the Walnut Diary

It’s been a blur this last month with the drought and the watering, but the sharp pain whenever I type an “A” indicates that the long dry spell may be over and the watering equipment put to rest. A lot of little trees will rest more easily when the fall rains begin in earnest. This all started when Rob Prosser and Howard French showed up in Forfar to tell us about the upcoming International Plowing Match in 2007 and their intended role for the Croskery farm and family in the event. The focus would be upon the woodlot and the conservation committee’s plans for a major display, highlighting one of the few remaining old‑growth forests in the area.

One of the early innovations was a management plan for the property drafted by Stewart Hamill and subjected to numerous revisions by a committee of family members. Stewart suggested a list of nursery stock for spring planting and we agreed. Little did we know, eh? Stew also wanted to extend the woodlot so that it would have a larger footprint for his precious birds. We chewed this one back and forth a bit. Stew wanted a wooded connection to the other, larger woodlots on the hill. I saw no advantage to providing a boulevard for raccoons to raid our sweet corn patch. Stew wanted forest cover. I wanted lines of sight. Educated through a round of meetings, focus groups, a symposium, and even a testimonial dinner for volunteers, I found myself gently led toward a rather elegant compromise. The deer and the raccoons will have to walk all the way around the perimeter fences if they want to travel in the cover of shelter belts. We will still get to see Newboro Lake from the kitchen, and passers‑by on the road will see clumps of evergreen and shrubs, rather than a wall of green. The line fences, however, will gradually disappear behind rows of pine and spruce. Then they took me to meet Neil Thomas.

Neil is something of a legend among tree huggers, having worked tirelessly for sixteen years to cultivate a plantation of black walnuts. His well-documented experience and active assistance made it inevitable that I would follow my own obsession with walnut trees and start a plantation as a display project for the plowing match.

Working alone, how does one mark a 20′ grid on a four‑acre field? With several summers of surveying experience during my salad years, I eventually hit upon using the skids of my 5′ bush hog as a marker on soil. That meant a great deal of mowing, but eventually I had a grid. Neil used posts made from brace wire to mark his plantings. I decided to make some, so off I went to Baker’s Feed Store and forked out $57. for a 50 pound roll of 9 gauge galvanized wire.

Then came the question: How do I make the posts? The wire’s too stiff to bend easily. Lee Valley Tools had the answer, of course, in a six‑dollar brace wire bender, easily mounted in your vice or screwed to your utility trailer. Two hundred pounds of 9 gauge wire later, I had enough posts to mark the walnut hills.