Arbor Day Foundation Trees

The Arbor Day Foundation is a wonderful organization, helping to plant trees all over the world and bringing all of the many benefits of trees along with them. As their way of saying thank you for donating to their organization they will ship you about a dozen trees to plant in your yard. The shipping is timed so that the trees arrive to you just in time for planting.

The trees are shipped bare root, you can see them in the white bucket in the above picture. Bare root trees are an extremely cost effective way of shipping trees, but their survival rate isn't as high as those shipped in containers. We had a dozen or so shipped to us last Spring and planted them in the ground the very next day. None of them ever leafed out. 

We weren't expecting a whole lot from free bare root trees, but anything above 0% survival would have been preferred. This past fall we had another dozen shipped to us and on the recommendation of Meredithe's uncle Tim we started them in containers. One of the dozen was a Blue Spruce which, being an evergreen, was easy to see that it had arrived alive. The rest we could have scratched the bark and monitored closely to see if they were still alive, but we just stuck them in these containers and protected them from too much light and wind by placing them along the Southern wall of our shed, back in the woods and hoped for the best.

To our pleasant surprise, they have begun leafing out this Spring. So far I think we have a Dogwood and a Washington Hawthorn. Hopefully more of them will leaf out as the weather continues to warm up this Spring. But even if the others don't make it, at least a 25% survival rate is better than 0%!

Washington Hawthorne

Dogwood

Walnut Bandits!

A couple of months ago I planted 30-40 black walnuts an inch or two down in the soil to stratify for the winter. I thought that covering them with a grate, weighted down by cinder blocks, would be enough to hold off the squirrels. I was wrong. The cinder blocks do, apparently, make a lovely squirrel table. The grate is also easy enough to just tunnel right under and stores walnuts reasonably well... for a squirrel to find and secret away... somewhere else.

I didn't lift the grate and inspect the damage, I just grabbed a few rocks from the driveway and reinforced the sides. I'm hoping that they only absconded with a few walnuts and the rest are still awaiting Spring. I covered the rocks with a little extra dirt, covered it all in pine straw and kept it moving. Maybe they just thought a few should live somewhere else and I'll find a surprise walnut tree somewhere in a couple of years? OR maybe squirrel season doesn't end until February 28th and they'll taste of walnuts. I'll keep you posted.

Clearing Space for the House

We decided to place the house at nearly the highest point of the property. The site is just to the North of the garden and, more importantly, just North of a few wild cherry trees, an elm, and some as yet unidentifiable nut trees. They may be pecans planted by the previous owner, but we aren't quite 100% sure what they are. There are a few pines in that area to the South of the house and 5 remaining pines where the house will sit. There are maybe 20 or so more pines in the area that are a little too close for comfort. The 5 pines will definitely have to come down, and at least some of the others in the area. Most of the underbrush was privet, easy to remove, but tedious. After 10 or 15 hours split over two days I cleared the privet, as shown in the next picture.

Next I tagged the trees that would need to be removed and used some lumber I removed from the old chicken coop to mark the corners. The currently expected house footprint is 35' by 45', with a 15' by 25' screened in front porch. The front porch will hopefully be where the chicken coop currently sits along the Southern wall, with the possibility of adding a second porch on the Western side of the house in the future. All of these pictures are taken from the Southeast, basically from the front porch, looking at the front of the house.

This final picture is the most recent, and from a little farther back to show the chicken coop removal fully underway. If you refer back to last weeks post, The Chicken Coop Rescue (...again), you can see the drastic difference between what the space looked like before and after this stage of the clearing process. Once big pines start coming down the area will undergo another drastic transformation, letting in much more sunlight. The larger hardwoods to the South will be kept to shade the house in the Summer, but let the sunlight in during the cooler winter months.