O (Dead) Christmas Tree

Christmas, the 800 pound gorilla of holidays, is once again upon us. Every year, I envy my childless brother, who insouciantly flaunts on his own blog how free he is to blithely ignore Christmas. Oh, he enjoys the vacation time, which allows him to spend his disposable income gallivanting about the globe (most recently Taiwan) instead of spending it on a lot of plastic crap, designed to satisfy the outsized expectations of  a bunch of self-absorbed human pupae for exactly six-point-eight minutes.

What? Am I not exhibiting the correct cheerful demeanor?

I do, in fact, enjoy Christmas. I do, in fact, spend a lot of time planning activities that I think my kids would enjoy. I peruse my local paper and jot down the dates of Christmassy events - for the past two years I have made an advent calendar of events, complete with paper doors for them to open every evening and read the event planned for the next day. It might be a local concert or it might be hanging  christmas lights at home. My community is very civic minded and there are a goodly number of really cool holiday events - when those are lacking I plan home based activities such as baking gingerbread cookies or making christmas cards to mail out to relatives and friends.

One of the very biggest events in any Christmas season, obviously, is buying and decorating the tree. I'm not going to google at this time of night, but you and I both know that probably 99% of Christmas trees sold in this country are cut trees - read: dead trees. There is an argument to be had about the environmental impact of the christmas tree industry - some people maintain that the carbon sequestered by the growing of all those trees is greater than the carbon released by their harvest. I don't know about that - but I can say for certain that buying and planting a live tree is better than buying a cut tree.

That is what we did every year that I remember, growing up. Never in my memory did my mother buy a cut tree. We were lucky to always live in a private home on a suburban lot that allowed for the planting of at least one tree a year.  For many years after we moved away, my mom would take us driving back through old neighborhoods, and point out the trees we had planted years before. She would name the trees as she pointed them out: "Look, there's your brother's blue spruce. That one is your weeping pine."

During the years that I lived in a house on an urban lot on Seattle - from 1992 to 2006- we never had a Christmas tree. Since I didn't have space to plant a live tree, I chose to not have a tree at all. Instead, we made gingerbread houses, or I bought long sheets of green butcher paper and we cut out a simulated tree and taped it to the wall and decorated it with glitter glue and potato stamps. Moving to our current homestead, a windswept 5 acre property that could really use many more trees, was happy for many reasons, but not least for the chance to have a live Christmas tree every year and plant it the following spring.  I sited an area on the west side of the property that I planned to fill with Christmas trees, slowly. When my children were grown, if we kept cup the custom, we would have a Christmas tree grove for them to inhabit and imbue with meaning.

We have planted some five Christmas trees since we moved here. Many more fruit trees; but they don't come into this story. We re-used a few Christmas trees because they have become very expensive in recent years. And one of the trees we planted died, covered in blackberry vines and smothered by canary grass. But there are still five live trees, and there is still a lot of space to plant future trees. I have a vision of a lovely, full grown grove of evergreens on the western border of our land, home to native birds and mammals.

The day that the advent calendar said "buy a Christmas tree" was a day that I was working all day long. I asked Homero to please take the girls and get a tree. I told him in simple language to buy a LIVE tree. I didn't think it was terribly important thing to emphasize - after all, we had had live trees in each of the last five years. But knowing that Homero is - how shall i put this? CHEAP - I made it quite clear that I knew a live tree would be expensive, but that that was simply a fact of Christmas.

I'm not entirely certain  I have managed to describe how important it is to me not to have a cut tree. Do you, gentle reader, understand? If not, let me fill you in on a few details that my husband was already aware of. As well as attending a Christian church, I consider myself a pagan, a follower of the western and northern European pre-christian traditions. Trees are the very basis of the sacred calendar in this tradition. My oldest daughter, Rowan, was named for the sacred tree that presides over her birth month. She is a practicing witch. Trees - living trees - are the foundation of the knowledge of the Wiccan tradition. Having a dead, cut tree in our home would be, quite literally, sacrilege.

So my husband bought a cut tree. He took the kids, while I was at work, and drove around town, and decided that the live trees were too expensive. By the time he communicated to me what he had done, it was a fait accompli.  The dead tree was already installed in our living room.

Oh I was so upset. We were talking by text: I said "I am bringing home a live tree anyway! You just bought the goats lunch!"  Rowan and I both felt righteously indignant. We felt that our beliefs had been trampled and slighted. We felt that an atrocity (albeit a small one) had been committed in our name. We felt a burning need to remedy the situation. However, the prospect of dragging the dead tree out of the living room (a prospect I considered) seemed too drastic. That would only make me into a Savonarola, a crazy zealot, an extremist. Much better that I attempt to model flexibility and adaptability.

On my way home, I bought a small live tree. I was driving a volkswagen golf - I had to find something that would fit in the trunk. I ended up with a five foot tall arborvitae. I also bought a bag of large pinecones, and a sack of birdseed. At home, Rowan and I smeared the pinecones with peanut butter, and then rolled them in dishes of birdseed. We tucked the cones into the branches of the small live tree, which Homero set up right outside the kitchen window. That was his gesture of reconciliation, arranging a sturdy base for our live tree. This past week, we have enjoyed watching spotted towhees and black capped chickadees eating the seeds from the tree.

