Tree Hugger Kills Trees!

My mission in life: 1) save all the cats and 2) plant as many trees as possible.  Guess which one my husband agrees with?  But that's another issue.

This week I cut dead branches  from two large spruce trees that are partially shaded by a maple which

had killed their lower limbs.  No problem, it makes for a nice shady nook, perfect for a hammock, or mabe just a big rock.  But there was one problem.  One gut-wrenching, guilt-inducing problem - the maple, already a parent to three fine-looking saplings on my property, had shed seeds all over the bare ground beneath the dead branches.  About 50 tiny maple trees had taken root.
 

New life!  And they had to go.

My tree-hugging soul screamed, "Save them all! Transplant!"  Except the ground is thick with tree roots and impossible to dig in.  There was only one solution: pull them out and (shudder) throw them away.  Then go sob into my pillow all night for murdering baby trees.

You know I saved a couple.  When I yanked their fragile stems, they came out, miraculously, with lacy, intact root systems.  A sign, right?  I cradled their little bodies gently as I transfered them to sunny temporary homes in the corner of the garden that serves as my tree nursery, recently vacated by three crab tree spalings.  Then I watered and caged them with chicken wire to protect their tender leaves from deer.  Maybe, like the crab saplings, in three or four more years they can be moved to permanent homes, survivors of the great baby tree massacre of 2013.  And I will look at them and be happy for the two trees I added to the world - after brutally killing 48 of their siblings.  Sigh.

Trees In A Box!

LOOK WHAT I GOT!




What do you mean, you can't see anything?  There are 140 trees in that box! 
 
Literally, in the box.  The corrogations in the cardboard contain approximately 70 tree seeds (and beneficial mycorrhizal fungi) per square foot, which means all parts of the box.  Yup, we're planting an empty box.

Life Box Company is not only concerned with perpetuating life on our plantet, but also with doing it without creating waste products.  In fact, they made the packaging beneficial to growth.  Basic instructions are right on the box - two boxes, in this photo:

 

I haven't started it yet, but that soak and chill part is interesting.  Soak for 10 minutes, and chill in the refrigerator for 6-12 weeks.  I think this simulates the dormant period of winter, because if you plant in the fall, you skip the refrigeration step.

 

I don't expect to have a forest - many seedlings don't survive in nature, and I imagine deer, rabbits, and assorted others will make a tasty snack of some of my baby trees.  But as a prospective parent, I am looking forward to some or all of the following native species:

 

 

Douglas fir                                                     river birch

Arizona cypress                                             water birch

Blue spruce                                                    paper birch

Lodgepole pine                                              desert willow

pitch pine                                                       American sweetgum

Eastern white pine                                         American sycamore

Virginia pine                                                  American elm

mountain hemlock

white cedar

                                                                                                               

Stay tuned for the next twenty or thirty years and watch my babies grow up!

 

 



Stupid White Guys

The day after the wholesale bulldozing of the previous post, these guys came by to "trim" the branches along the power line that runs to my and my neighbor's houses.  I let them in my pasture so they could get access to the lines, where they spent 5 1/2 hours topping trees and trimming side

branches on anything within 8 feet of the lines to save us from a power outage if a branch should fall in a storm. 

We weren't happy to see them.  They did this last year, too, along the front of our property.  It wasn't pretty; whole trees were taken down, and hacked trunks were left lying along the easement for us to take care of.  My neighbor was furious - they made specific promises about what trees would be cut and how much, then took much more when she wasn't watching.  Naturally, she asked this crew for specific details of what they would take, and let them know how unhappy she was with last year's careless workers.  One crew member assurred her it wouldn't happen again because it was most likely done by their Mexican workers, whom they'd had to "send home" because they were so inept.  They were Mexicans, right?

Oh, my.

I like to think I'm fair-minded, but I'm a passive milktoast compared to my neighbor who's a vocal opponent of any sort of inhumanity or social injustice.  The world could use hundreds more like her.  She stared at the man, speechless.  Even dum-dum's co-worker stood in awkward silence.  I wouldn't have given two cents for the guy's chances, and can only attribute his survival to the early hour and the fact that they took us by surprise with their big trucks and wood chippers.  My neighbor seethed and hyperventilated, and finally bit out a sharp response.  No, they weren't Mexicans.  They were white men.  Stupid white men.

The guy should have been embarrassed, but he wasn't.  It went right over his stupid white head.

