A Big Relief

Our four days of planting went well considering one day was a miserable soaker. We had checked the forecast and it looked like it was going to precipitate most of the day so we dressed accordingly. Even with that, the constant dripping was able to infiltrate our gloves, clothes and boots. The walk down the hill out of the woods was a slippery, slimy slope. We were all a soggy mess at the end of the planting day and questioning our resolve about one more day of planting after that one.

The last day gave us beautiful blue sky and a vista that looked over the hay fields at the bottom of the hill. This is the ground that is the absolute steepest area on the whole property and a couple acres had to be cleared because of damaged and diseased trees. We planted it last year with a scattering of cedar and Douglas fir since we wanted to test this area to see how well seedlings would grow on this slope before investing all our labor into the venture. Where the cedar from last year showed a poor outcome, die-off or in paths where the elk tromped and killed them, we tried planting more Douglas fir. In areas where the cedar were more or less undisturbed from wildlife and were thriving in their protective cages, we filled in a few more.

This small acreage definitely gave us the biggest workout of the planting season with most of it being on hands and knees to keep from tumbling down into slash piles. Scratches and contusions, bruises and sore muscles proved such, but our forest replanting is considered completed for this year.

While I can sit back a let out a big breath of the tenseness and worry over getting the seedlings safely placed into the forest, it is not long before I have to take a reality check and force myself to take a good long look at the calendar. We did not get around to our riparian planting in November as I had hoped and the fruit trees in the garden have only started to get trimmed and the list goes on.

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