Until her hatchlings were big enough to strike out on their own, this mother made her home in my garden—coming and going through an opening I made in the fence just for her.

For the past four or five years, rabbits have made their homes in the yard of my country home. Two years in a row, I failed to get my vegetable garden in shape before there was a rabbit nesting in the humus I’d applied in the fall. The first year, the female rabbit dug down through grass clippings into the soil and gave birth to three babies in that hole.

One day, rain fell so heavily that every depression in my yard filled with standing water. It occurred to me that this couldn’t be good for the bunnies, and sure enough: when I peeked at the nest, I saw the babies had drowned.

Fenced In Rabbit

In the next season, I finished planting my garden and I erected the rabbit fence I’d built years earlier. I noticed immediately that a rabbit was eying the fence and looking a little anxious… and it dawned on me that this rabbit was a mommy and I had just cut off access to her babies. I opened a panel in the fence, and shared my garden for several weeks as two out of three rabbit puppies grew big enough to leave the garden and seek their fortunes. (A third baby died a few days after the bunnies left their nest.)

I haven’t had rabbits in the garden for a few years now, but last year one laid eggs under the forsythia in the front yard, and this year there’s a nest under the shrubs that grow outside my office windows.

Rural Living with an Old Friend

I like to think that this year’s mommy rabbit is the same one that started in my garden so many years ago. During that second year when we shared my garden, she showed little fear toward me. In subsequent years, mommy rabbit has shown the same fearlessness—letting me get within about six feet before freezing in preparation to bolt. Last night, for example, I walked past her to my car, opened the door, and sat on the seat as she lay in the grass next to the driveway.

I’ve come to like the wild rabbits for three reasons: 1. They’re cute. 2. They require almost no care—as if I have pets but I don’t have to do anything for them. 3. They eat weeds. I’ve seen this again and again over the years: mommy rabbit lays flat on her stomach and daintily snips a dandelion stem off close to the ground. Then she pulls the stem into her mouth bite-by-bite—vaguely suggesting the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp.

Technorati Tags: bunny, garden, lewisburg, rabbit

The old peach tree that came with my house rotted through and fell over two seasons ago. Still, it’s covered with flowers, and is likely to produce a decent crop this year. Woodchucks like this dying tree. In the fall they stand on their hind legs to reach the lowest peaches, and in the winter they chew on the tender bark (as you can see on the branch in the lower-right of the photo).

My county home came with three apple trees, a peach tree, and a pear tree. Having this convenient source of free fruit suits me very well: if I’m growing plants in my yard, I want them to provide food for me. Unfortunately, fruit trees are challenging.

As plants go, fruit trees are among the stupidest. They may produce flowers any time in April… with no regard for when the last frost is going to hit. Some years, this means a late frost destroys a tree’s young fruit. If trees had any brains, they’d keep their buds closed until after the last frost.

Fruit trees have no sense about their own personal space. They grow branches every which-way, filling spaces between branches with more branches. New growth shades out old growth, and branches often collide with and cross each other. In wind, they rub together causing damage where insects and fungus can take hold. To keep trees healthy and promote healthy fruit-production on all the branches, it’s important to prune the excess growth—usually in late winter.

Fruit Trees are Uncooperative

Fruit trees don’t automatically do what’s best for the fruit-eater. For example, trees with hardy roots often produce fruit that isn’t particularly appealing to eat. Roots of trees that make delectable fruit may succumb easily to insects, rot, and other problems. Many of the fruit trees you buy in a garden store have a desirable fruit variety grafted onto a hardy root of a different variety.

When there is no killing frost, a tree can produce thousands of flowers. If all the flowers mature, they’ll produce small fruits. Professional fruit growers pluck hundreds of undeveloped fruits, leaving only a few on each branch to mature by the end of the season. The survivors are often two or three times as large as they’d be without that early culling.

My pear and peach tree aren’t healthy. In fact, three years ago, we planted a second peach tree because the old one looks ready to go. How ready? The main trunk rotted part way through, and the entire crown of the tree fell over two years ago. But the healthy wood of the trunk didn’t break—it bent.

Last year, with its crown resting on the ground, that old tree produced a whole bunch of rather small, very sweet peaches… and this year the crown is covered once again with flowers. I imagine in a week or two I’ll be out there plucking off nascent peaches so the ones that survive the summer grow large.

