And just like that!

 We have anxiously waited all Winter for the weather to warm, and just like that the Spring projects have begun! Daytime temps have been averaging between the 50's and 70's (those warmer temps are supposed to happen this week). Intense storms ushered in great weather and gave me and Woodchuck a chance recently to start on the usual Spring-time work, but let us take a moment of silence first for my favorite work tool, an old iron metal rake that I seemed to have misplaced after raking up the branch debris from alongside the back ditch. Woodchuck and I looked everywhere for it, and we may have been looking right at it for all I know, but just couldn't see it! So we had to buy another one. Hopefully we will run across it when we least expect it!

On our latest trip out there, we started by checking the back ditch and found the drainage tubes to be nearly plugged. Woodchuck cleared them out and placed on the filter caps we bought and we decided to walk away from it for a bit to see what happened. When we went back we noticed that while the caps keep the larger debris out, it builds up in front of them. So anytime we are out there, we will need to check them and anytime the ditch may dry up again, we need to keep trying to get all of the debris out of it. This feels like it's just going to be one of the constant maintenance projects and if that's what it takes to keep things flowing smoothly, literally, that is alright. The water level did drop a few inches, so that was a good thing!

Woodchuck needed to change a filter in the tractor (which took three trips to the tractor place to get it!) and spread some stone out to fill in puddles (getting things ready for when the concrete will be poured in the pole barn!). While he worked at the front, I walked to the second CRP forest because I noticed an Autumn Olive and honeysuckle right on the edge of it that I didn't get last year. While cutting and treating those, I noticed green in the forest and got that sinking feeling.

I went in and found lots and lots of garlic mustard. It was expected, because remember I talked in the past about seed banks in the soil? The key this year is to get to all of them before they flower. I've been thinking more and more about what a friend once told me, that I should ask for help out there. But there's a whole other ball of wax with that. Keeping people safe, teaching what to look for and how to remove it, etc. And then there's the whole finding someone to give up their time to come do manual labor out in a forest. So for now I'll keep chipping away at it myself and try to get Woodchuck on board when he doesn't have something of his own to work on!

Some people treat them with herbicides, some people pull them to eat them, some people pull them and black bag them. I'm the later of the three. Though! I did pull some right before we left for us to try with dinner, and it was going to be our first time eating them! Of course, as with wild foraged foods, you want to make sure you have permission to be on that land, that you know exactly what it is that you've gathered, and that it hasn't been treated in the past with herbicides. Also, with garlic mustard, you want the youngest plants to eat from what I read. Turns out Woodchuck started having an allergic reaction to just a tiny piece of leaf that I had him try. So I ended up eating it instead. I wasn't impressed, but I ate it raw and not sautéed like I read was a good way to get some of the bitterness out. 

One garlic mustard plant can produce 600-7900 seeds on the high end, and those seeds can stay viable in the soil for years! Invasive plants change the soil composition to suit their needs over the needs of native plants, plus they come up early in the Spring and are prolific spreaders, out-competing our native plants. Just look at this one! The top was very young and not very tall, maybe a couple of inches, but look at the deep root system!

I kept stopping to take in the beauty of the day and forest. Scattered storms were in the forecast, so we figured as long as it was safe to, we'd get done what we could. Turns out the whole day was amazing and reminded me of the days as a child that I'd play outside (which was more often than being inside). There was some warmth to the air, but also a bit of a damp chill and with the cloud cover, I wanted to be sure that I didn't get cold. My auto-immune issue doesn't respond well to that and I was already hurting before we even got out there.

I would sit still and listen to the birds, some of which I can't identify. I would smell the air that had little notes of Spring on it. I would crawl around in the dirt, pulling the plants, and inhale the loamy-ness of the soil while listening to the dried leaves still on oaks rattle and green needles on the white pines whisper in the breezes. Truly in my element. 

In looking ahead all around me, there was forest. Looking behind me, there was the pond and open sky. What a beautiful place.

