would have brought on a much different response if it had been otherwise.
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Precious Godsend
A few weeks ago, our neighbor stopped by to deliver some mail that had erroneously been left in their mailbox. He walked around to the back of the house to find Cyndie, and noticed my pile of logs awaiting the ax. He told her that he had a gas-engine splitter that wasn’t getting any use. He offered to come over and help me split firewood.
I had mixed feelings about it. I don’t like the noise the gas engine makes, but it would be a huge advantage for getting a lot of wood split all at one time. I loved that our neighbor wanted to help us, but he is 77-years-old and this was a task that seemed above and beyond the call of duty. Since his first offer, he’d mentioned it a couple of other times when I’d seen him, so I knew the offer was genuine. That made me really want to take him up on it, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it.
Yesterday he made it easy for me. He called and asked if I would be around in the afternoon, because he wanted to bring the splitter over and take care of my wood pile. Happily, I was just on my way home from picking up Delilah from her grooming appointment. How could I refuse?
I’m no longer worried about the effort being too much for him. I think he can out-work me. I wanted to stop when the sun set, but there was still some wood left in the row we were on. He told me I could go and he would finish those last few. I stayed, ultimately insisting he quit when it got too dark to work safely.
Obviously, the powered splitter made much quicker work of the logs than I could accomplish with my manual splitter, but more importantly, it is able to tackle the stringy-est wood that would defy my splitter entirely. I don’t know if it was ash or elm (he said it’s a hybrid of the two), but some of the largest logs were of that wood and I never would have gotten them split without the 22-ton force hydraulic ram-rod he volunteered to bring over.
I think splitting wood is something he sees as a pleasure to do, not a chore. I also think that I live a charmed life to have landed this paradise of a property with two of the most helpful neighbors on either side. As he prepared to depart for home on his 4-wheeler with the splitter hitched to the back, he very matter-of-factly stated that he would come back tomorrow to finish the remainder of the pile that needs splitting.
I didn’t try to refuse. I’m putting that energy into trying to figure out how I will ever be able to return the favor. My gushing thank-you’s don’t feel anywhere near adequate.
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Old Fence
While working to widen the trail we created through the south woods, I recently discovered the remains of an old barbed wire fence. There is no obvious logic to the location of this fence. It is in the middle of the woods. There are so many trees in the area that it is hard to imagine what the fence was originally supposed to be keeping in, or out.
Most of the rusty barbed wire had fallen down and was buried out of sight, beneath the dirt, leaves, moss, and fallen branches that carpet the forest floor. Occasionally, it would rise up to a dangerous level that could become a treacherous surprise to an unsuspecting explorer. It was clear that the fence was from a long time ago because I found a tree that had grown up into one strand, eventually swallowing it entirely, and continuing on undeterred.
As I struggled to navigate through thick growth while trying to keep track of the 5 lines of rusted and barbed strands, I came upon an old fence post that still had nails and hooks in it that held on to some of the wires. The post was barely a hint of its original size. It was so weathered it looked more like a walking stick than a fence post.
Working with rusted barbed wire is an onerous task. It often breaks unexpectedly. With much of the wire buried, if it breaks when I am trying to pull it up, I have to delicately hunt through the ground cover in search of the portion that remains.
When it breaks while we are trying to bundle the lengths that have been cut for removal, the number of pointy ends and loose pieces doubles. That’s on top of the ever-present barbs that constantly poke our gloves and catch on every obstacle possible.
Removing it from the middle of the forest is a major hassle, but rusty barbed wire is a hazard we don’t want to have lurking among the trees, so we find that the torturous effort of removing it is worth it.
Now we just have to find a way to conveniently dispose of the bundle. I bet I could find a taker on Craig’s List. I think it belongs in a sculpture by some creative artist.
Someone other than me. I don’t have the patience —or the right gloves— for it.
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Big Plans
Today we have some high expectations for big accomplishments. Our friends, Barb and Mike are coming over to help us get the woodshed roof back up. Before we even get to that project, our horses have an appointment with the veterinarian. They will have their teeth checked and be given whatever shots are due in this routine scheduled visit. We plan to move them into their stalls in the barn when we go down to serve their morning feed. After horses, it’s all about the woodshed.
If we are successful in getting the woodshed rebuilt, it will be a significant psychological milestone for me. It has lingered in my mind all summer as unfinished business, and visually tarnished the look and ambiance of that space behind our house. While we’ve made great strides on all the other major projects we had in mind for the summer, that unfinished woodshed remains as the last of my significant goals. It has been an ongoing source of torment for me.
I miss having that place where my wood splitter was conveniently stationed. I would meander back there at various odd times, in moments between other projects, to split 5 or 10 logs, tossing them on the stack under the roof. There is something special about the atmosphere of that space where the logs are split and stacked. I don’t feel the same sense of satisfaction toiling away on the workbench in the shop, as I do around the wood splitter.
I’ll have plenty of opportunity to enjoy that space once the woodshed is rebuilt. We have quite a backlog of wood that needs splitting from all the trees we have cut to clear space for the pasture fence, to open up the south drainage ditch, and to widen the trail we opened up through the south woods. Unfortunately, it will all be for next year’s burning.
I’m going to be a little short of split wood this winter, I’m afraid. When things get slim, I’m hoping I can harvest some of the branches of dead wood that are widely available around the property. There are plenty that are small enough they won’t need to be split, if I just cut ’em to fit into the fireplace. I know Cyndie won’t want to give up warm fires just because we’ve used up all the seasoned split logs. It will be important that I devise a workable alternative to satisfy her voracious appetite for that mesmerizing glow from the hearth.
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Relative Something 