Hello from the farm!

It feels like winter will never end!  We are ready for sunshine and warmth around here although, the snow sure makes for a beautiful view.

We’re expanding!  We’re clearing and preparing a new field on the west side of the gift shop.  It’s what has previously been called “The Bull Pasture”.  This is some acreage that we purchased from Poppie a few years ago.  David and Poppie have been working on clearing this field for over a year now.  They’ve cut down a lot of trees and cleaned up small trees and vines to open the field up to more sunlight. They deem it ready for planting now.  We’re hoping to have space for close to 1000 trees.  David, Caleb and Judah have been laying out the field.  To do this they use golf tees and a measuring tape that’s marked every 6 feet.  They find the row and lay the tape on the ground in a straight line and place golf tees in the ground where we want to dig the hole with the tractor.  The golf tees help Poppie to find where to place the auger when he’s drilling holes and they help us keep the rows of trees straight and tidy.

We’ve also been clearing space for planting more trees just behind the Treehouse Playscape.  It needs some more work to be ready to lay out and plant.  We hope to finish that up really soon, since planting time is upon us.  The rain and mud have been huge obstacles in working in the fields this January/February.

The new field

A different angle of our new field

We’ve been laying out the other fields also.  We ran out of the bright colored golf tees and have been using white and tan ones.  That’s not a lot of help because they’re difficult to see.  So, we’ve been walking the rows and spraying these golf tees with black spray paint to make them show up better.  We do everything we can ahead of time to speed up the planting process.

We need to plant baby trees in about 500 holes in our current 4 fields from last season cuttings.  Then, we’ll start planting the new fields. Sometime this weekend we will be receiving 1000 trees to plant.  This batch of trees is Norway Spruce.  They will take somewhere around 7-8 years to mature to a 6 foot tree.

9 year old Norway Spruce

Our goal is to plant around 250 trees in a 10 hour planting day (I see some epsom salt baths in my future-hehe!).  We’re hoping to have 1000 trees in the ground in 4 days.  David will have to take some time off from his job and we’ll be setting aside the homeschool books.  It’s looking like we’ll have a little bit of help from Boone & Burke this year.  Maybe Aubrey and Turner will help some, too.  Planting days are fun–full of laughter, singing, good food and well, let’s face it, HARD work (maybe a lil groaning, too).  And, Aubrey will be our photographer and you’ll have much better photos to look at in my next few posts.  😀

Aubrey with Turner & Hannah in background

Our next batch of trees will be dug out of transplant fields in Pennsylvania sometime after April 1st.  These 1000 Turkish Fir will ship to us in that first or second week of April.

Please pray for warmer, dryer weather for the next few weeks as we plant trees.  Our fingers and toes thank you!

Thanks for stopping by,

Dawn