While being out in nature is a gift all in itself to me, there is always magic to be found in the arms of Mother E! While most people would walk right past this white pine tree with a scattering of black walnuts under its bare boughs, my eyes go right to them and I begin to feel the energy of the creature that left them there. I also began searching for the black walnut tree itself and soon found him. 💚

I kept getting pulled deeper and deeper in to the forest, drawn by the lure of bird sounds, the ambient lighting, the smells and the sense of magick. What else lies in there, my spirit always wonders. What will be revealed to me on this day? What more can I do to bring this place back to native health and what did I miss last year that I need to see this year? I am feeling less overwhelmed and more capable (at least right now) of dealing with what I find and I never feel alone in the forest. )O(

Woodchuck and I will be on vacation from our jobs next week and have a list of the projects we would like to get done both here at home and at the land. Because it is not reasonable to think that we can fit everything into one week, we agreed to work on small/quick home projects on the days the weather permits this week leading up to vacation time. That will hopefully knock at least one or two things from the list, because we don't want to be spending ALL of the time working on the vacation...we need to have a little fun too! I started yesterday by working on invasive plants along our home driveway, and he'll work today when we gets home from work on cleaning up along the front of the house where the neighbors trees drop their leaves and they get all caught up and piled around the grill, bike rack, etc. Some times it is just those little things that make us feel more accomplished, organized, and ready for the new season! 💜
  

What does the future hold....besides trimmed blueberry bushes?

 Well, it is officially done. All of the blueberry bushes are trimmed...at least the ones we could get to. There are two or three that are just in too much water for us to bother with. We noticed that the land around them has become even more wet, and I wondered if it was the bushes, and the land, responding to the situation and changes we have initiated. 

As always, we swooped in to help, and now we must step back and let the land and its plants respond. I can almost envision the blueberry bushes stretching and enjoy their new-found freedom. They aren't perfectly trimmed, by any means, but I feel everything out there understands our intentions and responds in like energy and giving us a little grace in being less than professional in our understanding of how to handle all of the things out there that we do.

It was so warm and perfect on this trip out. No cold wind, and a warm, enveloping sun. I was able to take my long sleeves off, not caring that the thorns would attack.

 I had just had two days of allergy testing (revealing no reactions, mind you) and was willing to add to the marks. I'm a girl who doesn't care about scratches anyway. To me, nature is like a cat when it lashes out a bit. They are just doing what they are designed to do, and it's nothing personal.

While Woodchuck worked on trimming the bushes, I worked on cutting down, and treating the stumps of the invasives and aggressive plants. Some times too a plant can be native, but volunteered to grow in a less than ideal location. When we say a plant "volunteers" that means it wasn't planted where it is growing. Carrying around a pole saw on dry, firm ground is a task for me. The saw is longer than I am tall, and it's heavier at one end. So I look like a clown on a high wire trying to balance it, with a bum shoulder. Trying to do that in wet and muddy conditions could be dangerous, so I had to go slow and deliberate. In those moment I always think of a friend of mine who I learned a lot about invasives from, and how she is so tiny but wielded a chain saw with strength, grace, and deliberately. I always remind myself that if she can, I can. I just have to be smart about it.

This river birch pictures above had a lot of crap growing around it. Brambles, crap tree starts, the red twig dogwood (that is native but FAST growing and takes over VERY easily and quickly!), etc. This is one of my favorite trees, with a colorful peeling bark of what looks like sheets of paper. I left a little oak tree next to it for now. When I don't know how natives will interact together, I leave it and watch. Soon enough their interactions and relationship will be revealed to me and I can make better, informed decisions.

The mud was up to my ankles again. I've had to learn the proper way of walking in mud this deep! It's all about releasing your heel first when you go to take a step! Don't twist your foot to change directions until the heel is released or you will sprain your ankle...or worse!

This tiny oak tree was being taken over by more brambles, and a grapevine that was twisting around it. I had to be very careful right here! The tree is on a little mound, surrounded by water on nearly all sides. I freed it from its captor and told it that we will be working on the pond this year and can hopefully save it from a watery grave.

                                                            Hang in there, little oak tree!

