Rose Fleguel of the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority showed up today to look at butternut trees. It seems she tours the country tracking down rumours of blight-resistant trees as potential breeding stock. We toured the woodlot, checking out the new seedlings and a couple of dozen trees, some healthy and some with the canker. She was quite taken with the stand of wild walnuts and claimed she had never seen anything like it. Music to a windshield rancher=s ears. Windshield ranchers? Those are the yuppie idlers who can=t get off their golf carts to do any serious work, whose chief activity and pleasure of mind is to point something out to a visitor and say, ALook at that!@ Today I was the victim. The logging guys were all excited about the bald eagle that had hovered around the woodlot all morning. While they were telling me this the massive bird gathered his feathers for another pass over our heads. That left me with some score-settling to do, so poor Rose got quite the tour. She was a good sport about it and walked the legs off me in the ankle-deep snow. Then when she got me back to my truck she had the gall to flit off into the woods for another hour or two with her GPS to plot the locations of the butternuts for inclusion on the Canadian registry. Ah, youth. They just don=t know when to tire out. I last saw her heading off to Charleston Lake for another session in another woodlot. So many butternuts, so little time.

Banished from the fridge at Thanksgiving, the processed nuts have sat in the gazebo while I worked every available hour on the renovation of the second story of the house. A heating season can=t begin until the building is closed in, so the walnuts had to wait. With great relief I watched last week the first time a gust of wind made the vapour barrier flex like an enormous, complex diaphragm. I turned on the heat and the new room immediately became the warmest in the house. Then came this week=s run of mild weather. Perhaps the nuts wouldn=t have to wait until spring after all. I opened up the first bag. The nuts were damp, fresh-smelling, and as usual ready to stain everything they touched. Just in case I took a sample in to the work bench, encased it in the jaws of a pipe wrench and hit it a sharp crack with a hammer. Quite a lovely nut, actually. Maybe it=s the hydration, but the shell was completely filled with meat. It had a pleasant flavour — perhaps a little young, but definitely palatable. So little then remained to do but to seize the window, not look gift weather in the mouth, and get all my nuts in a row. Off I went to the back field with a large hamper full of wet walnuts, my magic planting stick, and not quite enough clothes for the deceptively cold and windy day.

The plan was to fill in the spots where walnuts hadn=t grown last spring. A secondary plan was to double the number of plants in the field to encourage a taller growth and to generate some mowing efficiencies. I would plant enough new hills to convert the existing 20′ X 20′ grid to 10′ X 20′. I had read that even nurseries only expect 50% germination from black walnuts, so I decided this year to hedge my bets by planting three nuts per hill, rather than last year=s two. I have read that some plant as many as six, but with my tendency to bond with each seedling I=d end up unable to cull the extras and then what would I do? Put them up for adoption? Grow a hedge? Anyway, out I went with the golf cart and in went the nuts. The gloves got soggy, and all my other clothes became filthy as I wrestled the first thousand nuts or so into the ground. It looked like a nice, sunny late-fall day. It felt cold and raw in the brisk wind. Still, the ground was soft and the nuts were going in. I finished off the back field shortly after lunch and then moved to the field closer to the house. I like its park-like aspect so I may not pack more hills into it after all. The rest of the afternoon went by quickly as I inspected each hill and replanted to fill gaps. I ran out of light, energy and seed with about an acre left. If I get another good day I=ll grab the remaining bag of nuts in the gazebo and have at this last patch. What have I learned from my day?

