Ordentliche trees

I'm pleasantly exhausted after a day of yard work, and it feels so good after the white prison of Winter 2010. I had this idea that our apple trees might need to be pruned, since we've never done it and we've lived here a year. I noticed last year the apples were all horse-quality only: ) It would be nice if we (people) got a few this year.

So I read up on how to prune apple trees and my man came by and said, "What is pruning?"

"It's trimming."

They say to cut the branches that shoot straight up. We have three apple trees and two of them had a fair number of straight up branches, so I took those down with a stepstool and loppers. Then I cut up each branch into miniscule bits for kindling someday.

But there is this hybrid tree that is really big. I say hybrid not cuz of the ingenious Japanese design, but because it has both red and yellow apples. It was twice the size of the others, kind of towering there looking ancient with lichens on some branches and branches so knobby they kept grabbing my hair. I believe that was the tree's form of revenge because my man and I really got it down to size.

The three trees are orderly now, "Ganz ordentlich!" as I say, and we were careful not to take too much. I think even a Wenatchee apple farmer would approve.









Here are a couple piles of apple tree that I have not yet cleaned up. In the background are three compost boxes which amazingly my horse does not mess with, and our environmentally friendly manure pile (with tarp).

My man didn't want to stop there, so we cut blackberries on our hang and dug up nettles and I am in the slow process of rolling our blackberry bramble piles down the hill, past the ponds, and up and over the fence by the creek, where the swampiness eventually breaks them down (amazing, last year's pile is almost gone!). As I forked piles over the fence, I looked up into the pasture and Baasha was lying in the grass. His head kept nodding and his tail swishing as he dreamt.

And guess what ---we have our very first color shift to green! Just yesterday I noticed the grass went from drab to deep green, but not everywhere, just in patches. Soon!!! I make Baasha stay on the pasture all day long to acclimate slowly to this exciting change. He still has to work to get a meal out there, it's not much yet so he's happy to come into his stall at 5 pm and eat hay again.

Anyway, back to the work story.

My man gestured to the worst part of our bramble forest and said, "How could a goat possibly eat that?" I said, "No earthly goat could, it would have to be one of those outerspace goats."

But I noticed before he went up to the house, he stood back and looked at our progress, which is really something. It's slow and painful, but we're working through the hang meter by meter, and he thinks will have our "first pass" done this year. I think 2012. We'll see. We've got between 1/3 and 1/2 of our hang cleared, and it was a bramble patch above your head when we moved in--a solid wall of Brer Rabbit* land.

I also trimmed the rose bushes (I hope it was the correct time to do it!) and the fuschias who now live outside again, and swept the leaves and muck off our cellar stairway. It is now much safer to descend the stairs.

Our front lawn is glowing green but only barely growing - like a millimeter, so I cannot turn the lawnmower on yet, as much as I want to. We still have no leaves at all on our bushes and plants. They are just not ready yet.

We're still hoping for a timely Spring.

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* From Wiki, RE: Brer Rabbit: The word "Br'er" in his name reflects the habit of addressing another man as "brother" in many African cultures. While modern Americans generally pronounce the second 'r' in Br'er, the original pronunciation was "Bruh" or "Buh." When Joel Chandler Harris spelled "Br'er" with an 'er' at the end of the word, he was indicating the Southern pronunciation of the final 'er' as in "brothuh" (brother), sistuh (sister), or faa'muh (farmer).

Rabbit/Hare myths abound among Algonkin Indians in Eastern North America, particularly under the name Nanabozho, 'Great Hare', who is generally regarded as supreme deity among tribes in eastern Canada. "It appears that Joel Chandler Harris, when he wrote them, did not realize that his Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox were originally Cherokee inventions."

In the Cherokee tale of the Briar Patch, "the fox and the wolf throw the trickster rabbit into a thicket from which the rabbit quickly escapes"