It is so open now that you can see the start of the watershed immediately on the other side of the bushes (pictures above). A tiny white sign to the upper right of each picture marks the boundary. Once the NRCS comes out this month I will talk to her about the amount of the red twig dogwood on that section. I don't want to clear so much out that I take away natural habitat and cover for the wildlife, but clearly these native are incredibly fast-growing trees and have not been kept on for the better part of ten years or more. I need a better understanding of what I should do with them.

We walked back to the front and I picked up garbage along the road while Woodchuck fired up the tractor. I am always observing the nature around me, watching and listening. I found many, many dead trees in this area that would be great to cut down now before everything on the understory wakes up and makes it difficult to get in. The goal is that once we have cleared out the non-natives and dead stuff, we can make a plan to then replace it with new, native stuff. 

                                                            Old ear fungi on a dead tree.

Woodchuck has really been wanting to plant sunflowers up front, but is thinking they won't do well there because they wouldn't be in full sun all day. Honestly, where I had them here at our house, they weren't in full sun all day either, just many hours of it. I think it would be worth a try! Speaking of flowers....

The faery lillies and daffodils are coming up! I heard my first red-wing blackbird and the doves and robins are all over the place now. Once Spring gets here, I hope it slows down. I would love a long Spring, Summer, and Fall this year. 

Now for the second update about the place that went up for sale next to the land. Woodchuck thought hard about what I was saying, and how I was feeling at the prospect of another infringing and less-than-neighborly-neighbor moving in so close to us at the land. I refuse to spend my retirement fighting the same battles that I have spent fighting here for the past 23 years. And the more he thought about it, he agreed and felt the same. So he contacted the land owner and asked if there was a way to work something out, only to find out that after just a few days on the market, he sold it already. Someone offered him cash, though a little less than he was asking for it. 

So, we are moving forward on the land as planned, getting things back to native and healthy, while we wait to see how it goes with whomever moves in. We have to come to grips with the idea that we might eventually sell the land and start our search over again. It's not ideal in the least, it took us over 20 years to find the land, and with Woodchuck being four years away from retirement, time continues to tick away. But we are letting this unfold and be what it is. We will continue to love and care for the land in the meantime, and are blessed by it no matter how we have to move forward later on. 💚

You're such a ditch! the long-winded edition

 Most projects we take on don't go as planned. Take the patio at our current home. When we moved in it was rock and in those rocks were dwarfed trees and other plants that the previous owner enjoyed. We needed a place for our son to play, and ride his bike, etc., so we removed all of the stone and plants and put down patio block. And during heavy rains, it floods. So I got the BRIGHT idea to remove the blocks at the corner and in a design at the patio table area and plant grass only in those spots. Sweet Lords of the Plant Kingdom, what was I thinking?! Oh it helped the flooding issue just.fine. but why didn't I take into consideration that hubby doesn't weed whack but like twice a season and that's only because I keep reminding him that he hasn't done it and it needs done. And now that we are in a drought, the only things growing are what are coming up in all of the seams and nooks and crannies of that patio. Including that grass. Ugh.

But the other thing that didn't go as planned as the burning of the tree debris pile at the land. Woodchuck just *had this feeling* that the fire department was going to light it up and POOF, it would be ashes. Since they did keep pushing back the day they would be doing it, we kept adding to it. Fresh, green, healthy bushes and other invasives. It's gonna burn, he kept saying! And we show up the day after the burn and are like, "why aren't we seeing smoke?" as we are pulling in. And "Uh oh, what if they didn't show up again?" as we are walking over to the area. The closer we got, we could smell that something had been burned, and many of the trees were charred, but didn't burn completely because they were still too green, but it did take all of the leaves off. Well shit.

This totally messes up the plan for the prairie area now. Woodchuck called them on the next business day and asked if this is a work in progress or one and done. We've never done this before, we didn't know! And nope, it's a one and done and they said to see if people want fire wood. Soooo, now we have to clean this up. Ugh. Well. we'll have plenty of fire wood for when we camp, which sadly isn't all that often. While out there we took stock of other projects we could be hitting, so we walked around and made a plan.

