At the Farm

Into the thicket ...

     This was one of the most pleasant stretches of the summer – no rain, low humidity, temperatures in the 70s.  I was hoping for a two-night/three-day stretch at the farm to get a lot done. 

         As it worked out I had to leave a day early, but I still got up on top of the hill and the one- or two-acre thicket that has grown up in the two years since the aspen harvest in the area. I wanted to try to “dig out” a few of the 10 or 15 trees I planted in the area.  I liberated five trees in about an hour and a half – two sugar maples, two red pine and one white pine.  One sugar maple was a huge surprise.  It had grown to almost four feet despite being completely engulfed by weeds and blackberries.  Another nearby maple had survived but had not grown even six inches.  Still, it give me hope for these trees reaching 10-foot height where they will be above deer browsing and able to compete better with the vegetation around them.  From my luck with other trees over the past 10 years or more, I’ve decided it’s worth the effort to get a few specimen trees per acre going.  I can’t make every tree in any given acre a perfect tree, but I can make some of them that way.  
    I arrived Tuesday afternoon around 2 after tying up some loose ends at home, and spent much of that afternoon mowing.  I got the yard around the house mowed with the push mower, then used the Cub for larger areas.  There was only about a half-inch of rain in the rain gauge, so I watered some of the flowers, too.

    Wednesday I went for a 2-plus-mile walk, first through the woods and over the hill then down the road to Highway H and back.  Somebody’s horses or cows have really torn up our steep trail in the south hardwoods, the one that goes up the hill to the west and through the pines.  It was a nice clear morning, a contrast to the foggy one a week earlier when I walked down the road.  Yellow butterflies were in such profusion along the road that they flew into me as I walked past. 
    After breakfast, I worked on cutting up the big white oak behind the garage.  When it fell earlier this summer, it fell across an old road behind the house that I want to get opened up, so I’m trying to get it off of the road.  I made progress cutting off limbs, but cutting out sections of the main trunk, which are probably three feet in diameter, will be a chore.
    In the afternoon, I headed to the south end and stopped to cut out one thicket of box elder in the pines.  I piled the resulting brush up and treated all of the stumps with undiluted brush killer. Then the rest of the trip was sort of a repeat of a week ago when it rained.  I sprayed more of the second growth buckthorn in the pines that we had cleared the year before.  Some of the buckthorn was showing the effects of the earlier spraying, even though it had rained almost immediately after I sprayed it.  I’m using up the last of the Ortho brush killer I bought earlier in the summer and am about to graduate to Garlon – the expensive and heavy-duty stuff that is recommended by almost everyone as the most effective weapon against buckthorn.

     I also dumped a couple of buckets of gravel into ruts on the road up the east side of the hill, then worked at clearing around the little trees on top of the hill.  I was spooked by the thought that a cougar could be lurking in the thicket somewhere, but I fought off the urge to head back to the house and stayed with the project. 

      When I got back around 5 I spent a few minutes on my laptop, then checked my phone messages and found I needed to get home.   I quickly packed up and hit the road, pulling out about 7 p.m.  It was an earlier departure than I had planned, but I still was pleased with some of things I had been able to do.  The rest, as always, could wait until the next visit.