And in the living room, a lovely cut evergreen is decorated with lights and homemade ornaments. I am trying to look at it with appreciation and joy. It will feed the goats, after the twenty-fifth. I hope that those whose say that the tree sequestered more carbon dioxide in its life than it will give up in it's decomposition are right. I hope that during it's life it provided shelter and sustenance to many small creatures. I hope that the life of this tree amounted to something lasting. In the meantime, we will honor it's life by appreciating the beauty of its adorned branches.

Happy Solstice. Merry Christmas.

Seed Catalogue Season (Plant Porn)

My daughter Rowan started a garden a few years ago; a big garden, with the idea that she would have a booth at the local farmer's market. She got a business license and called it "The Enchanted Broccoli Forest." Yes, I know that name is already taken. I told her that - I have the cookbook - but she didn't care. And it doesn't matter, because her business has never actually advanced as far as selling anything. Pretty much all the success has been on the supply side, so far, not so much on the demand side.

One of the consequences of having an actual gardening business, even if it has yet to make a penny, is that you get dozens of seed catalogues in the mail. January is prime seed catalogue season; so far I think we have received somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen or twenty. Rowan and I both love seed catalogues - really, what gardener does not? Such a wealth of possibility, so much fun imagining the ultimate garden that this year - this year! - will be a reality. I'm sure some people get the same satisfaction leafing through Architectural Digest imagining their dream home, or Vogue, imagining their impossible wardrobe. I could care less about clothes or decor - give me plant porn.

While we were in Mexico, Rowan used my garden space and greenhouse, and when we came back she moved her garden to a friend's house. This year, we've decided to both use the garden space and greenhouse here at the house. Lord knows, I don't make full use of it. I'm sure there's enough room for both of us. We have a 10 x 12 greenhouse with shelves and a fenced garden area of about 800 square feet, or enough room for ten or twelve long beds. Last year I used four of the beds. Maybe together we can put the whole space to use.

Rowan and I have differing ideals, as well as differing abilities, when it comes to gardening. I have the time and the money; she has the muscle and the energy. She wants to grow a wide variety of interesting and beautiful, unusual edibles, such as purple pole beans and cheddar-cheese cauliflower. She looks for weird and rare varieties of garden staples, such as the beautiful Peacock Broccoli or the wonderfully named Frizzy Headed Drunken Woman Lettuce. Her main priorities in choosing a plant are beauty, oddness, and "wow factor." I have different ideas.

Seattle recently launched a very cool and innovative vision - the Food Forest . If you haven't heard of it, the idea is to grow a whole bunch of trees and shrubs, bushes and other hardy perennials that can provide food for local gatherers and foragers free of cost. I think this idea may have been a natural one in an area that so amply provides the wonderful hardy (if invasive) perennial the Himalayan Blackberry. Most Seattleites are accustomed to harvesting berries from roadsides and parking lots every August, and some of them (like me when I lived there) are not averse to seeking out neglected apple or plum trees and helping ourselves. I love the idea of the Food Forest and I hope it flourishes.

On my own five acres, I'd like to eventually have something similar. I want to create a habitat for as many edible perennials as I possibly can. Mainly because once established, a perennial garden is WAY less work than an annual garden. So far, I have a pretty good orchard, two healthy rhubarb plants, a nice little strawberry patch, and a thriving if small raspberry patch. And of course there are the wild perennials - blackberries, mushrooms, dandelion, nettle, dock, thistle, and clover. All harvestable edibles which we take advantage of to one degree or another. Here are a few perennials I'm still missing which I'd like to establish:

- an asparagus bed. In one of those catalogues above there is a special deal - 15 asparagus crowns for only $7.00. I have not planted asparagus yet because I don't want to wait three years to start harvesting it - but by that logic I never will. So this is the year. I will give over one of the garden beds to asparagus permanently.

- grapes. I've tried grapes here twice before and they have died each time, but that's because a certain male person who shall remain unnamed repeatedly mowed the vines down with the weedeater. I'm going to try one more time - I'll use a locally adapted variant of the Concord called the Lyn-Blue. It's an eating and juice grape, but I don't much care about the eating quality because my main interest is in the leaves.

- hazelnuts. I have one thriving and beautiful hazelnut bush which flowers abundantly every year but which never produces any nuts. Obviously it needs a pollinator, but that is hard to come by as I don't know what variety my bush is. I'll have to buy two or three separate varieties of hazel and plant them all; that will assure that one of them at least will fertilize my well-grown bush. I hope.

- plums. Similar issue with a lovely Greengage Plum I planted years ago and which flowers every year but which has never set a single plum. I need top look up what the pollinator is and plant one.

I also have a yen for a few non-edibles this year. Looking through the catalogues, there are some great deals on trees - trees which do not produce food but which are still beautiful. We have a severe lack of trees on the property and personally I think it is the civic duty of everyone who has room to plant a few trees for posterity. I'm gong to try a couple of big old fashioned weeping willows and a couple of paper-white birches. And, of course, this year's Christmas Tree.

