We had a great weekend working at our new place. The weather was perfect - sunny and breezy. Brandon continued to destroy the interior of the house, which he loves to do, while I did important things like transplant flowers and plant trees. Everyone knows that when you have a house that is practically turning to dust, the best way you can spend your time is to move irises from one spot to another!
Mom, Jamie, and Leigh all came to help, and between the four of us we masterfully engineered a temporary well bucket so we could draw water for the trees we planted. Byron built this well bucked from some pipe and it has a fancy stopper in the bottom so that it fills as you lower it and when you raise the bucket a gasket closes and the water stays in. I found the pulley in an old barn that was going to be dozed a few years ago and it worked perfectly. It even had that classic old well screechy noise that really makes you feel like you are accomplishing something. I was a little worried that tying the pulley to a fallen tree branch was dangerous, but it never came crashing down on our heads and the fear that it would added a thrill to the task.
There are two wells on the property. This one, which is at the bottom of the hill near a small stream, goes down nearly forty-five feet and, so far, has had water a few feet from the surface. After removing about ten gallons it took it a few minutes to fill back up. It doesn't have a cap or any sort of cover, so the water was murky and had bits of leaves and dirt in it. I wouldn't want to drink it without filtering and boiling, but it worked great for watering trees. Thank goodness I don't have to haul water that far daily! By the time I hauled it out of the well and lugged it up the hill to about half of the trees we planted I was ready to try a rain dance and put the fate of the trees in the hands of the clouds.
The trees we planted were some left over from a work project that I have been storing in the yard healed into some straw. They seemed to be alive, and some even had buds that were opening. Jamie, Leigh, and I used planting bars ("dibble bar") to put the trees in the ground after mom trimmed off some of the long roots and some of the branches.
The planting bar is an ingenious tool. It's like a flat shovel that you push in the ground with your foot, push and pull on it until you open a slit in the ground, stick your tree root in, and then push the bar in the ground in front of your tree and push and pull until you close up the first hole. It's important to close the bottom of your tree hole so that you don't trap air around the roots. Even with this easy to use tool, we didn't plant half the trees.
I decided to plant the trees in the area between the house and the stream that wasn't mowed because of some old fence posts. This area is covered in wild blackberry brambles. It will be many years until these tiny trees are tall enough to shade out the blackberries, and in the meantime it can be habitat for birds, small mammals, and reptiles. The property has some trees on fence lines and along the small stream, but doesn't have a nice woodlot. Now it has a baby one.
The trees that haven't been planted yet are stored in the root cellar. At least that's what I've been calling this strange circular underground room. I'm not sure if it's an old cistern, bomb shelter, ice house, or just a creepy place to hide captives, but it's nice and cool so I think it will work as a root cellar.
I like this picture from inside the house where Brandon was tearing things apart (he swears he'll put it back someday) because you can see that the house is sitting on stones, not blocks or cement pillars, but big rocks that look like they came from the creek. I'm sure modern building materials are more efficient, but I'm enjoying recycling this old house. Of course, I haven't tried to actually live in a warpy, damp, and probably cold house yet, but so far it's fun.
We didn't work ourselves too hard this weekend. We took time for a picnic lunch complete with wine, home made bread and jam, brownies, and beef stew, foot ball in the yard, visits with friends, analyzing bird calls, and even some home brew and pizza.
Some of us even found time to throw down a chair cushion and a roll of paper towels and take a nap!
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