We have got to get to this back ditch while we have dry weather! (above)

And aw, heck! While we are back here, let's start getting this area cleaned up too! Sadly, this is the ONLY spot we got cleaned up right here. So much to do and only two of us!!! We'll come back to it soon though because I will need to come this way to access the watershed pond to treat the phragmite. 

So when we went back we tackled the front. We always think we are going to get farther than we do! We usually spend about 3 hours on one little spot, and with 15 acres to be working on at various points in the year, it's just not all going to get done. But we managed to liberate an old tree and some young junipers, from multi-flora rose. We need to come back to this area to take down some dead trees and continue moving along the front at some point.

    

                                                                            Before ☝

    

                                                                           During ☝

                                                                        After ☝

And a wall of so much more to go! Checking on the area again days later, the multi-flora rose that we couldn't reach to pull out of the tree has died. Yes, friends, the multi-flora will climb trees! This tree had that AND bittersweet. The majority of the tree died because it lost the battle for sunlight, but there are still green parts higher up where the invasive plants hadn't reached yet.

You know that I always say Mother Nature gifts those of us who fight for her. We are not just gifted with our own lives, but get to see the others we impact. How this little mantis did not get caught up in the tractor, the brush hog, or under our boots I will never understand, but what a treat!

And I have made it a habit of giving myself breaks along the way of the work to make pretty things out of destructive things. I have several wreaths now made from grapevine and bittersweet. Though many have asked what I will do the wreaths, I haven't decided. It is my understanding that I can't sell the bittersweet ones because of the new terrestrial plant rule in the state I live in. I am sure one of the reasons behind it is because they don't want people to see the wreaths and think what a great idea it would be to grow invasive plants like this Oriental Bittersweet. Another idea would be to stop the inadvertent spreading of it. For now they are sitting in my workshop, but once we move to the land I may hang them through as a ward of sorts to keep the oriental bittersweet at bay. That being said, I know it will take years to get the issue under control out there.

                                     For example. The front ditch is one of the worst areas for it.

All of those tendrils reaching up are individual vines coming off of one (at least) main root. (above).

 Directly across from the this spot, on the other side of the ditch, is this monster. (below) I can only assume there's a Staghorn sumac under the crap, but all you can see the bittersweet that has overtaken it. 12 foot tall. I doubt that the sumac is still alive, deprived of sunlight. I'm not shitting you when I say that I/we have our hands full and this will take years to get the land back to the native species home it should be. I admit that I get scared some times that we will get too old and too frail to keep working it before I see it done.

We are workhorses, and all work almost all of the time. So in response to Woodchuck's work schedule getting changed with no notice, we decided to camp out on Das Zem! The few days prior to were PERFECTION. No humidity, breezes, clear skies. Of course that changed the night we decided to camp. We were both dripping sweat barely five minutes into trying to remember how to set up the tent. Why did we even bother showering before we went there?! It's never a fast thing to set that tent up, but

we prevailed!

Home away from home for the night! Always seems like a lot of work for just one night. 😑

It was almost 8 p.m. before we were able to get the grill going, and sit with a beer to watch the sun sink.

Woodchuck even got fancy this time with the bathroom needs! We've always had the bucket, but he added the seat this time.....just wish he would have sanded the wood a little better and centered things correctly. I'm surprised I don't have splinters on my tush.

With the naked eye we could see some bright stars, but with my phone camera, we could see so many more in the pictures. It was truly magickal!

And the darker it got, the more magickal it got! But 5 beers later, and staying up way past our usual bedtime had caught up with us. Time to hit the hay because we had a lot of hard work waiting for us on the next day and it was supposed to be really hot.

I slept like shit, there is just no sugar-coating it. An air-mattress is no place for a 200 pound Slovakian man named Woodchuck, and his 5 foot tall wife who is the size of a 5th grader (okay, maybe 4th grader. But I refuse to say 3rd grader!). It was hot, and I don't handle polyester anything very well and that is what the sleeping bags are made of, as well as the sheet we put on the mattress. This was the first time we'd camped out since my hip surgery and my hip says NO MORE air-mattress, lady!!!