Old Christmas Trees, Old Christmas Trees...

Here is a terrible picture of my four goats and the cow attacking a christmas tree. Most people don't think about ruminants eating evergreens, but they do. Just try to plant one in their pasture and you'll see! This time of year, they are subsisting solely on hay, except for every once in a while when the sun comes out I can bring the goats out for a nibble of whatever they can find around the yard. I'm sure this tree was a nice change of pace for them, something fresh and interesting.

It's not my Christmas tree, though. As always, we bought a live tree and it is still up, covered with decorations, in our living room. It's high time to get it outside, but I probably won't get around to that for another few days. Our property is still severely lacking in trees, despite the four Christmas trees and dozen or so fruit trees we have planted. I have a master plan to create a mini-forest of ex-Christmas trees over by my husband's shop, but that will take a good many Christmases yet.

No, this tree is the result of a post I put on my Facebook Farmer's group saying I would happily pick up your Christmas tree if it were outside and not too big to fit in a Eurovan. I got two trees yesterday and I will probably pick up a few more this week. I'm thinking that after the goats turn them into skeletons, I may stuff them into the chicken coop to provide some natural roosting areas.

Tree Trouble (What the Hell is Wrong With These Plums?)

Sometimes I despair of the orchard. I really do. There are so many factors conspiring against trees here; some of them natural, others decidedly of my own making. We didn't site the orchard very well, to begin with. It's right up on the highest part of the property, where the prevailing winds hit the trees full on. The trees in the southernmost row are all hunched over, curled around their own trunks, almost in the fetal position.

The soil up there is poor and rocky; further down, it gets spongy and has poorish drainage. The highest trees struggle in the compact gravel while the lower ones have wet feet most of the year. Of the five trees we planted the first year, only one remains, the italian plum. The rest succumbed to a variety of maladies, known and unknown.

The orchard has been repeatedly attacked by goats. A herd of six or seven goats can really blow through a young orchard if you give them fifteen minutes unmolested. Then there are the times - yes, more than one - that I rode right over a first-year tree on the riding lawnmower. Sometimes I used to have a few beers before I decided the grass was getting a little long.

It's amazing, the sheer variety of of pests that have plagued my orchard. I didn't know there even WERE so many fruit tree pests. There are the ones that look like tiny little slugs sticking all over the cherry tree leaves, and that, as far as I can tell by googling, are called "bird-poop worms." There's fire blight on the pears. Caterpillars chew on the leaves and voles gnaw on the roots. Something makes certain leaves turn white; something else makes other leaves curl up. Yet something else shreds them like a hail of tiny meteors. There's white fly and mildew and scab, oh my.

It's really too bad, because I believe that the orchard is rightly the cornerstone of a successful homestead. Nothing gives such return on investment as does an apple tree. Twelve or fifteen healthy, highly productive fruit trees would supply a family with much of their family's needs - for fresh fruit, certainly, but also for winter preserves, for animal forage, for shade and beauty, even, perhaps, for some extra cash from a farm stand. A good milk goat is a valuable creature, but she doesn't begin to touch the worth of a good tree.

Much of my orchard's problems are due to simple neglect. I have taught myself a little about pruning, but I'm timid and afraid of doing damage. I hate to use sprays, and I haven't even used fertilizer. The orchard is far from the hose, and to water it in the long dry stretches of August, I have to carry a whole lot of five gallon buckets around, and I haven't done that as consistently as I should. Considering the potential worth of these trees, and the money already invested, it's probably worth it to get a real tree person out here to prune and give me suggestions. Certainly, the current state of affairs is intolerable.

Today I went out to check out the plums on the plum tree. I had been delighted to see that we actually had a decent number of plums this year, but then I began to get annoyed by the plums' mystifying refusal to ripen. Here it is, practically mid August, and the plums are still green as grass and hard as rocks. Hunting diligently through the ratty, tattered foliage, I managed to find two plums that were respectably purple, and even sort of soft. So I bit into one.

I haven't got the foggiest clue what is wrong with those plums, but they taste like satan's compost pile. They are filled with a brown, mushy gunk that seems to be fermented and rotten. Checking carefully all over the skins, I didn't see any holes, nor did I find any insects in the stinking brown mush. Maybe it's a fungus of some sort. Maybe it's a virus. Maybe it's monkeys, I don't know! But it makes me VERY UNHAPPY.

Things That Are Not as Simple as They Seem (Poppy Pony Update)

The blog has been neglected lately, but not because I've had nothing to write about. Quite the opposite, in fact - it's been busy around here, so busy that I haven't had time to write much. After a week or so, it starts to feel very difficult to catch up on the writing, so I keep putting it off. Next thing I know there's such a laundry list of things to write about that I probably can't even remember them all.

This blog has a case of mission-drift. It started out as an online diary, a place to record anecdotes about my new life as a farm girl. I wrote very much as if I were writing letters to friends. Then it slowly morphed into a kind of farm-log, where I tried to record mating records, birth records, vet visits, treatments, garden planning, et cetera. Not being a very good record-keeper, that effort kind of fizzled, but at least I can use the blog as a kind of genealogy, if I tend to forget which goat is related to which other goat and how. And I can page back and find out which garden crops did well in a given year, and where they were planted and what the weather was like. Rather than neat records, what I have here is kind of like an archeological garbage dump, but it's still useful.