• From a look at the bare patches after last year=s planting, it is clear that walnuts don=t like wet feet. Butternut seedlings seem much more tolerant of standing water. While most of the walnuts which did not grow had been planted in wet areas, some spots seemed to be relatively high and dry, but when I re-planted them I hit the kind of silt one finds in low-lying areas and the ground was wet. I think the silty soil had retained the water from recent rains. Successful hills seem to have more grit in the soil and don=t hold the water as well.
• If they are stapled down so that they don=t become kites and destroy the seedlings, paper mâché mats greatly enhance the chances of the seedlings they surround.
• Roundup application is highly dependent upon the weather and the skill of the applicator. Both the best seedlings and the worst bare spots in the fields show the effects of Roundup. Too little doesn=t work and too much produces a mini-wasteland where nothing can grow. On average, however, the spraying gave the seedlings a much-needed boost. In the overall scheme of things all of my hours of weeding last summer didn=t count for as much as one bad spray-job.
• Where walnuts like to grow, they really like to grow. Many of the hills I visited today had two little seedlings, standing straight and as tall as one summer=s growth can let them.. Volunteers planted by squirrels and seedlings snipped off by mowers in previous years have wrecked any semblance of an orderly grid in the best area, an abandoned pasture with tired soil and much less aggressive grasses than those in the working field next door.
• While August=s drought caused the seedlings to drop back early while the butternuts charged forward, I saw no evidence that any had died from the lack of moisture.
• A one-year old walnut is mainly leaves. At this time of year there isn=t much left to see.
• It is still cool planting a tree.
• When one plants 1500 walnuts in a day, even with the magic planting stick, expect UNBELIEVABLE LEG CRAMPS later in the evening when you try to climb a set of stairs.

This evening I came through the door in a new coat and clean sweater. My wife chipped: AHey, you look kinda presentable B except for the hands.@ Yesterday the comment had been, AI guess I won=t be taking you to a restaurant for a while with those hands.@ I=ve been processing walnuts this week. I discovered half-way through the first morning that walnut hulls do an excellent job of staining whatever they touch. By then it was too late to bother with gloves, and I was separating the nuts from the black goo largely by feel at that point, so I carried on.

Apart from the mess, it=s not a bad job, harvesting walnuts. The weather when they fall is the best of the year: a warm fall day with a strong, dry wind. My Pennsylvania friend Tom complains about walnuts beaning him from a hundred feet up when he clears them off his lawn, but my trees were a good deal more polite when I was gathering. None hit me. I filled three large hampers and all of the 5 gallon pails I could find. Walnut grower Neil Thomas provided advice by email and I went at the job. The first hamper of nuts, the squishy ones, landed in a heap on a piece of flat concrete next to the barn: my threshing floor. The golf cart seems to find a role in just about every task around the farm. Its left rear wheel became my crusher, methodically flattening and breaking down the blackened hulls. Then comfortably seated on my four-wheeled garden cart from Lee Valley Tools, I casually picked up a hull, extracted the nut, tossed it into the tub of water, noted that it did not float, and reached for another. And again, and again, and again. Gradually improvements suggested themselves. Digging just the nuts out of the mess without picking the crushed hulls up worked well. I=d pick all of the nuts I could reach, then move the cart and do it again. Before long I had worked my way through about 20 gallons of nuts. Very few floated, so by Neil=s calculations, they should be viable as seed. The next stage was to clean, bag and chill them sixty days for fall planting. My wife may be a bit surprised the next time she opens the big three-doored fridge she bought for the dream kitchen. My morning=s work fitted easily into one vegetable drawer. I set the humidity to Ahigh@ and cleaned up some of my mess. Except for the hands. No hope there. Two days later I decided to complete the job. Thirty gallons of the freshest nuts still awaited me in the barn, but Neil had warned of mould, so I went at it again. By now I=d established that the hulls could be removed by hand without too much trouble, but I like tools, and my cement mixer was just standing there. I had a mind to get it into the game. The green hulls were harder than the gooey ones, as well. The golf cart barely dented the fresh hulls. I needed more weight. My SUV did no better, so I backed the Massey Harris out of the barn and tore into the pile of nuts with the ribbed tires, front and back. The Massey worked the threshing floor into a fleshy pulp, so I put it back and shovelled some of the mess into the cement mixer. It immediately caked in the back, just like my first few efforts with sand and Portland. Water helped a bit, and then I tossed in a few sharp rocks, just to liven things up. That worked. Walnuts don=t crush from a little rough treatment, even if their hulls turn to mush. After a few loads dumped into the wheelbarrow and separated by hand, I realized that if I overfilled the mixer, the goop that slopped over onto the concrete would not have any nuts or rocks in it, just whipped hulls. A large potash kettle full of rain water next to the barn provided the liquid as I flushed the hulls away from the nuts. This worked pretty well, and I ended up with three pails full of burnished, sinking walnuts. But oh, the mess around the mixer! A two-inch pool of sludge looking like some infernal attempt at whipped cream just lay there, burbling. I averted my eyes, heading for the house (and the new fridge) with my stained hands and next year=s nuts. The second morning=s efforts filled the other vegetable drawer and the deli tray underneath. Completely. They are all triple-bagged, so now all I have to do is keep my wife from looking into the fridge until December 1^st.

