Wild Rosehip Candle Ring and Holiday Tablescape

 I have often said that the chief joy that I have in decorating for Christmas and other holidays is in creating something new.  I am not the kind of person who puts out the same decorations year after year with no variations. Of course I do keep my decorations and add to them each year but I am always using new themes or trying to highlight some new find.  

For several years now I have had a table centerpiece with a pillar candle in a hurricane glass.  I raise it up on a cake stand and I can change out the greenery each season.  I have several rings made up that I can just swap out.  The cake stand gets it up off the surface so it doesn't take up much room and I can grab the whole thing and move it off quickly and easily.  I will probably put it back after Christmas.  But for now I am tired of it.  For one thing, pillar candles get harder and harder to light as they get older.  I want tapers this year.

I collected up all of these brass candlesticks several years ago.  I have used them a little, but not in a whole group.  It's time to let them shine.  First I cleaned them well and gave them a little polish.  Now to figure out some greenery.  You know, something simple like this...

This is a perfect spot for the rosehips.  As a base for the candle ring, I am using a three inch macrame hoop.  To keep the berries from spinning around it and to disguise the gold color, I wrapped it in floral tape.  I am using a finer gauge of paddle wire, but I cut a length of it off the paddle and wound it up tight to make it easier to pass through the ring.

I snipped the ends of the rosehips off of the bramble with kitchen shears.  The newspaper is to contain the mess.  There are a lot of pieces of dried rose petals and old pollen that fall off as a fine dust and this will also help keep the thorns out of my sock feet.

You begin like any wreath.  Take a little bunch of stems and wrap the wire securely around them.

There is an up and a down to each sprig.  

They are really quite pretty.

Take two or three more little stems and lay them on top of the first ones, securing them with your thumb.  Use your other hand to wrap the wire around and through the hoop.  It doesn't have to be too tight. The floral tape really helps quite a bit.

Keep going...

It doesn't matter if it is a little irregular.  You can make it as thick as you want as long as you have plenty of material.  When you get back to the beginning, you may need to place a gob of hot glue in the empty space and just sort of weave a few last sprigs into the bare spot.  Unlike a door wreath, you don't have a bow or anything to fill in where the end meets the beginning.

My big handful of hips made two matching rings.  I think I want a smaller (sparser) one on the candlesticks at each end.  

Time to go foraging again.  Like last year I ordered a box of evergreens for making the wreath for our front fence so when that arrives I will lay some of that incense cedar or fir tips in and around the candlesticks.  This won't be a very moveable arrangement, but it will be bright and cheery.

Pip Berries

 This blog entry was going to be titled "I am Tired of Trees" (more about that in a minute).  I found something more fun to talk about.

Pip berries are a staple in Primitive or Country decorating.  Really they are just artificial rose hips.  I have occasionally purchased floral sprays of pip berries, but nowadays, I prefer to get them at home in season.  That means clipping them off of the dreaded multiflora rose bushes.  I have eradicated most of the multiflora up near the house so I am having to go a little further to get them.  The other day I picked a few at the back of the property but I did not have a pruner with me.  Today a good opportunity presented itself and I harvested some more.

Saturday night and all day yesterday we had high winds.  Last evening the neighbor called and let us know that two border trees behind his barn had come down. Because we have a hunter going in there almost every day, and because we retrieve deer with the tractor, we needed to deal with these.  They were blocking the trail.  While my husband chain sawed enough to move these out of the way, I was clipping rose hips.

While I got a handful the other day, today I got a big bouquet of nice plump berries.  You want to let these dry hanging upside down so the stems stiffen before the seed heads weigh them down and make them droop.

I have already started to tuck some of the first ones into my decor.

Once you get them in the house and laid out, the thorns are super easy to just pop off and you can trim the stems to length,

I plan to make some candle rings with my bountiful harvest.  All that is needed is some paddle wire and some craft rings and I have both of those.  Below is the look I am going for.  When mine dry enough I will show you how they turn out.  Mine will be fluffier and more realistic because.... they're real.

These are the fake ones

Sassy Doe Becomes Amish Dinner

Today is the first day of shot gun season here.  Our hunter friend has already taken two deer, a doe and a buck during bow season, but he wanted to sit in the woods today and see what was going on.  There was a lot of activity around us and that means the deer, and sometimes the hunters, will be running around a lot.  He was out there mainly for informational purposes.  But he finally got the big doe that has been tormenting him for two seasons.  She was notorious for spotting him and alerting the others, mugging for trail cams and taking a nap right behind the tree stand where he couldn't get a shot at her.  She was big and fat and beautiful and we took her straight out to our Amish friend where she will be canned and distributed to anyone who needs meat this winter.  The youngest son had also gotten his first buck this morning and was skinning it in the barn when we arrived.  With two deer to process, I'm sure it was a busy day in the kitchen.  At 10:30 this morning the bread and pies were already out of the oven so we dropped off a deer and came home with bread.

Just to be on the safe side, I added another layer of protection to the pear tree.  I drove new poles and wrapped it with a second layer of netting.  If they stick their face through the first layer, there is a second layer to deal with.  And I don't think a deer will want to stand there with its head caught in a net long enough to get through the second layer.  But, I've been wrong before.

Out the Bedroom Window

Nice buck...  Stay away from my trees....

This one walked up the driveway and right past the office window.

That's right.... move along,,,

Stinkin' Deer

 I can't forget about them for a day...  I go out and do a walk around about every other day.  Today I saw that one had walked up to the pear tree...

...and beavered a hole in the net big enough for me to put my arm through.

It's a seriously big hole.  And it is at least a foot away from any branch.  There must be hundreds, if not thousands of twiggy little trees that they can eat all over this countryside and yet they have to walk up the sidewalk and put special effort into eating the one tree I don't want them to ruin

I just clipped a second layer over that area.   You can sort of see the green clips on the corners below. I guess at some point I am going to have to use new netting and wrap twice around.

