An oak glade

It’s not often you get to plant up a forest. But that seems to be what I’ve done today.

This was Andrew’s idea back in the spring. We need to find some sort of screen to make the courtyard more intimate and not overlooked.

It makes more sense to try and plant trees and shrubs that are found all over this mountain; so that means oaks.   I am not entirely sure what our oaks are here.   Holm oaks, or evergreen oaks. I really must find out exactly what we have.

But they self seed well and we have been scooping up the baby plants and nurturing them all summer.

This is an experiment.   And I may weaken and buy more bare root plants in the winter at Vachon.   But for now it was a fun project to get started.

Annoyingly I had to strim first thing. I wasn’t keen on that as I’m still getting over the last bout of sciatica.   But the mighty machine started almost first go and I strimmed for approximately five minutes. Max.

Were I feeling stronger I would have had great fun doing all sorts of strimming chores that are sorely needed.   But no. It was a quick job to just clear the land where I want to dig and plant the baby seedlings.

And then it was a mere five hours or so of digging and weeding and preparing the land.

The soil is, of course, poor.   But that might be to my advantage as I won’t have to worry about too many invasive weeds.

And I had a compost bin of lovely muck to add. One bucket at a time.

I was being cautious as I don’t want a flare up.

So once I’d dug the long wide area, it was down to the compost bin to collect the muck.

Artur came to watch this strange woman trudging back and forth with her five buckets of compost and settled down nearby to enjoy the spectacle.

I had ten oak seedlings to plant up here.   One went into the gap between the walnut and the existing oak tree further along the road.   That one was easy peasy.

They look alarmingly close. But I need them to grow crowded and tall rather than sprawling and low. And if by any chance they don’t get eaten by deer, accidently strimmed  and actually grow, it will be great.

The large oak tree beside this glade is an example to the little seedlings. One day they might grow up to be as beautiful as this one.

I finished the day by emtpying the other compost bin and trudging very slowly all over the garden depositing my mighty muck.