Meanwhile I=m slinking around like Lady Macbeth, groaning, AWhat? Will these hands never be clean?@

Whew! A rainy day at last. The last six weeks have been busy. Thirsty pine and spruce seedlings tend to grab one=s attention, and keeping the 1700 little conifers alive during the month of August took a couple of hours per day. I tried the one-man-bucket-brigade approach, hauling well water in seven plastic oil drums on one of the utility trailers. This grew old very quickly as my back couldn=t handle the strain of lifting several hundred buckets of water out of the oil drums. The golf cart again found itself pressed into service, towing the single oil drum on the little trailer, drained by gravity through a 50′ garden hose. This proved in most ways a very efficient watering method. The water could pre-heat a certain amount, the work wasn=t strenuous, especially when I discovered an abandoned ski pole could be used as a handle on the end of the hose, and little water went to waste because I could stop the flow at the first sign of run-off, wait for the ground to soften, and apply more a few minutes later. Unfortunately, this watering method took time, lots of it. I could deliver a gallon per minute, watering about eighty seedlings with a load. Then the old Ez-Go died. The gradual loss of compression of the motor from old age came as no surprise, so I quickly bought a replacement, another Ez-Go, but this one a little-used 2003 model. The trailer hitch I had improvised on the old model bolted right on to the new one. They have changed the chassis design to encourage the use of heavy hitches on carts now. I guess this is an indication of where the utility vehicle market is going: more and more of Textron=s products find themselves doing utility work around gardens and meadows, rather than golf courses.

After I replaced the stock tires with others designed to be run soft, numbing somewhat the cart=s rather savage suspension, the fuel bill for the cart shot up. Everyone seems to have something for it to do, and most of it involves pulling a trailer. August 25^th was a very big day at the farm. Gary Nielsen had called a meeting of the Conservation Group for an inspection of the plantings on the property. Needless to say I spent the previous week mowing around seedlings, even using the riding lawn mower to work between the little trees after clearing the rows with the tractor and bush hog. The 18 hp Simplicity hydraulic runs back and forth with its foot control very smoothly, so I put that to use. With the cut set at 5″, the same as the bush hog=s, I learned to make a diagonal cut between the trees, brushing the seedling on the left, then stopping just before the blade annihilates the one on the right. Back up. Repeat the process. Only 1/4 mile to go. Three rows, though. The technique proved remarkably effective and not too hard on the mower. The overall improvement in the looks of the plantation later put the inspectors in quite an expansive mood, which prompted them to overlook my navigational errors with the bush hog in the pine plantation. The trouble was when we laid out this stand of pines I had volunteers at the ends of a 220′, knotted cord. Two of us sprayed the ground wherever we found a knot. Trouble was that nine feet means different things to different people, and so the rows took off on some unexpected diagonals, occasionally trapping the driver of a 5′ 6″ wide tractor in a 5′ row. With the seedlings more or less under control, the time had come at last to tackle the maple orchard. Originally I had intended to have the hay guy harvest between the twenty-foot rows, but the fear of a large round bale taking out a row of maples left the task to the bush hog. It responded to the stress of the long, dry hay by throwing off its blade, again. This time the dealer had a nut for it in his shop within two days, a great improvement over the two-month wait last summer. Forced back into service after a gruelling morning of wrench work, the rotary mower returned to the orchard to slay the grass. Anticipating a holiday, I guess, it retaliated by turning a bearing into a siren, disturbing my reverie with a high-pitched grating sound. Back to the barn, siphon out the gear oil, add heavier stuff, return to the maples, armed with earmuffs. Let it howl. I=ll take the gearbox for a rebuild the next time it manages to throw the blade off. On came the inspectors. They started, of course, with the one plot I hadn=t worked on all summer, the wet area near the house where we had planted spruce and cranberry. It turns out spruce don=t enjoy a good drowning, though about half managed to find high points on the rough ground and survived. The cranberries seemed fine down under the vegetation with the frogs.

