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

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. 

Rain Delay

We are enjoying a quiet, peaceful, April Shower kind of day.  Just what we needed!  A break from landscape clean up.  It is such a gentle rain it makes me wish I had planted something.  But, I am in a spring planting lull.  I am beginning to move things out of the workshop and into the cold frame to harden off.   This is a good day for that.  They won't be too hot and they won't scorch in the sun.  I can just put them out there and relax.  

Yesterday I brought out the El Brighto coleus cuttings I took from my lightly frosted plants last fall. They hung out in the workshop all winter at 55F. They got pretty pale at that temp, but when I turned the heat up to 60 a few weeks ago they colored up real nice and started putting on growth. I deleted a couple over the winter that just didn’t root in well but ended up with 15 gorgeous plants. I cleaned out all of the dead leaves, spread them out into two trays to give them room, and watered them in well.

Yesterday we cut the last landscape bed edge.  We are out of old mulch and waiting for this year's truckload, but we are prepped and ready to roll.  It was a good day to dilly dally and check on the roots of the Linden trees.

We all believe we are not over mulching and creating mulch volcanoes around our trees, but it never hurts to check.  I raked the old mulch away from the trunk flares and checked for any strangling roots.  Each tree had a few that needed to be removed, but nothing too dramatic.  I just used pruners to snip these sections out where they cross the larger roots and gave each tree an apologetic foot rub.

 

More Pruning and Picking Up and Stuff Like That

 We've been working outside a lot and getting ourselves back in shape.  We both have a regular walking routine but all of this upping and downing and lifting on top of that takes some getting used to.  We're not old but we're not as young as we used to be.

After walking past the south apple tree for a week I became determined to top it.  This is not the first time it has been topped.  In fact, the current main leader is not even the original main leader.   There is no point growing apples up there.  I can't reach them even with my apple picker. So I got the big pole pruner out again.  This is how top pruning is accomplished.  This pole is fifteen feet long.  It's main job is to help us lift the telephone wires when we have to get a big truck in or out, but it is still sharp

First I set the pruner then I walk around the tree on all sides.  I've been planning this for awhile, but I have to keep in mind that a tree has at least 360 different angles.  Once I get that leader shortened, the one on the left has to come down too or else it will continue to out grow the leader.  The one on the right is marginal and can stay for now.

Once I get that middle section down, it is pretty gnarly.  I'm glad I did it.

This is better!

The left side looks like it could come down a little too but that can wait for now.

Another pruning project is the Nine Bark shrub.  These grow in a water spout shape and require special pruning.  If you want to size control them you need to make each cut right at the base of the branch or you will ruin its form.  Someone in our neighborhood tries to prune these like a regular rounded shrub and the mess it makes each June is interesting.  I will have to try to remember to take a picture.

To keep this from getting overgrown I take out about half of it starting with any weak or spindly branches at the bottom.

You can't really tell I took anything out.

Another project was the mess created by this big dead Ash tree.  It was actually the neighbor's tree and he got the trunk sectioned up and hauled away to his firewood pile a few weeks ago.  We need to roll the area to erase the heavy scar from the grass so we picked up any leftover bark and started sorting out our junk pile.

This junk pile gets relocated and reduced about every five years but there are still things we find a use for.  We just have to make sense of this mess.

This is better....

Here it Comes Again

 We are off to a great start on an old fashioned winter.  We've had two rounds of significant snow already and we're gearing up for another

It had already started this morning when I headed out for my walk.  It isn't too cold but it is windy and the wet snow is being plastered against everything.  It's pretty.  Especially when viewed from indoors.

This time we are expecting 1 to 2.5 feet of lake effect from an Alberta clipper developing into a nor'easter, but this cold is going to dip down and also give much of the mid-west and some of the deep south a good chance of significant snowfall.  

Our forecast also includes 40 mph winds which will blow the snow around and suddenly we are looking at blizzard conditions.  We've had quite a bit of wind earlier this week with trees down and power outages in some parts of the county.  Of course we have to endure our share of downed trees.

This one fell Sunday night.  Thankfully it did not fall across the trail to the back property so it doesn't have to be dealt with immediately.  But naturally it did have to make a nuisance of itself.

The top hit the area where we have been storing some leftover pavers and bricks and some extra wire fencing.  It is only about fifty feet from our bonfire area, but they are fifty very muddy feet so we are hoping for some more cold but clear weather which will give us hard, frozen ground but no snow or wind to complicate things.

There will never be a shortage of campfire wood on this property.

The Beginning of Fall Chores

 Perhaps the final step in the tree clearing up front that we started back in 2021.  When you start cutting trees out of a woodlot it can be difficult to stop because you disturb the growing environment of the remaining trees.  There is sun shock and damage from falling trees.  Newly exposed trees have more wind directed at them which can cause stress. The soil around their roots becomes compacted and the water flow patterns changes.  This can be a lot for a mature tree to deal with all at once.  You end up losing more trees along the edges over the next few years.  Studies have shown that it may take as long as twenty years for a wood line to stabilize.

Red Oak Tree

I was disappointed to lose the Hickory tree as it had been nicely shaped to begin with.  It was close to a large Oak tree that we ended up taking out in our second round of cutting.  We had wanted to leave the Oak but it was a little too top heavy.  When it came down, the top was intertwined with the Hickory and the Hickory whipped down to almost a 45 degree angle.  Hickory is amazingly flexible wood and instead of snapping at the trunk as many trees would have, it just popped right back up.  Over the past three years it has declined instead of recovering.

Hickory Tree

It didn't take long to get the two trees on the ground, sectioned out and hauled back to the burn pile area for processing.  

The stumps were far enough away from remaining trees to be dug instead of being cut to ground level.

The Oak did not have much of a base, but this Hickory had a deep root ball and some amazingly strong side roots.  I've never seen side roots pull out quite like this.  Usually they break

We have been building a burn pile throughout the summer as we limb up lawn trees and cut the occasional Ash sapling.  We will wait for a rainy stretch before we burn it.

And we have some campfire wood for next year.  We will get this split and stacked later.

Below is a view of the natural area down our west property line where we removed trees this spring.  It always looks quite pretty this time of year with the fall color.

A view down the center with the "wild flowers"

My favorite ornamental grass "Fox Trot"

The remaining Seychelles pole bean vines are putting out a late growth.  I have plenty in the freezer so these will be turned into dilly beans.

Spring Flowers

 It finally stopped raining and the sun came out.  It was a perfect day to enjoy all of the spring flowers.  We've begun our yard work and at the end of the day I do not have many words, but I do have pictures.

Primrose

Hyacinths

Hyacinths

Hellebore

Itoh Peony

Lemony Lace Elderberry Bush

Tulips

Tulip

Apple Tree

Winter Sowing

A peek inside

And that tree...

We put a chain on it about 10 feet up and pulled with the tractor until it snapped.  Don't worry, we were well back.  We used every chain we had to put the tractor about 75 feet away on firmer ground.

Then we cut it up and hauled it away.