To continue: When I returned from Tillamook, I made 3 wire cages - maybe there's enough for 3 more. I was jazzed - empowered: I could get the wire, flatten out its bumps, find the wire snips, cut the wire, and bend fingers of it to fashion a wire circle cage!!! I can do it!
Rose and I took the yellow wheelbarrow up the hill (through the vegetable garden, past the tiny pond) with shovel, 3 dowels to anchor cages, 3 plants, and an old gym basket (where you put your clothes when you dressed down when I was a kid - trash from the High School remodel). I started with 2 of my wire cages but one wouldn't stay on the wheelbarrow, and I could picture it scraped off and poking me in the eye. So we left it by the house. The other one was scraped off as I went under the top half of the veg. garden gate - gates and the fence are 8 feet tall to keep deer out. I left it there.
We planted a huckleberry on north side of tractor road by pond. We covered it with the gym basket, and anchored that with a motley arrow I found nearby - from the days of archery fascination and bow building by son Sean and his dad.
We put a cedar below the spring fence, close to the tiny creek. A little west of it, we put in a hemlock. The terrain is steep there - I found myself sliding out of my garden clogs, then digging with the shovel while kneeling. Lots of roots to dig through or around. And rocks.
I threw one large rock down the hill and Rose went after it. Down by the house, when we went to get the cages, I noticed she was carrying that rock. Prized possession. (No, she didn't chew on it. Sean, Rose's true master, will want to make sure I never let her chew on rocks.)
Yellow dog tooth violets (Viola glabella?) just beginning to bloom, and sourgrass (Oxalis oregana, I believe, with pink flowers) just opening its leafy rosettes. The oxalis, called sourgrass around here, forms dense carpets of individually fragile plants. It is a strong spreader, considered a weed by those who don't want its exuberance. I love it and the false lily of the valley - Maianthemum dilatatum - which also forms carpets in the shade. We have yet to get any of the Maianthemum well established.
I came across lots and lots of English holly. I remember in Fall I began my one-a-day trips as going in the woods each day with Rose, clipping blackberries and pulling holly trees.Only after the New Year did I revamp my "daily" into also planting a tree. Much harder to do! But I do still pull the hollies near my new plantings - and clip the blackberries. I'm still planning to set the holly WAY back this year.
I'm beginning to get really excited about 365 trees/shrubs, new ones, most on this property, our 5 1/2 acres. I think of them growing big, the salal, huckleberries or snowberry forming dense clumps - or thickets! Hedgerows!! (I love both those words.) It takes years for the shrubs (trees, too, sometimes) to "take off", but I'm content to wait - though I will take compost up some days and side dress our new and former plantings.
I'm beginning to get really excited about 365 trees/shrubs, new ones, most on this property, our 5 1/2 acres. I think of them growing big, the salal, huckleberries or snowberry forming dense clumps - or thickets! Hedgerows!! (I love both those words.) It takes years for the shrubs (trees, too, sometimes) to "take off", but I'm content to wait - though I will take compost up some days and side dress our new and former plantings.
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