The tour along the shelter belt of spruces and pines produced rave reviews. AWhatever you=re doing, keep it up. These trees are great!@ I pointed out some slightly yellowing pines, the cause of much of my anxiety which in turn had produced many hours of watering. AHmm, looks like a bit of overspray from the roundup. They=ll be fine.@ Here I=d been trying all summer to keep them wet enough they wouldn=t die, and … anyway, the others flourished because of my bad information and worry. I remembered Gary clearly saying, ABy the time a pine shows you that it needs water, it=s usually too late, anyway.@ I=d spent a lot of time in August trying to prove him wrong. Then came the maple orchard. In the early spring it had been such a morale boost for everyone, taking a bare field and in two days producing this wonderful grid of head-high trees. Now all I could see were the bare sticks of the fatalities. Gary, Rob, Donna and Lloyd seemed more inclined to look to the bottom of the glass, the half-full part, instead of my more pessimistic view. Everyone took a row and inspected each tree for signs of life. They broke the dead ones off to avoid confusion later in the fall when replacements arrive. By a rather generous estimate, Gary figures 75% of the maples survived. I counted 232 living stems of the 381 with which we started. 61%. And they accuse teachers of mark inflation? Mind you, those 232 trees look pretty nice on the side hill. They just don=t like wet feet, and so we=ll have to remember not to transplant into holes full of water. No doubt planted as a joke on the property owner, the two young basswoods are doing just fine.

When the crew got to the silver maples I had carefully carved out of the 6′ orchard grass with the lawn mower, they were highly complimentary. I groused that no more will I allow tree planters loose without a pre-measured grid. The work crew planted in a stream-of consciousness pattern which looks great but doesn=t allow me access with the bush hog, producing severe wear and tear on the lawn mower. Rule: if you can’t mow around it, you’ll mow over it.

The butternut plantation is a triumph. The centrepiece of the conservation display, these 132 seedlings took off in late July with a growth spurt leaving them lush and tall in the centres of their plastic spirals and mulch mats.

The transplanted walnuts stubbornly cling to life, but they are tall and make for interesting pictures, more so than the walnut seedlings in the field, which by the time of the inspection had decided to recede into the grass and concentrate on putting down roots for next year. A year later I learned that they had needed water, and my time spent on the pines might better have gone to the needier walnuts. Who’s to know?

I insistently dragged the crew over to the field by the barn, my original walnut plantation, where things have gone quite well, by my estimation. In Gary=s mind, though, this plot is off the beaten path and of primary interest as a source of transplants to repair the broken grid of the other field. In fact there are a number of double hills in the field and a lot of squirrel-relocations and volunteers which should yield some good transplants. It remains to be seen how well my little proteges will enjoy a new location, but I guess it=s inevitable. I can=t have two, 60 foot walnuts growing within a foot of each other. They=d fight.

So the next steps for the plantation? More mowing, gravel for the trails through the woodlot, plans for a fall/winter work crew on the site. In all, a pleasing end to a harrowing month in the tree-hugging business.

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.

June 10, 2006 My comments in this missive will deal primarily with growth trends in the horse pasture, the sloped, sparsely‑vegetated field adjoining the barns. The field nearer the woodlot has a lush hay crop only partly impeded by the spraying, and the seedlings seem to be germinating later in it. The horse‑pasture seedlings continue to peek up around my marker‑stakes, though some patches seem bare, either from infertility or rodent predation, so I have taken to picking up the metal stakes and using them to label volunteer seedlings appearing off the grid.