Then I began to insert some politics here and there, and to compile interesting articles and bits of theoretically useful information. I linked and crosslinked and put gadgets on the sidebar! The blog was out of control! So I guess the first thing that is not a simple as it would seem is writing a coherent blog. Oh well, I've always been a scatterbrain in the real world, I don't know why I think I would be any different in the blogosphere. It is what it is, and I yam what I yam.

Here's what I've been so busy with: Poppy. She has developed an abscessed foot, most likely secondary to her foundering last month. I thought at first she had sprained something climbing all over the giant mound o' hogfuel, but when her limp became more pronounced I called the vet. He tried to evacuate the abscess with a knife, but was not able to. Instead of a single pocket of pus, which is what usually develops, Poppy had a diffuse infection throughout the hoof. He applied pressure to the bottom of her hoof with large blunt pincers, and showed me how the infected matter (sickening black goo) welled up out of the cracks all around the perimeter of her hoof, in what they call the "white line."

There was no way for him to relieve the pressure under her hoof wall, so all he could do was give her antibiotics and dress her foot with mag-paste (green goop, basically an epsom salt emulsion that draws the infection by osmosis). I was given instructions to dose her twice daily with the powdered antibiotics mixed in a bit of grain; to change her dressing every day, to get a boot for her foot to protect it from mud and poop and stuff; and to give her an oral anti-inflammatory for the pain. As anyone who has ever suffered from an abscess knows, it is exquisitely painful, in this case especially because the infection is contained behind an impermeable, inflexible wall. It's like having an abscess deep under your fingernail.

Keeping up with Poppy's regimen has been a little tiring, especially because she absolutely hates some of her medication and I have to get Homero out to help me hold her head and forcibly cram a tube in her mouth. It's also a bit scary - I almost got the shit kicked out of yesterday. She is also confined to the stall, so there is extra mucking, feeding, and watering to do. Putting a boot on a horse's hoof is one of the things that seems simpler than it actually is. Look at the photo at the top of this post: she is making it look easy. I'm here to tell you, it isn't that easy. However, Poppy is improving and that's the important thing. She's young and healthy, and should recover fully.

Another thing that is not as easy as it seems: building a greenhouse. My brother-in-law Fransisco left here with the greenhouse 95% done. All it needed was a few more pieces of siding to fill in the chinks, and silicon all around. Then, of course, it needed to be stocked with shelves, containers, soil, tools, and all that. When did Fransisco leave - I think three weeks ago now? More, a month. Homero told me he would get the greenhouse finished within a week (just the last of the construction part - the stocking and preparing was up to me). He did finish it a couple of days ago. I told him that even with three sliding glass doors, I still needed some ventilation on the roof, or my plants would fry and die come August. Since all the glass roof panels are already installed, I came up with the neat idea of installing a long piece of siding with hinges, so it can be closed in the spring and then propped open come a summer heat wave. Thank you, thank you, yes, I'm a genius.

Yesterday I found a whole bunch of beautiful wooden planters at a garage sale for $3 apiece, and bought all nine of them (for a discount - $20 for the lot). I dragged a set of old metal shelves into the greenhouse and set up the boxes. Now all I have to do is fill them with compost and potting soil and wait a few weeks, and then I can plant early crops. Yay!

Theory

Reality

The last task with which I have been busy is pruning the fruit trees. We have a pretty decent orchard going now; three pears, four apples, three cherries, two plums, and four gigantic old blueberry bushes larger than most of the trees. Oh and the hazelnuts. That's just what we've planted ourselves, we also have the enormous old antique pear over by the garage. Some of these trees were planted just last year and don't need pruning yet, but others are in dire need. Pruning is an art I know little about, but unless I want to pay someone a ridiculous sum every year or else let my trees turn into thorn bushes and resign myself to a far less-than-optimal harvest, I need to learn to do it myself. Last year I took my first stab at it (Fear of Pruning and Unseasonable Weather) and didn't do too badly - at least, all the trees I pruned lived and grew, and one of the pears produced a respectable crop. So once again, I took my hoof-trimmer in hand and girded up my loins and went to work.

The smaller trees that we planted are really not all that difficult. Most likely, I am under-pruning out of an abundance of caution rather than over-pruning. Fruit trees can easily stand losing 30% of their bulk to pruning, and will give a better harvest for it, but I can't bring myself to trim more than 15% or so. I just try to take off the suckers (stems growing straight up) and generally clean up the interior a little bit. Overall, I believe I am doing more good than harm and that's about all I can hope for.

Theory

The antique pear, however, is a monster that I cannot even begin to cope with. That really does need professional attention, but it is worth it, because the difference in the harvest between a well-pruned and an unpruned tree is amazing. The first year we were here, the old pear tree gave us about a dozen gnarled old pears, and we figured it was nearly dead. But after professional pruning, the next year it gave us a super-abundance of big, sweet pears. Pruning fruit trees is probably not as difficult as it seems, as long as you can climb a ladder without fear, but I am willing to pay somebody to climb that ladder for me.

