I had so many things I wanted to do this weekend, and yet here it is, Sunday evening again, which means back to "work" in the morning, and very little, if any, time for gardening for five days. The weekends are just never long enough.
But I guess I did get a few things done so the weekend wasn't totally wasted. After it warmed up just a bit on Saturday morning, I took my Green Shoots foam herbicide dispenser, the loppers and the saw back down to The Carey woods and spent about an hour and a half cutting privet and treating the stumps. There's just so much privet.
Saturday afternoon I carted in three more cartloads of cow poo from the field, and layered that in with three cartloads of straw and hay that the cows didn't eat. Now...that may have been a big, big mistake, because there are definitely weed and grass seeds in that hay. But I started thinking about how little composted cow manure I ended up with last year, and I wondered if it just didn't have enough "browns" (carbon heavy materials) in the bins. So I decided to go ahead and take the chance on the weed and grass seeds because I'm having a tough time coming up with browns again this year - and especially since I've decided not to use the leaves in the compost.
I also spent part of the afternoon shredding privet limbs. RAF helped me load some in the truck and we unloaded them by the garden. Little Joe and I worked for about an hour late yesterday, and got about 2/3rds of the limbs shredded. I think the privet limbs will work pretty well to make some chips for the walking rows in the garden. They do shred very easily.
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| Little Joe does a great job at shredding privet limbs. To the left by the loppers there was a pretty healthy pile...enough to fill the front part of that walking row with about 3" of chips about 3' in to the row. Nice. :D |
And while I was shredding privet, Mo was digging moles.
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| Mo dug quite an extensive bunch of holes trying to catch the mole that has been working the back yard. |
Today (Sunday), I carted in more cow poo and hay/straw so I now have two of the bays filled up and have started on a third. The one bay that I filled last weekend still hasn't really heated up. Ambient temperature was 52° F when I want out this morning, and the pile was only reading 72° F. I've added some water to both of the full bays. The manure wasn't as wet and raw as it was last winter, so it might just not have been wet enough to start heating up. I'll check on it in a few days and see if there's any change.
RAF went with me down to the creek so I could "hack and squirt" the female Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) that grows down there (a part of my war on invasives...). But when we got there, I was dismayed to discover that there wasn't just one female tree...there were many. They may all be root suckers from a single female tree, but regardless, there were way more there than I thought. And unfortunately, it looked like most of the seeds that were on the one I saw earlier in the winter have dropped off, so I missed my chance to collect and destroy the seeds. It may be too late in the year to effectively poison the trees, but I figured it was worth a shot. I'll see what happens to them this spring and if the treatment doesn't kill them, I will try to be more on top of things this year and get them poisoned in the fall as is recommended.
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| Female Tree of Heaven at the creek, photographed on June 26, 2016. That's been six years ago...six years of making thousands of seeds. It's really amazing that the entire creek bank isn't covered with this invasive tree! |
When we got back, I walked Mo around the field, then went back by myself and dug up an American Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) from the field. I planted it in the back yard where I plan to put a new flower bed. It was a fairly young plant, and had a good root system, so I think it should survive the move.
I'm a bit worried about Mo tonight though. He has seemed fine all day, but tonight seems very tired and maybe like he doesn't feel well. Maybe he's just worn out from all the digging and the walking. He does tend to want to eat gross things that he finds, so I hope he's not gone and made himself sick.