Forced March

 

The day was not ideal -but was it ever going to be? I mean, at least the wind was a breeze and the temperature above 30°. As far as I could tell it was the best day out of the following ten or the previous three. Sleet and graupel, thunder and lightning, snow, wind and temps dropping to ten degrees forced me to plant in the snow on a day more like March than October.

 

 I tilled last Sunday before I knew for sure what was coming and that tilling modestly displaced the snow so that I could mostly make out my rows. The little hump in the top center is a few kale I left in place should things change and another few leaves can be eaten.

Despite the drought this year, several heads of garlic sized up well and even when they didn't, there were plenty of large cloves. Above, Porcelain variety named "Music," a well known large garlic. My other Porcelain is the strain known as "Armenian."

The real trouble was the snow drenched soil which, as the image of my wheel dib should tell, clung hardily to my gloves and glued the cloves large and small to it! The weight of the accumulating goo slowly pulled my glove away from my fingers, disabling dexterity and my attempts to push the glove back with the slick left handed glove were fruitless. The soil, wet and cold, clung to soaked gloves made for cold hands, but that was the worst of it. I completed the project in a scant three hours if I cut the clove popping done in the morning from the calculation.

 

I’ve reduced my garlic count this year to about 500 -my lowest count since my first year growing garlic. At the end of the day, the patch looked like I had a fight with a tub of Oreos cookies and cream, but was glad to be done and not out there today or any of the days to come. 

 

I still have, ahem, a few projects sitting unfinished under snow. I'm holding out for a brief warm up that I tend to think will come whenever the temperature drops so incongruous with the season. So, some porch work this November, or if I am lucky, just before Halloween? Scary thought is how many things sit under the snow that were near completion or that I thought I could get to, but simply couldn't, by dint of weather and age.

Where Have I Been

It's been awhile, and maybe it shouldn't have been. As you can see by the square-formatted images below, I have been spending too much time working for Instagram. Much more of my warm weather time is spent repairing our house in the woods (prior post). Yet much of that work should be ending soon as we approach freezing.

I took a break -really forced myself to cease working on siding and house painting to make a visit to our neighbors, adjacent to our woods, on the southern edge along the powerline. Luck has given us great neighbors, a couple -half from Minnesota and the other half from eastern Pennsylvania. Their property was formerly part of a farm, as was ours, but ours was the woodlot and the wetland waste where old car parts, appliances, and other mysteries were dumped (ravines were farmers' dumping grounds).

 

We grow what vegetables we can in one hundred and forty square feet of raised beds in the sunniest portion of our front yard. The remainder of what we grow, including my garlic, happens at the neighbors' garden patch.  

 

  You’ll see some of my native and non native plants growing in rows here (for sale next spring!) and hard to believe -my first successful carrot (just one -is that success?).  

 

And the greenhouses -where I now have the pick of the last tomatoes which will be sauce as soon as I can get to it.

The balance created by visiting open space while spending much of my time within the woods is restorative. I grew up not far from the sea -I would go there whenever I needed that open space. The desert I lived in, now over twenty years ago, also provided it. Now, the neighbor’s cleared ten acres and garden patch does the same.

 

Meanderings

Four year old buckwheat seed still a hearty sprouter in this year's garlic field. A fast-growing cover crop, it is now tilled in.

My neighbor's giant pumpkin patch: all those leaves to support one pumpkin.

My tray seeded royal catchfly, Silene regia, finally flowers, weakly, in its first year.

Eastern tiger swallowtail grabbing a drink from a rain filled cell tray.

A frog poking its head out of the same. 

The tomato patch, post tomato. One plant has retained a healthy posture, but continues to blight its fruit. The plants directly to the right are peppers, unaffected by the blight. The container near the hydrangea are potatoes that have somehow, to date, resisted succumbing. I pulled all the plants, anyway, leaving the tubers in the ground for my picking as needed. The tomato plants filled three 45 gallon trash bags.

