A New Year

Frankly, I'm glad to see the sleepiness of winter around here. Christmas is past and a new calendar with twelve new scenes is on the wall. On a recent walk, I managed to flush out three wild turkeys from the trees. They startled me, breaking the silence with such a racket, crashing and flapping through the branches. Imagine a bowling ball with wings taking flight through the trees. I'm still finding their tracks in the soft soil. I'm impressed with their size and the fact they've made a home here. That's a good sign.

The plantings are dormant now and other than the frosting of an occasional snow, the landscape has fallen to shades of a dead gray/brown. Mulch is arriving from winter line clearing and we'll try to spread it as long as temperatures remain fairly moderate and it remains workable. Archery season for deer is over and I can get back into the woods and continue clearing. We've made good progress this past year. We've learned a lot. We established several hundred plantings, cleared invasive plants, trimmed and uncovered hidden gems of trees and sites, built an arbor for grapes, trellis for brambles, racks for storage, new well, pump and irrigation. We've tagged, catalog, transplanted far more plants than I had envisioned in the beginning. Now we're planning for the next round, the orchard.

Last fall, at the peak of apple picking season, we ordered three cases of apples containing 36 varieties and taste tested them.  For the most part, we tried to be diligent in sampling two to three apples a day and scored them in order to narrow down our favorites for planting. Katherine has been ever diligent, as usual, in researching varieties, root stocks, reputable nurseries, etc. All told, we ordered 12 varieties of apples, 8 cherry and 11 peach. We already have a few varieties on site that we'll incorporate into the orchard area as well.

The area that will be the orchard was set aside as an orchard long ago when Russell originally planted some fruit trees. That was 20-30+ years ago. Most of the trees were diseased, dead, dying or were just entangled with autumn olive.  The area, like much of Birdland, was never maintained so Katherine and I just decided to clear the old out and start new. And so, this became another project we engaged in this fall. The area was already fairly clean of trees and shrub so our clearing effort was minimal. Some minor clean up is still needed, but overall, we're ready for spring.

This winter has been extremely mild to date. It's certainly helped us proceed with clean up and clearing. Having the die back of foliage has really helped the accessibility in getting into areas that are otherwise difficult throughout the rest of the year. It also exposes the immense amount of debris that still exists and needs to be removed. All we can do now is inventory trouble areas and what we'll need in resources and for planning. The reality is troubling, it usually is. The scope of clean up will be easier to deal with in small areas, one step at a time.

On the bright side, we just received our first real snowfall of the season. It certainly has a way of transforming the landscape into a peaceful state. Now, there's no garbage, no weeds, nothing is ugly anymore, it's a new place and the same place. It's quiet, day and night. It's good to be out in the snowy cold to see the beauty of the season. It's wonder all over again.