Blueberry Bliss

Homero and Ivory dig holes for the blueberry bushes

Peekaboo

The weather has made a drastic turn for the normal - meaning the temperatures dropped twenty degrees and it's started to rain more or less constantly. That's normal. The sixty-plus degree days, the bright sunshine, the blooming rhododendrons - all very nice I'm sure, but completely out of the ordinary and unnerving for a climate-change believer like myself. I'd rather freeze my tuchus off and feel like all is right with the world than go bodysurfing in November.

Anyway. My ongoing love affair with Craigslist has once again borne fruit (hahaha): blueberry bushes. We love blueberries around here. We also love raspberries and blackberries, but I think blueberries are my favorite. For the last several years, we have picked our blueberries at a wonderful local organic farm called Hannah's blueberries (Enterprise road, for you locals). I love this place for a lot of reasons - tall old bushes, acres to get lost in, a dozen different varieties, only $1 a pound... but still, that didn't stop me from wanting blueberries of my own. Partly because of the self sufficiency game (The self-sufficiency game (love you, Dad)) and partly because blueberries are a gorgeous plant. One thing I am missing here on the farm is some fall color, and nothing has more beautiful fall color than blueberry bushes.

So, when I saw an ad for fully mature blueberry bushes - six to nine feet tall, twelve years old, bearing 10 to 15 pounds of fruit per year, for only $25/bush, I jumped all over it. A local commercial grower was replanting some of his acreage in new varieties, and getting rid of his full-grown Nelson blueberries. He had a 4 bush minimum, so that's what I bought.

As usual, I buy stuff, and the burden of the actual work lands on the wide and capable shoulders of my ever-patient husband. He spent two backbreaking hours in the rain and wind yesterday planting bushes, while I snapped photos and generally stood around feeling useless (back injury, remember?). But I'll make it up to him next summer when I bake him blueberry muffins, pies, biscuits, pancakes....

Good News, Bad News

Whaddaya want first?

Whenever I am asked that question, I always ask for the bad news first. But I can't make that option make narrative sense, so here comes the good news first:

Yesterday was an absolutely glorious day. The sun finally decided to shine, and it shone brightly and warmly. I think the mercury hit 67 or 68. I could not spend a single minute indoors, my skin was so hungry for sunlight. I stripped to a T-shirt and worked just about all day long in the garden. There was a brisk wind, and large, threatening clouds marched across the bright blue sky. When they occasionally blocked out the sun, the temperature would drop immediately, but as long as I kept working I felt warm enough.

The first thing I did was clear out the greens from several planters. The lettuce was beginning to get bitter and the spinach was starting to go to seed. I picked a giant colander full of salad greens to eat, and gained fresh space to plant. In the sun room, I had a few tomato plants and a few winter squash starts (a variety called "sweet buttercup" that I am not familiar with but am hoping is something like hubbard. These were transplanted into the recently vacated tires.

A couple of weeks ago, on the last sunny day we enjoyed, I dragged one of the garden boxes out beyond the fence that protects the orchard from goats and used my fancy mother's day wheelbarrow to fill it with used straw from the barn. The idea was to let it compost a little and then cover it with topsoil and viola! A new garden bed. I simply laid the square down on the lawn and covered the inside space with empty feed-sacks (they ARE good for something!) before carting several loads of crappy wet straw over. Ooh, my back hurt that night!

When my husband cleaned out the parthenon (Nasty Weather and Unfinished Business), he found a jar of scarlet runner bean seeds. A big jar. I have no idea where it came from. Instead of bringing it into the house, as a normal person might do, he decided to simply empty the jar onto my new garden bed, right on top of the straw. Then, it rained for two weeks.

Well, you can guess, right? Now we have a veritable carpet of bean sprouts all over my garden bed. I'm going to make him build a trellis. I had been going to plant corn in that bed - now I don't know where I might plant corn. It's getting late - if I am going to plant any corn, it should be done this week.

Let's see - more good news.... We got a lot of grass cut. But that leads me into the bad news because I ran over one of the new apple trees. Earlier this spring I planted six trees from Trees of Antiquity, four apples, a greengage plum, and a cherry. All six were doing just fine. Until yesterday, when I misjudged the distance between my blades and the Ashmead's Kernel and severed it completely from its stem. I felt like a murderer. It was perhaps the healthiest and most vigorous of all six trees, and I simply ran right over it like a full-blown idiot. Ah well, what are you gonna do? I never claimed to be a good driver.

The other bad news is about the bees. Two weeks ago or so, I opened the hives and discovered that one of them had apparently lost its queen. They were making queen cells. Consultation with my beekeeping mentor (The Bee-Man Speaks) yielded the plan to check the hives again in two weeks to make sure that one of the new queens had survived her maiden flight and begun laying eggs.

Well, I opened the hives yesterday. I am still a fairly hesitant beekeeper and I am not confident in my ability to correctly observe what is happening inside a hive, but I can be fairly sure that there is still no queen in that hive. I did not see any brood at all. There is plenty of nectar, and some capped cells, but no eggs or larvae.