But the crows didn't come screaming out of the forest this time before the sun rose, in fact, the first bird I heard was a cardinal in a tree next to us at 4:15 a.m. And then the symphony started. Waking up to those sounds never gets old! In fact, as I am typing this I have tossed all caution to the wind, turned off the a/c and thrown open the windows. It may only be for an hour and it may be an irritation to my asthma with the high mold counts, and listening to the neighbors dogs barking by 8 a.m. is always frustrating, but that morning bird song gets me every time. 😍

Up and at them with a quick breakfast of organic chicken sausages on the grill and another beer for Woodchuck. I was already dehydrated enough, thank you very much, so I had juice! 

We packed up the stuff we weren't going to need anymore, took down the tent so that the dew could dry off before we packed it up too, and then headed to the (gulp) back ditch. We have worked on this ditch area three times now, and are not even quite halfway down the length of it. The next trip out there doesn't look promising to work on it again, and I am trying to figure out exactly what *will* we be working on when we go out there next.

The first thing was to get the drainage tubes cleared out and dug out a bit better. We don't know if the previous owner, who put in this ditch, put the tubes in this position, or if they've been heaved up over time by twigs and branches. A lot of what we are doing out there is trial and error. Do something one way and observe it over time to see how it responds. With the lack of rain, there's been nothing to observe right here. Below is what is looked like before all of the work started.

You can just see the black tubes above, at the bottom of the picture.

Many staghorn sumacs wrapped in grapevine.

                                                       I'm just gonna grab a quick snack!

The ditch was dry but a little slick in spots. So many types of toads and frogs in it!

And this corner up on the bank is now clear!

And after, down in the start of the ditch. You can see the black tubes clearly. Farther on in the ditch is another tube that was buried in the second CRP forest by the previous owner. It has a plastic grate covering on it and something large has been gnawing it. Possibly a Woodchuck? (no, not my human one!)

Walking farther down the ditch line, we see it is all dried up and we decide that this needs to be our continuing project for as long as possible.

Lots of various kinds of animal tracks down in the muck!

           Another day, a little farther in to the ditch. So.much.grapevine. and MFR. The before.

The after.

The tree is actually down in the ditch, and possibly rotted, but we don't have time right now to deal with it. It's not causing any issues, and other things are. I slipped and fell while working on this spot too and landed hard on my right hip. I bounced right back up but was a little sore and worried that maybe I messed some thing up. The surgeon told me to be careful through the month of June and this happened right at the end of it. So far so good though!

I tackled the front ditch on my own the last trip out while Woodchuck serviced his tractor. I thought I could whip right through it, as I always think, and I always end up being wrong. I started on the worst part of it, because there was a tree that needed help. It was covered in oriental bittersweet and the MFR was starting to climb it. Before pictures x 2 👇

This bank of this ditch is lined with bracken ferns and while I tried to be careful, a small portion was trampled in my efforts to clean the area up. I always feel bad about that. I have found them to be very resilient though and grow back if they are mowed down, but I don't like to play with the possibility that they may not at some point. 

Once some of the icky stuff was cleared, I found a little treasure! At first glance I thought it was a bone, but it ended up being something more hard to find on the land.

After pictures x 2 below 👇

These piles of vegetation that I cut out and piled will be taken care of by the tractor next time we go out there. 

I left the grapevine wreath on the tree I pulled it from. There's still lots left in the tree itself, but it will die of now that it's cut from the main root source. I could feel the tree sigh in relief and where its prize proudly! It had been liberated!

And once again in the liberation, I found the tiniest of creatures. I was worried at first that it had been tagged the herbicide I had to use when I cut the bittersweet and MFR (and AO!), but I believe it is okay. It's a baby (referred to as a Nymph) walking stick 😍 

And the tiniest bit of amber (tree resin). Something may have injured the tree in this spot. I have gathered tree resin in the past for art projects, but not only do I have enough already, this tree needs this to help protect the damaged area.

                                                        Another oriental bittersweet wreath.

                                                                A grapevine wreath.

And a video of the baby walking stick. Woodchuck and I are getting so excited to start the process of building and to move to the land and to see these things on a more consistent basis. There is magic all around and everywhere we go 💚💜