A hard day's work...

A hard day's work...  Yesterday morning my brother Scott came over, and a little later a couple of his friends from Newton (Tammy and Cheryl) joined us.  The four of us worked all day long toward the end result of planting 14 baby (bare-root) trees in our back yard.  Each of the trees got four T-posts pounded in around it, and chicken wire strung up to keep the dogs away from the trees.  These 14 trees were just a few of the 140 bare-root trees I had purchased a few weeks ago, so the rest of them needed to be bedded down.  We put them in two yards of potting soil spread out above a piece of weed cloth, all under a big willow in our back yard.  That potting soil all had to be moved from another location (tractors are so handy!), smoothed out, and then holes dug for all the trees.  Then we had to water it all down really well.  Debbie served us up a delicious lunch of homemade chicken salad sandwiches – we had a bit of trouble moving after that. :)

In the photo at right you can see the little T-post enclosures we made.  Inside them are an assortment of trees, including Nanking cherries, elderberries, lilacs, cotton-less cottonwoods, western red cedar, and a couple others I've forgotten.  All the plants looked nice and healthy.  You can also see my “lawn” there – sod laid down late last fall.  The tracks you see running directly away from the camera were made by my ATV when I was spraying.  We cannot figure out why these tracks appear in our back yard but not in the front yard.  The shriveled-up plants are the remains of dandelions killed (or seriously dinged) by the spray.  Obviously we have a lot of work to do on this.  Our front yard, by contrast, is quite lush with beautiful dark green grass.  Same sod, laid at the same time.  Weird!