That's not even the worst. The SECOND hive, the one that looked perfectly healthy last time, also appears to have lost it's queen. I did see some capped brood and some well-developed larvae, but no eggs or tiny larvae. I couldn't find the queen nor could I find any sign that she had recently been active. Nor did I see any queen cells.

This SUCKS! My plan had been, if there were no queen in hive one, to combine the hives by laying a a few layers of wet newspaper on top of hive two and then putting hive one on top. By the time the bees chew through the newspaper, they will have chemically melded and won't try to kill each other. But that plan only works if one of the hives still has a viable queen. With two hives but no queen, I haven't a clue what to do.

Well, I do have one idea. Call my bee-mentor and beg and plead for him to help me. I am not even sure of what I saw - I don't want to make things worse by buying and installing a new queen if there is in fact still a queen there. But on the other hand, I don't know how long a hive can survive without a queen. Maybe they will all die or fly away unless I get on the ball. In short, I need a second opinion, and I need one quick. Maybe I can bribe the man with goat cheese.

God knows, I have plenty of that.

2010 Plant List (So Far)

The girls enjoy planting some seeds on this unseasonable warm and sunny afternoon.

Orchard:

4) hazelnut trees

4) apple trees

1) cherry tree

1) plum tree

1) spruce tree (not part of the orchard but still, a tree)

this is, of course, in addition to the fruit trees we already have: three pears, an apple, a cherry and a plum. If I can keep all these trees alive, I think they will amply provide for our fruit related needs.

Garden:

snap peas

radishes

spinach

beets

carrots

mesclun

potatoes

I want to plant more potatoes, but other than that, I'm done for a month or two, until it's time to buy warm-weather starts and direct sow warmer-weather crops. I plan on growing tomatoes, chiles, summer squash, and pumpkins. Homero wants tomatillos, cilantro, green onions, and maybe corn. We have a friendly rivalry going. He won't read any gardening books or listen to a word I say (he wanted to direct sow tomato seed, the silly man) so we have a bet going on whose garden will do better. The stakes are what we always bet: foot massages.

Tree Count Through the Roof, and a Future Full of Fruit

The trees I ordered from Trees of Antiquity arrived. There were six: four apples, a cherry and a greengage plum. Additionally, I found a lady on Craigslist with several native hazelnuts for sale Apparently her neighbor has a gigantic 50 year old hedge and it has been sending up seedlings in her yard forever. I got five trees from her, and a couple of them were over twelve feet tall. All for twenty bucks, yahoo!

I'm not sure if I can take credit for these trees or not: Homero actually planted them. He hasn't had much work lately and so he's been catching up on farmwork. I sure appreciate it - planting eleven trees is no joke. I could have done it, but it would have taken me a hell of a lot longer and I would have been hurting a lot more seriously afterward.

The orchard really looks great now. It occupies a space about thirty feet wide by eighty feet long, adjacent to the eastern property line and running from the backyard out to the horse's pen. In that space are now eighteen trees, more or less in six rows of three, all semi-dwarfs. That leaves plenty of room to add in a tree here or there as the fever takes us. I can't imagine we will ever want more than twenty trees, assuming they all stay healthy.

Maybe I can see adding another nut tree - a walnut or two. I do love walnuts. But the six hazels theoretically ought to be enough to provide us with both nuts (highly storable protein) and oil (hard to come by here in the lands north of olive country and for smallholders without equipment to deal with canola or something like that). And now I have five apple trees, which likewise is theoretically enough to provide all our apple needs, from eating out of hand to drying, applesauce, and cider.

Our other fruit needs should be met by two cherries, three pears, two plums, and acres of wild blackberries. Within a mile of us we can get raspberries and blueberries in unlimited quantities.

I plan to put the beehives right smack dab in the middle of the orchard.

On the phenology front, at top is a picture of some adorable yellow crocuses I saw in Bellingham last Tuesday. My own crocuses are not yet up, but I am twenty miles north of Bellingham and at a higher elevation.

My Personal Tree Count

I've planted a fair number of trees in my life so far. I planted one today. I decided I'd like to try to remember all of them and make a list.

As an American born in the last quarter of the 20th century, I am well aware that I could not possibly offset my carbon output, no matter how many trees I planted. Most likely, I could have spent my entire life from birth planting a tree per minute and still not come close to matching my consumption. So let's just not go there, okay?

I just like trees. Long before climate change was ever on my radar - say, 1981, when I was nine years old, to pick an arbitrary date - I was into planting trees. My mom, God bless her, always insisted on live Christmas trees, so we planted at least one tree a year as far back as I can remember. During the years that I lived in the city, I refused to have a Christmas tree at all, since I didn't have a place to plant a live one. Instead, we made gingerbread houses or painted christmas trees on butcher paper and taped them up on the wall (Now I know that there are Parks Department programs that will plant your live, donated tree in a park).

Nearly the very first thing that happened when I bought my first house, on a medium sized city lot, is that my Mom gave me a gift of two apple trees to plant in the back yard ( that makes 2). Those trees are alive and well, though sorely in need of pruning, and putting out large amounts of apples year after year.