This Land Is Your Land (and the oil companies')

A story, because I love this land.

Four houses up the road from me, someone buried something 60 years ago.  The someone was Enbridge, Inc., a Canadian based oil company.  The something was an oil pipeline.  I never knew it was there. 

Should I have known?  No one was obligated to tell me.  My neighbor who owns the property it's on knew about it, but didn't give it much thought.  Maybe we all should have.

Enbridge has the world's longest crude oil and liquid pipeline system.  (That's from Wikipedia.  But if you want an idea of how extensive the oil transportation system is, check out this map .)  They've had a lot of leaks and spills.  Like, over 800 in a recent 10 year period.  A big one in Michigan in 2010 dumped close to a million gallons of tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River.   They should have safeguards for that, right?  They do.  Operators overrode them when they signaled a problem.  Twice.  Hmmm.

So Enbridge wants to update these pipelines.  Good idea!  That inclues the one that runs just a few thousand feet from my house.  Right over my water supply.  Sounds responsible.  They'll just "seal" off the old line and put in a new one.  But, hey, times have changed and they want to ship MORE oil around the country right beneath our feet, so let's make it twice as big as the old one.  We'll just rip out whatever's in the way, because it's called "eminent domain."  Remember that from civics class?  You thought it was just for the state or the federal government, so they could build highways and such for the common good.  Nope.  They grant that right to Big Business too.  Your land is yours - except for the part that's theirs. 

It starts like this, looking all festive with their colorful pennants.

Then they bring in the heavy equipment, like this:

 

And this:

 

Enbridge can't park on the right-of-way they're ripping up, so they park beside it.  No one will miss this big tree, right?  It turns out it's legal for them to rip out stuff that's near their easement and that they say is in their way.

 

Hey, in another sixty years you'll never know the difference.

 

So yeah, I'm a little pissed off at the wholesale destruction.  Especially since I don't know what will happen when they need to bury their pipeline here - under the wetlands - where they aren't allowed to rip stuff out willy-nilly.



 

I talked to one of the workers about it, a woman directing traffic around all the huge trucks parked along the narrow dirt road.  And I learned more than the basic facts about what her employer is doing.  It's not Enbridge, by the way, it's the company that clears the land for them.  She's a single mom who was out of work for a year during Michigan's painful recession.  She was glad to get this job so she wouldn't have to lose her house.  Like so many people, she's willing to do whatever it takes to have a job, which for her means driving 90 minutes from her home in Battle Creek to Howell, where she then gets in a company truck and drives another hour to the work site here.  After a 10 hour day, she drives an hour back to Howell, then 90 minutes back to Battle Creek.  It's a long, tiring 15-hour day, but she's glad to have the work.  And she gets Sundays off. 

 

Ironically, guess what's right in her back yard in Battle Creek?  The site of Enbridge's 2010 oil spill that closed down 35 miles of the Kalamazoo River.  And now it turns out that Enbridge is providing the job that has saved her from losing her house. 

 

Nothing is ever black and white, is it?  But I'm still sick over the carnage that was wrecked through our peaceful rural landscape today.

Your Federal Tax Dollars At Work

Say hello to the Emerald Ash Borer.  Pretty color, huh?  Some time during the 1990's this little guy hitched a ride from Asia to the U.S., saw all the lovely ash trees, and said, "Yum!"  Then he and his larvae went to work - one more illegal immigrant making good in America.  And boy, did they ever.

Twenty years later, the result is hundreds of millions of dead and dying ash trees.  On our five and half acres alone, that amounts to a dozen or so mature trees, and several dozen half-grown trees.  They're our problem to deal with.  But along our tree-lined road where dead trees stand close to power lines, it's the county's problem: take down the trees before they take down the power lines.  That's a pretty damn expensive problem.

Here's where the Federal government comes in, with a grant to cut down the dead ash trees that are near power lines.  Only ash trees - don't mess with that government money and try to get your dead oak taken down, because these guys know the difference.  Two of these trucks were working in front of my house today, chain saws and wood chippers roaring.  They left me a pile of ash logs that, I have to admit, will make nice firewood once we cut them into shorter sections and split them.

As a result, there is now a much smaller chance that my cable, phone, and electricity will be taken out by the next big wind storm.  Plus, I get some free firewood.  So thanks for that, American taxpayers. 

And f-you, emerald ash borer.  I'd rather have my trees back.