Tag Archives: trees

It’s been a long time coming….

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It was a long and nearly snowless winter.

Spring was late and with no snow to melt, extremely dry.

One lousy April shower and May took its sweet time showing us some flowers. Heck, we even had frost last week.

But finally….

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The lilacs are popping.

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Which means vases of that heavenly scent are scattered throughout the house.

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And while a little scraggly…

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The expensive dark cherry tree we planted last year is hanging on.

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The blooms are gorgeous.

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So my fingers are crossed it grows big and strong.

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In front of the barn?

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The choke cherry tree is in blossom. The fruit is inedible and sometimes poisonous, but the delicate spring blooms are sweet.

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More snow pictures, just because I can.

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We haven’t had a nice base of snow in so long I find myself walking around the property simply to enjoy the glorious whiteness.

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A path was cut to the man cave/Barn Mahal because, well…

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The beer and alcohol live there.

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I need to take his Lordship back outside now that we have some accumulation.

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I love when the snowfall gently envelops the trees. It’s clean… and peaceful.

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When I fail to shovel off the deck after the first storm? I regret it. Because now it’s probably going to stay that way till spring.

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The birds like our deck railing and land in certain spots to eat their seeds even when the railings are covered in snow.

It’s not hard to see which places.

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De-Christmasing.

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Since I hadn’t heavily decorated the inside of our house for the holidays in a few years… I’d forgotten what a time sucking nightmare it was to put everything away.

Three days after I started…

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With help from Lord Dudley Mountcatten…. I was done.

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And after buying a fresh cut ( I use that term loosely) tree from a roadside stand instead of cutting our own as we usually do, I’m seriously cursing needle drop again.

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While I do love a real Christmas tree…

( Note the lack of snow and abundance of green grass in our yard. In Maine. In January! 😠 )

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I do not love clogging up my vacuum with 20lbs of dry needle droppings. Though I have to admit, it does smell wonderful.

How about you?

Are you de-Christmased yet?

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It’s hog time.

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I woke up yesterday morning to fog in our neighbor’s field….

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And the distinct sound of rumbling…. which at this time of year could only mean one thing.

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Fall in the country means bush hogging and as the sun started to break through, the hog was hard at work.

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Our neighbor hires a local man every autumn to knock down the growth in her fields. This is necessary if you want to keep fields from becoming forests and since he’s right next door…. we piggyback on the opportunity and have him do our little parcel of back field as well.

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And as I looked out on our backyard pre hogging, I was pleased to see the maple trees we planted this spring had survived the awful summer drought and were beginning to turn color like their larger neighbors.

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It was touch and go for a while. Maine was hot and dry for months and we’re on a well. I had to stop dragging my 300 feet of hose out there to water them and I feared our nearly $1,000 investment would shrivel up and die. But they seem to have hung on and for that I’m grateful.

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Later on in the day it was our turn.

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And those trees sure do make a dramatic background for hogging.

🙂

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I’m beginning to think she didn’t really want a tree…

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Eight years ago the flowering pear tree we’d planted by the bird feeders when we moved to this house died. My late mother, who loved nothing more than sitting on the deck watching our fine feathered friends, told me we needed to replace that tree because the birds missed it. Sadly, she passed two months later… and because she wanted me to make the decision what to do with her ashes, I laid part of her to rest with a beautiful tulip tree in that very spot.

Unfortunately the tree wasn’t hardy enough for the rugged Maine winters and croaked two years later. As did the flowering dogwood we planted after that and the Rose of Sharon after that. Two years ago when our neighbor gave us a few river birches to plant in front of the man cave/barn, we transplanted a flowering plum to my mother’s spot. It did well, for two years.

But now….

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There it goes.

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Undeterred and very determined to give my mother the tree she wanted… we went to an extremely expensive nursery where I paid an astronomical sum for a flowering crabapple.

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It was a beautiful specimen. Tall and bursting with good health.

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So in it went, with my mother.

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My fingers and toes are crossed this one makes it more than two years.

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Because if this one dies, I’m really going to wonder if my mother is trying to tell me something.

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Who needs a gym when you have a garden?

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The forest of trees my husband recently planted need to be watered and I’ll give you one guess who has to do that….

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Twice a week I man handle 300 foot of hose down to the back forty to give them a drink.

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And once that sucker fills up with water? It is HEAVY.

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But I’ll do it, despite my bad knee and pinched neck nerve because I refuse to let $700 worth of trees die. The husband loves to plant them, but never offers any follow up care.

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After that I was down on my hands and achy knee to plant. It hurts, but is so rewarding.

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Sadly, the mice are at it again. They live under the floor of the baby barn/shed and damned if they don’t chew the blooms off my marigolds and drag them through a hole.

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I plugged it with some stones, hopefully that will stop the raiding.

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Random skies and sammies.

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Woke up this morning to an odd light in our front yard.

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The sun was shining through little peaks in the clouds and it was positively eerie.

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This being Sunday, it was my day to cook for the weekly man cave pool tournament… but this time, I took your advice.

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Fresh ham salad and chicken salad sandwiches on flaky croissants.

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With fruit plate accompaniment. Pretty… and so much less time consuming.

👍

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Have shovel, still traveling.

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More trees were replaced/planted yesterday…. this time as far away from the house as is possible.

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And after all the rain we’ve had, I don’t think watering them will be necessary for a while.

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There’s a reason none of the trees my husband plants in our far back yard live and it’s called clay. While there’s nice topsoil near the house, our property slopes down to the woods and eventually to the banks of a river…. and around here that means clay. Saturated with water in the spring, cracked bone dry in the summer… but that doesn’t deter my husband. No sir.

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Two of these beauties were purchased and planted.

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Marrying an eternal optimist makes for a lot of work.

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Whether theses trees will last any longer than the previous elms, oaks or apples he planted is any one’s guess.

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Have shovel, will travel.

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Hard as it is to believe after the apple tree planting fiasco of 2021, my husband was back at it the other day … ripping up the dead apple twigs and filling the holes with bigger and better new trees.

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He came home with a beautiful flowering cherry I would have loved for the back lawn where I could see it every day….

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So naturally he planted it on the far side of the barn where it’s completely blocked by the building and out of line of sight from our house.

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It will however be prime viewing when playing pool in the man cave.

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It’s a pretty tree and was an immediate bee magnet. In no time flat they were circling and we were stepping away.

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I might just have to buy another for my viewing pleasure.

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