I lived in that house for fifteen years, and during that time I planted (in addition to the apples) a cherry tree, a plum tree, and a pear tree. All of those trees are alive and bearing. The cherry (a Bing) gives an immense and delicious harvest of about fifty pounds a year. Man, I miss that tree (total of 5).

When we bought the Ham road property, again, the first thing we did is plant fruit trees. I was just out there the other day, and alas, two out of three fruit trees have died, but one of the cherries is still alive (six). Also, we planted a Christmas tree there two years ago. I can't remember what kind of tree it is, but I know it's some kind of fir native to the area. It's alive (seven).

This property that we live on now is - as I think I have mentioned - seriously lacking in trees. We planted a small orchard as soon as we could. Alas, the goats killed many of the trees, but the survivors include an apple, two cherries, a plum, three pears, and a big hazelnut bush which I am counting as a tree (fourteen).

Today I planted this past year's Christmas tree - a Korean fir (fifteen).

I can't count them yet, because I haven't planted them and I don't know how many might survive, but there are six fruit trees coming in the mail which I will plant this spring. God willing they all live and that will make twenty.

Yahoo!

Note: these images were gathered from the web: none of them is an actual picture of my own actual trees.

Fear of Pruning and Unseasonable Weather

Very strange couple of weeks we've been having, weather-wise. After the cold snap ended, about three weeks ago, we entered an unseasonable warm spell. The mercury has been hovering between forty and fifty. For a while it was rainy and gloomy, then crazy windy, and yesterday the sun came out and hasn't stopped shining since.

Sunshine combined with warmth has made everyone and everything become suddenly springlike. The neighbor's pussy willow is very fuzzy. Even the earliest of the alders are showing their catkins. This is all just ridiculous - it's the middle of January, for Pete's sake.

This blackberry vine is covered in tight little green buds, something I don't think I've seen before mid-February before.

I figured I'd better prune the fruit trees before the begin to blossom. Now, let it be known that I have never ever pruned a fruit tree myself before, even though I have, over the years, planted some twenty of them. I'm terrified I'm going to kill them. But today I was out with the goats by the trees and I looked down and lo and behold, there was a hoof trimmer lying there on the ground, so I figured what the hell. Why call somebody when I could do it myself? I HAVE read about it enough. I DO know the basic theory.

Here is a picture of one of the pears before pruning. Pear trees have a strong tendency to turn into thorn bushes after a year or two without pruning. Our giant old antique pear is in need of serious pruning, and I can't handle that myself, but this pear is still little enough I thought I might be a match for it.

Here is the same tree five minutes later. Probably I could have trimmed quite a bit more, but I didn't want to get carried away. You can see I've taken off several of the lowest, smallest branches and generally thinned the tree out a bit, removing inner branches that cross over each other. There is also some rule about removing branches that form too narrow of an angle with the trunk - you want an angle greater than thirty degrees - but I didn't remove all of those. Too much of a softie I guess. Or a coward.

Lastly, here is a picture of Flopsy and Iris out enjoying the fresh green grass. They look extremely pregnant. Either they are both carrying triplets, or they were bred by Cloud and will give birth well before April.

I kind of hope it's the latter. I don't want to wait so long for baby goats!

Farm Planning, and Aesthetics Versus Practicality

I think I'm stealing this from somebody, but there's nothing to make you contemplate the future like planting a tree.

Shortly, I'll be planting seven of them. I expect my shipment from Trees of Antiquity within a couple of weeks. For those of you who have asked, that's four apples - Ashmead's Kernal, Golden Russet, Hauer Pippin, and Saint Edmund's Pippin -, a Stella Cherry and a Bavay's Green Gage Plum. There's also the Christmas tree to plant - a Korean Spruce, if anybody cares.

So today I was walking the property during the twenty minutes of sunshine we enjoyed just before sundown, checking out the orchard and trying to decide where to plant my new trees. Walking the prop was a pretty squishy proposition. It has been raining pretty steadily - not to say unceasingly - for the last week, and even the highest and driest parts of my land are not so dry.

Wet wet wet wet wet wet wet. My boots were making an icky squelching sound on the lawn. The hole that is left over from the burial and re-emergence of the famous roadkill deer (The Redneck Rubicon (WARNING - GRAPHIC)) is in the middle of the orchard, and it has a foot of water in it. Everything I have been reading about fruit trees tells me that they hate having their "feet wet." I was planning on simply expanding the existing orchard where it sits by planting my six trees in two rows of three directly to the north. However, I doubt that is a good idea. It just isn't the best place for trees.

I know that this is most likely one of the wettest weeks of the year, and that the ground will not probably be so saturated for more than a few weeks a year. But even so, there are better places on my farm to plant than this one. If I want my new trees to live, I should look for several different spots here and there suitable for one or two trees - break them up and give each tree the best chance it can have. And furthermore, who knows what the future brings? According to the newest research (What Could 4 Degree Warming Mean For The World?) I can expect my area to experience MORE seasonal heavy rainfall.