The tender seedlings appear vulnerable to established vegetation, so I crop several handfuls of grass away from the base of each stem before labelling it with a stake. While doing this I have noticed that some of the stems have been cut off before, so most likely are last year’s growth, cut down to the ground by the haying operation in July, 2005. They seem lively, though not so fresh as the volunteers obviously growing from a buried nut. Back to the squirrels. They have despoiled many hills, especially along the two outer rows of the field, but all is not bad. When lifting the stakes from the ruined hills on the south side, I found today that I seldom had to look further than ten feet to find a volunteer seedling or two, even in sites well away from the resident walnut trees. It seems as if the squirrels were re‑planting the nuts as they dug them up. Their planting‑success rate seems a good deal better than mine and I quickly ran out of stakes in that area. When I tried to apply my hypothesis to the north edge of the field, however, I found that the nuts had not been replanted (or haven’t germinated yet). This could have something to do with the ready proximity of large, hollow maples frequented by red squirrels. Perhaps it is a lack of ready storage space which causes the raiders on the south side to cache their booty, or else it might be their species. I see black squirrels most commonly along the south side, not reds. At the moment there are easily 300 viable seedlings in the field, but many are not where I planted them. I expect more to hatch yet from the lower (cooler) regions of the field. I pulled out one volunteer seedling yesterday showing a black smut‑like deterioration of some of its leaves. I’m pretty sure it was a walnut, not a butternut. The discolouration turned up to a very limited extent on two other volunteers today. From the net last night I learned that walnuts rarely catch the butternut blight, and then aren’t as severely hurt by it. Another idea is that the discolouration isn’t blight, just what happens to leaves when they are beaten up by more aggressive grasses. Anyway, the mortality rate for the seedlings so far is extremely low. I’m spending far too much time trying to hold every leaf, but it’s exciting to watch them grow. I’m still trying to decide whether the squirrels are vandals, predators, or clever but idiosyncratic gardeners. Rod June 15, 2006 After several days of rain the butternut seedlings were clearly in distress from the rapidly-growing hay crop in the back field, so I resolved to mow it with the bush hog to give the little guys a fighting chance. We had planted them with a cardboard mat stapled to the ground, so they had some protection, but the hay was almost four feet high in that area of the field and the recent rain caused some sections of it to tip over flat, taking the seedlings with it. Eleven hours on the Massey Ferguson and I had trimmed up the fields to where the butternuts were out of danger and the walnut seedlings had some chance of success.

Weeding by hand was growing old quickly by the end of the second day=s two-hour session, so I gassed up the lawn mower to see what I could do with the sections of the back field where seeds had not yet germinated, likely due to low soil temperature, shaded by the heavy hay crop. Repeated passes with the bush-hog left approximately 2 sq. foot areas surrounding the metal posts. With the lawn mower=s hydraulic foot controls I discovered I could drive up, inspect, pull the post if no sprouts were evident, reverse, mow the site, reverse again and proceed, replacing the post on the way by. This should make it much easier to locate any new sprouts, should they survive the mowing process. Where sprouts were evident, of course, I would hack away as much vegetation as possible with the mower, but then, inevitably, I would have to shut off, dismount and weed by hand. Still, the process saves some hand weeding, particularly in the less- productive areas, and leaves the field looking like a slightly seedy lawn, not necessarily a bad thing. In an hour I covered approximately one quarter of the four-acre field. Next time I plant walnuts I will make a point of having the field mowed off close before the Round-up spray. Seedlings can and will make their way up through substantial grass cover, but the sprouts rescued from the hay are vigorous but crooked. This might not matter for nut production, but I am a timber man, and a straight stem is much more desirable than a pretzel. The East vs West Competition: The smaller nuts harvested on the farm and planted to the west of the stakes have sprouted reliably, but in a given hill where both are planted, seem to be about two weeks later than the larger imported nuts from Kingston and Lansdowne. Perhaps this lateness gives these northern cultivars the ability to avoid late frosts. June 17, 2006 This morning I started matting the seedlings in the sugar bush field. I was able to locate 76 recipients of the left-over mats, occasionally selecting the more viable of a pair of stems. Remember that half of this field is given over to transplanted walnuts and nursery butternuts, planted over a spring planting of single nuts which I discovered in my shop over the winter. Of those 200 nuts I have so far observed three viable seedlings. (Five more by July 3rd) (65% by summer of 2007) Friends from Ottawa arrived and were quickly put to work on the matting. A transplanted seedling I sent home with them in a pot last week died shortly after transplant. I suspect it may have been the tap water with which Anne watered it, but anyway, Wally the Walnut is deceased to great lamentation. The remainder of the 158 mats we distributed around the higher-needing seedlings in the horse pasture. A few of the hills which were formerly in very heavy hay are now producing seedlings, though a good chunk of the field held standing water this morning after last night=s heavy rain.