This is not your tree!

First Snow

 We awoke yesterday morning to a dusting of snow.

It snowed lightly all day yesterday and overnight.  This morning we have at least six inches.  Not all of the Oak leaves are down so those are falling on top of the snow and will hopefully blow away instead of snagging in the grass.  It makes an interesting change from the dismal rain we have been having.

I have watched some weather predictions and it looks like we are set in a weather pattern which will bring us plenty of lake effect snow this winter.  Just like last year.  

Final Winterizing

 I have been using our mild weather to walk around and look for things that need protection through the winter.  You would think that when everything is cut back and taken in, there would be nothing for the critters to damage.  Not so.  There are several types of perennials that keep their leaves through the winter, and that is just a start.

I place chicken wire cloches over the Heuchera and Primrose. Otherwise the deer or rabbits will eat them down to the roots.  They aren't interested in them during the summer but when those are the only fresh leaves available they are a popular delicacy. I have had the original Gardeners Supply cloches for many years but new designs have been popping up.  These tall black ones are a little less expensive.

And they have legs that function as earth staples to hold them in place.  This makes them more difficult to stack but I love the idea.  I don't have to go back for staples.

Some plants that do not hold their leaves need protection from Voles.  I mulched this bed along the deck where I had a vole damage the roots last winter.

The idea is to pin the cloche down below the surface level of the loose mulch.  I have observed that voles tend to burrow under the snow but at the upper surface of the mulch.  When they encounter a wire mesh, they turn.  The further you can keep a pest away from the plant the more effective the cover.  If the target is a mere half inch away from the barrier, they are more likely to conclude that a little extra effort will pay off.  I want to keep them far enough away that they don't see the plant as a possible meal.

The raspberry plant below is hardy down to minus 10.  I put the pot in a sheltered place where the cold will not be as severe.  That means it needs a cover.  Don't think for a minute that the deer won't come up on the deck to eat.

I left the bird netting around the pear tree.  The other day a deer must have walked right into it trying to get to the tender branches.  The open corner was pulled away and needed to be adjusted and reattached.  But the branch was not close enough for the deer to keep trying.

I protect the trunks from deer scraps starting in September.  A narrow sapling is a favorite for bucks to rub the velvet off of their antlers.  But even these more mature trees are still at risk for deer scrapes.  

I am glad I got the Lindens covered well.  Below you can see where a buck dug in the mulch and then tangled his rack in the branches.  I had to prune back four snapped branches. 

He had broken these fresh, supple branches clean off.

The fallen branches all had scraped bark.

There's the culprit right there.

Some evergreens may need protection from wind and sun.  This one Alberta Spruce gets sun scald on the south east side every winter.  I spray it well with Wilt Stop to seal in moisture, then cover it with burlap to block both wind and sun.

I left grids over these two Hosta plants in containers.  The leaves will be trimmed away but deer will still gnaw right down into the root of some plants and these are at table level.

When the leaves started falling back in September, I ran a lot of them through the old leaf sucker and saved them in a double ring of woven wire.  This has become a yearly chore.  I use the shredded leaves as mulch on the raised beds and what I don't use I mix in with the compost.  I have been adding layers of leaves to the compost tube as I fill it with kitchen scraps.

Some of the beds are already heavily mulched with leaves.  Sometimes I have to rake these off so they don't blow all over.  This year I got some plastic slip sheets that came in a load of metal roofing that the neighbor got.  I drilled holes in them and pinned them onto the bed.  This will also work to warm the beds in the spring.

We pulled that tree top out of the other trees with the tractor and chain.  Below is a picture of it on its way down.  The trunk was covered in a lot of poison ivy.  We got a friend who is not allergic to Ivy to cut it down and pull off the vines.  Then we processed the top into the burn pile.  A lot of it was good for firewood so we dropped that off next door.

It seems like there are always outdoor chores to do.

Fall Back

 Daylight Savings is over and we are on the edge of winter.  Friday we had serious northwest winds pounding on us all day.  Leaves were everywhere and the Oak trees that still had a lot of leaves on them were whirling around like crazy.  Yesterday morning we had arranged with the neighbor to blow leaves.   Not counting the many times we rounded leaves up with the lawnmower and stashed them in a tube of wire fencing for mulch next year, this was the third time we had "blown leaves".  This entails getting out our big back pack blowers and working with the neighbor to clear our side lawn and his front lawn.

There is a reason why we have woven wire along the split rail fence along the property line.  It gives us a place to corral leaves.

We gave the neighbor an hour head start.  He blew everything on his side of the fence across the drive to his lawn and then we all went up the dry creek bed clearing the remainder out of the rocks and from under the Spruce trees.  Then we helped him get an inconceivable amount of leaves across his front lawn over to the side lawn where he ended up scooping them up with the tractor loader and taking six big loads into the back woods.  We were far from precise on our leaf removal.  We left many behind, but in situations such as these, you have to work at it incrementally.  You don't count the leaves you left behind... you count the ones you moved.

In many areas we can just blow everything back into the brush.

There are several places that leaves drift.

We just help them down the drive to a more appropriate location.

We will still have to blow one more time before the end of the year.  After that we wait until April when we are mowing the lawn again to blow leaves out of corners and hand pick them out of tight spaces in the landscape beds.

We had been planning to burn the brush pile today, but in the wind storm, this dead Ash tree snapped.  We need to decide of we are going to try to cut it and process the top into the fire, or leave it.  

The base is still way too sturdy to just push over with the tractor.  We tried that.  We will have to cut it or pull it like we did the last two trees that broke back here.  Well, like we took down two of the last three... There is just no end to the dead Ash trees here.