I love the idea of having an orchard, a discrete area given over to fruit trees, rather than simply scattering them here and there helter skelter all over the landscape. In fact, I really like the idea of having several discrete landscapes, as it were... or habitats.... here, the vegetable garden... there, the barnyard, and over here, the fruit tree grove. Over there, the fishpond. Yon, the lawn with it's playground, complete with adorable children in pastel dresses chasing butterflies. You get it.

Five acres is not really a very big homestead, especially when you consider than fully half of it is pasture and of what remains, the house and it's immediate environs takes up a big chunk, and my husband's shop another one. Breaking it up into separate "habitats" provides visual interest, varied opportunities for recreation, and not least, a sense of satisfaction in laying out my kingdom according to my will and plan. It's annoying to have to abandon that vision because of certain facts of the terrain.

Hmm. Who said "there is nothing more disappointing than the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact?"

Perhaps....

Perhaps there is another kind of aesthetics I could aspire to. A more organic one. If I let my farm grow according to the dictates of it's real nature - that is, plant trees where trees might thrive, regardless of where I think they'd look best, and put the garden where the sun is hottest, et cetera - maybe I will come to appreciate the beauty that comes from the true potential of the place, rather than continuing to wrestle with nature to force it to produce something approaching my vision - a Sisyphean task doomed to failure in any case.

Is that enough of a run-on sentence for y'all? Maybe I should concentrate on following the organic nature of the English language and not try to bend it to my evil will, eh?

Anyway. The goddamn Christmas tree is going along the western fenceline and that's that.

Expanding Orchard

Trees of Antiquity is a fantastic nursery that specializes in heirloom fruit trees. After drooling for several days over their online catalogue, I wrote to them asking if they could help me pick some apple varieties suitable to my microclimate (wet n' windy) and needs (cider, lots of it!). I included all the information I had to hand about my property - the climactic zone, the annual rainfall and high/low temperature averages - all easy to google - and my personal preferences about apples. One of their experts e-mailed me back the very next day with a number of suggestions.

Their trees are organically raised and shipped at five feet in height, bare root, at the appropriate time of year for planting in your climate. I am personally delighted to be helping to propogate some rare heirloom varieties, and I can't wait until I have some fancy new apples (in two or three years, alas!). I also ordered a cherry and a plum tree. Check out this site; even if you don't have room for an orchard, you might be able to squeeze in a tree or two wherever you are. They have some tips on varieties for small spaces.

Back when I lived in the city, I planted five fruit trees on your basic city lot. I sorely miss my Bing cherry tree - at only ten years of age it was producing some fifty pounds of cherries - not even counting what the birds and the neighbors ate!

My Trees

There aren't enough trees on this property. Not by a longshot. We are up on the top of a very windy ridge - and I mean VERY windy. It isn't unusual in the fall and winter to have sustained fifty mile an hour winds, and gusts of seventy. There are only a few large trees, and there certainly isn't anything like a stand of trees that could serve as a windbreak. I intend to plant one, most likely a row of poplars along the southern property line. The strongest winds come from the north, but those only blow a few times a year. The rest of the time the wind comes from the southwest. Besides, I can't plant a windbreak along the northern property line without destroying my best-in-the-county view. 

Of course, I've planted my little orchard. Originally, there were twelve trees. But the goats have killed three, and then I ran over the little cherry with the mower. I'm down to eight. I will replace the dead ones, next year. Eventually it will be a nice little orchard, but for now, it's simply a few straggly little trees that barely peek over the shoulder-high grass. 

I also want to plant a big giant weeping willow. Well, a little one that will someday be giant. I adore weeping willows, and there's a low boggy spot in the back pasture where I think one would thrive. If I can keep the goats away from it long enough. And we will most likely plant one native evergreen per year: our christmas trees.

   The pink dogwood in full bloom. The lady who built this house told me her children gave it to her for mother's day about twenty-five years ago. 
The antique pear. I don't know what kind of pears it gives, but maybe Bartlett. They are large, classically pear shaped, yellow with a red blush, and very smooth and delicious. 

Whoops, don't know what happened here. This is the biggest tree on the property. It's enormous, it towers over the house. It's a "golden cedar" according to the last owner. Bats live in it in the summertime.

Does anyone know what this tree is? It's pretty big, too. The leaves are small, ridged, spade shaped and dark red. Copper beech? This tree does the most amazing thing on sunny days in the late winter. It sings. After a hard frost on a wet night, it is lightly encased in ice all over. If the day is sunny, then at around eleven o'clock in the morning, all the ice begins to shatter. It makes the most amazing sound, like tiny wind chimes. The tree shivers and the ice just pops off of the twigs and showers to the ground. I heard the noise first and it took me several minutes to figure out where it was coming from and what was happening. I went and stood under the tree and listened as the ice came showering down on me. It was like a singing rainstorm! I would love this tree just for that alone, but it's also a very beautiful tree in all seasons. In fall, the leaves turn russet brown and stay very crisp and crunchy. Just the right kind for kicking and jumping in. It's a late-leafer in the spring, but when the leaves do begin to come out, they come out in the form of very light green needles, long and sharp. Then they unfurl and they are this bright red color! 

I didn't even know how much I liked this tree until I began to write about it.