June 19 to 23, 2006 During a frantic week with the help of Joseph, a soon-to-be fifteen year-old bundle of energy, we cleared the fence line on the driveway so that Glenda and Mom may lay out bedding plants along the 300 feet of it not already a flower bed. Joseph and I spent our spare time attending to the walnuts. On the 21^st after rain and a drying wind, we found a few seedlings crushed under their mats: we had pinned the mats in place with the only staples we had, the seedlings= own metal stake. It seems that one 9mm wire post is not enough to secure a triangular, papier-mache mat in a wind. One seedling ended up with a kinked stem, but I think we got there before much damage occurred. In the wetter parts of the horse pasture the seedlings are still emerging as the soil warms up. I unearthed another dozen or so today, two pushing bravely up through clumps of mown grass, though this causes some bending of the stems, so I=d like to get to them before this occurs. I noticed a couple of stems cut off by the bush-hog growing new leaves. Not all have rebounded from this accident, though. The flat, low parts of the back field still lie quite fallow, though very occasional sprouts are emerging. The pattern does not look good for seeds which went into ground which was very wet or submerged in late fall. July 3, 2006 Perhaps I spoke too soon. The abovementioned fallow areas show some faint signs of hope, a half-dozen sprigs from the sodden turf and a few more which have managed to hide in tufts of grass showed forth today. I ran the tractor/rotary mower over the bare spots this afternoon, the better to monitor any sprouting activity over the next days and weeks. The papier-mache mats seem to do as much harm as good unless very securely fastened down. Two long metal posts don=t do an adequate job of protecting the plant stem from wind and swinging cardboard. I have lost a few stems over the last week, though the protected plants now seem robust enough to shake off the swirling mat without undue damage. Careful mowing and hand-weeding over a foundation of Round-up seems to be a clearly better strategy than hoping for protection from a mulch product which dries out and becomes a kite when forced up by emerging grass. The potential $600 penalty per punctured tractor tire leaves me reluctant to improvise staples to hold the mats down.

In the horse pasture the nuts are sprouting even from soggy turf, though none have emerged from beneath the surface of a puddle yet. About a week ago I mowed a heavy hay crop off this area of the farm and assume the soil has warmed up after exposure to the weather. The non-producing heavy tufts of uncut grass went under the mower=s blade today. Sprouts seem able to deal with a certain amount of early pruning. A number of strong plants in the crop are currently growing from a second leader after the main stem fell to mower, tractor chevron, or swirling mulch mat. Mulberry trees are in full production, so family members are quietly taking themselves off to the pleasant pastime of standing in the shade, picking the black-red fruit, and eating hand-to-mouth. Wild blackberries are ripening quickly with many bushes producing, though they aren=t as delectable as last year=s crop in the blazing sun. Too much rain for sweet berries, I guess. I spent the morning clearing paths to the blackberry bushes, as friends will show up with buckets, expecting to be guided to the bushes. This way I can simply point and tell the picker of the day to drive the golf cart around the path until he/she sees a bush she likes.

While idly searching Google I came across an article on the food-hoarding habits of gray and red squirrels. The abstract=s generalizations exactly parallelled my own observations in the horse pasture.

