Cutting the cedars
As you've probably figured out, we've put a
halt to our building for now. We're not
quite done, but we need a few days over 50 degrees to allow us to seal
in the skylight so that we can finish the roof, then the ceiling, then
the floor. And we need the same temperatures to caulk around the
windows, paint the outside walls, and then paint the roof. But
that's all okay, because there's a lot to be done outdoors before the
growing season really gets into full swing.
Wednesday, Mark
cut down a lot of red cedar trees while I stood around and
looked pretty (aka watched to make sure the trees were falling the
right way.) We've had trouble getting our apple trees to grow
since they keep coming down with cedar
apple rust.
The solution seems to be cutting down nearby cedar trees, which serve
as an alternate host for the fungus, so we took out the ones closest to
our orchard and will take out more if necessary in later years.
We ended up girdling some of the ones closest to the power line rather
than risking losing our electricity --- I hope the girdled trees die
quickly and don't grow over the wounds.
I'm afraid that opening
up the canopy over there has made me think big again. I know that
we don't have the manpower to expand our garden area now, but I can't
help wondering if we should figure out what we'd like to use that space
for and do some preliminary work to keep it from growing up in brambles
and honeysuckle. I could seed it in clover and turn it into
spillover chicken
tractor pasture, or
plant some fodder trees and figure it'll someday be part of a pig
or goat pasture.
I could take advantage of the sparse canopy of tulip-trees left behind
and fill the space with fruiting shrubs like hazels or gooseberries, or could plant black
locusts and sourwood in the understory for
bees. So much potential, and so little time left before the
growing season will make its own decisions about the disturbed ground!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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