The very green Eastern gray tree frog, notably Hyla versicolor, on its spiked throne.

Feeling Out Boundary

For years I have been looking across the wetland, visually leaping from this side to that. I hardly noticed it was a farming plot, hardly recall seeing corn or soy. When visitors see it from the upper floor in the snowy winter, they say how nice it is that we have a view of a lake, which is of course, an illusion. For quite some time I wanted to follow the edge of the wetland, crossing the wide drainage that marks southwestern boundary of our land, and I knew well enough this had to happen in winter. It turns out March is a good time, the soil is deeply frozen, and the air might be fifty degrees.

At the beginning of this great March melt, snow becomes puddles, ground frost begins to let go.

Water is beginning to move. A warmish day, sunshine, and then an attraction to any hint of burbling, the sound of moving water, is the first symptom of spring fever.

Crossing the wide drainage at the southwest corner of our lot where electrical infrastructure meets the woods, marsh grass and cattails meet the scoured land of the gravel mine. This is a boundary I've often met, but never crossed.

Along the western edge of the wetland we find the most Eastern Cottonwood, Populus deltoides. It likes wet feet, and can be found on wetlands, along streams and rivers, on lake edges, and occasionally upland. Large trees with trunks often bending and soft wood, they are prone to break. This is the source of its common name, I think, not the downy white fluff it distributes in late spring.

The wooded hillside slopes sharply, then levels out in a zone that accommodates occasional flooding. I have found that the four-legged and the two-legged creatures like to share paths whether made by us or by them. Here, we walk along a well-trodden deer path, one well-scoped by bow hunters.

As we gain on the farm field, the land rises up just enough to take it out of the soggy soil well-defined by the Cattails, Typha latifolia. Here I see a close resemblance to an oak savanna, a wonderful little spot containing grasses, annual and perennial plants, a large Bur Oak, Quercus macrocarpa (I think) and several smaller ones.

Growing too are large buckthorns with their countless berries. The oaks probably pre-date the buckthorn. New oaks are unlikely to be seeded, sprouted, and survive the shading without the regular fires that give oaks an edge.

Lichens (maybe orange Xanthomendoza weberi and grey-green Physcia aipolia) grow on even the lower oak branches. Rampant buckthorn growth will shade out the lichen too. I have to start seeing the positives of buckthorn, what were they again?

The farm road, which bisects the wetland and forces the drainage through a culvert.

The immaculate, stone free, black earth of the farmed hill to our south. I wonder why cover-cropping is not practiced in this region and have yet to do the research. I suspect that there might not be enough growing season to get soy or corn and sprout a cover before a freeze sets in, but then I am guessing. According to the MCWD, an agency that monitors our watershed, our sub watershed is draining phosphate-laden water to Dutch Lake. This field is near the head of the shed and yet another guess is that it's providing a good part of that input. Residential septic systems and lawn fertilizers are providing the rest. 

My knee-jerk response is to worry that it soon will have homes on it. The owner leases it to a local farmer, and from what I can find, its owner does not live on the property which totals 68 acres of woods, wetlands, and farm fields (other than this one, which is isolated by topography, woods, and wetlands). A quick search shows the owner as Stone Arch Development, but a google search for that shows only a corporation named Stone Arch Organizational Development. Adding more complexity to property ownership, the notion that our own "development" is acceptable, but any future development should be off limits, or at least out of sight. 

At the culvert, water flows in from the big marsh.

And flows out toward the south, draining another few miles of wooded hillsides, residential yards, and horse fields until it reaches Dutch Lake, and ultimately into Minnetonka, overtops into Minnehaha Creek, sent over the falls, then into the Mississippi, and off to a stint in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Turning back to the north we get the only wide open view of the woods within which we live, apart from satellite views. The cropped view highlights the house, toward which I drew an arrow. Witnessing the open, bright marsh and dark woods together is eye opening.