Food-hoarding behavior of gray squirrels and North American red squirrels in the central hardwoods region: implications for forest regeneration

Jacob R. Goheen and Robert K. Swihart

Abstract: The North American red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) has expanded its geographic range into the state of Indiana concurrently with a decline in populations of gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) throughout portions of the central hardwoods region of the United States that have been converted to intensive agriculture. Red squirrels construct larder hoards and function as seed predators throughout much of their geographic range. In contrast, gray squirrels construct scatter hoards and thus function as seed dispersers in addition to eating seeds. We conducted field observations to discern whether hoarding behavior differed between the two species in a deciduous forest stand near the southern limit of the range of red squirrels. Red squirrels were more likely to hoard walnuts and acorns in larders or trees, whereas gray squirrels were more likely to scatter-hoard mast items. We present a simple model to illustrate the potential impact of interspecific differences in hoarding on germination success of black walnut. Our results suggest that red squirrels are unable to compensate completely for the loss of gray squirrels as seed dispersers in portions of the central hardwoods region that have been transformed by agriculture.

Saturday I went back for a second look at the seedlings. They have grown remarkably in a single, rainy day. The early risers appear to be clustered along a sloping knoll where the grass is short (from exhausted seed and perhaps infertility) and full sunlight and good drainage areavailable. As I commented before, the east‑siders outnumber the west‑siders (locally‑harvested seed) by a wide margin. Then another variable emerges: for every nut the squirrels have poached, it seems they have successfully planted another in a slightly different location. The volunteer seedlings are perhaps a day or two more mature than the planted nuts (or else they are simply healthier), so perhaps my foot was too heavy on the planting stick for the first round of small, local nuts. The rodents would have planted what they had, unless, of course, they perfidiously moved the imported nuts to mess up my neat rows. I wouldn’t put it past them. The Roundup‑sprayed sections make it easier to find the brace‑wire posts, though I was forced to move a couple of dozen of them to new locations to highlight volunteer sprouts in pretty much the right places, leaving barren spots behind (so far, anyway). The longer grass in the more fertile field next to the woodlot may pose a greater challenge for the planted nuts, as it doesn’t get as much sunlight and the grass is much more aggressive, even when sprayed. The stems broke off about 8″ up, rather than at ground level. I have only located one sprout in this field so far, though I staked a dozen or so squirrel‑planted stems within the fall‑line of the biggest walnut tree. The butternut seedlings are doing very well with minimal loss. One which was planted underwater didn’t make it, but I think the others all did, even the three or four with very wet feet. The transplanted walnuts are all showing signs of life, be it at the trunk or sproutsfrom the roots. Seems walnuts are a great deal like sumacs: they are hard to kill. I remember mowing a walnut sapling off in a field last year. It or its twin was back for more yesterday when I bush‑hogged it again before I caught myself. I have taken a number of pictures of the seedlings. I totally dismiss my wife’s assertion that I am taking portraits of and naming each of the new arrivals as they hatch. What’s more, Huey, Dewey and Louie are offended by her aspersions.

Neil: The spruce and pines are budding, the shrubs have leaves, the maples are springing forth, but the walnuts are either dormant, dead, or absent. Any target dates? Roundup goes on before they sprout? I heard Gary and Dwayne discussing hiring a contractor to spray the seedlings, and I think that included the walnuts. The question is when.

Thanks,

Rod

Neil Thomas wrote:

> Rod,> > Probably the earliest you’ll see any sprouts is mid June. You can probably put Roundup on safely until at least end of May.>

> All the best,>

> Neil.

Whew!

1 June, 2006

As you may recall I planted two seeds per hill in the fields: east and west of the metal flag. A check of my old e-mails indicates that west is the home team and east is the imports, or at least the larger seeds. I believe the small seeds came from the two old trees standing between the fields. East is beating west by a ratio of about 20:1 among the new sprouts. I think I saw only two double headers. Early days yet, though. The field next to the woodlot isn’t up to much yet. It’s not as warm. Variables? Perhaps I buried the first‑planting seeds so deeply that it will take them longer to claw their way to the surface. Squirrels have excavated the two outer rows and a surprising number of the hills in the middle of the field. If enough seeds sprout, I may find myself transplanting some to vacant hills. It’s neat to see the little rascals popping up out of the holes.

Please don’t forward this to any squirrels, crows or ravens.

Rod