Getting a Fruit Harvest Requires Work

All my other fruit trees are also covered with flowers—more than I remember from any past spring. This means work. While I want to eat the peaches pears and apples, so do hundreds of thousands of insects. They’re already lurking, but I can’t take action until the blossoms drop—anything that discourages fruit-eating insects can also put off the bees that will pollinate the flowers. I’ll need to spray the trees with bug repellent repeatedly through the spring and summer.

So, by the time I’ve done the winter pruning, the mid-spring culling, and the repeated bug spraying, I’ll have spent, perhaps, twenty hours messing with my trees. The bug spray will cost twenty or thirty dollars by the end of the season. Of course, I also have to pick the fruit, but that’s no more work than buying it at a farmers’ market.

If all goes well, I’ll end up with four or five bushels of apples, and, perhaps, a bushel each of pears and peaches. It’s a terrific return on such a modest investment.

Technorati Tags: fruit, fruit trees, lewisburg, pruning, rural life, rural living

The leaves of Zoysia grass (top) have the unfortunate characteristic of dying during the winter. A Zoysia lawn is brown for the first month or so of spring. My friend’s discarded sod on the bottom right is weed-free. It may never look as good as my kidney-shaped patch of Zoysia, but it smothered, perhaps, 130 dandelions like the ones on the left of the lower photo.

As I admitted in an earlier entry, I’m not fond of yard work. In fact, I mow the lawn only when its length threatens to choke the mower. There have been years in which I’ve fired up the mower only a half dozen times… though in rainy years, it’s been as often as weekly. After mowing, it’s a shooting match whether any other lawn maintenance happens at all.

My lack of interest in yard work led me some years ago to plant several hundred Zoysia plugs in the middle of my back yard. You might have seen ads for Zoysia grass. They promise a lawn so dense that the grass chokes out weeds. They promise green when other grasses are dying because of drought. They promise a lawn that endures cold winters and hot summers. They promise a lawn that you only need to mow a few times each year!

The product seems to have delivered: I now have a healthy, kidney-shaped patch of Zosyia grass in the middle of my back yard. It’s thick and soft and nearly weed-free. Thing is, it would take several thousand Zoysia “plugs” to plant the entire yard, and quite honestly, putting 600 plugs in the ground was not fun. I now officially offer the non-Zoysia area of my lawn as a test plot for Zoysia Farm Nursuries. Please, Mr and Mrs Zoysia, send a crew and demonstrate to future customers how easy it is to plant a third of an acre with plugs. In the meantime, most of my lawn is a mess with dandelions, crab grass, and bare spots.

Good Rural Living

In contrast, I have a friend who very much enjoys yard work. Several hundred square feet of grass in his yard had fared poorly through the years because it received almost no sun. This spring, he rented a machine that cleanly slices the grass—and about an inch-and-a-half of roots and soil—away from the ground. His plan was to load the old sod onto his pickup truck, and pay $24 per ton to unload the truck at a municipal dump. I figured to save him the dumping fee as well as some gasoline.

So, this morning I helped lift dozens of chunks of sod off the ground onto a pickup truck in my friend’s yard, and then lift it off the truck onto the ground in my yard. There’s a lot of slope in one corner of my yard, and for years I’ve wanted to add topsoil and level things out—but doing that is more yard work than simply mowing, so it wasn’t going to get done… until the topsoil practically fell into my lap.

The way we unloaded it in my yard, I don’t expect the sod will grow into a gorgeous carpet of grass—it will never match the Zoysia kidney about ten paces away. But the unplanned half day of yard work has gotten me closer to my dream of a level yard; if my buddy wants to replace the rest of his grass with new sod, my yard has a low corner waiting to hold the old stuff.

Technorati Tags: lawn, lewisburg, rural, sod, zoysia

Up high in a building in Boston, you see city as if it goes on forever. Up high on a hill to which my family often walks with the dog, you can see buildings in the mist: a Lewisburg neighborhood.

The last day of my visit to Boston was a little awkward. Turns out Boston Billiards doesn’t open until 11:30, so my buddy and I had to kill about an hour near the establishment before we could play (we had snagged a parking space and weren’t going to give it up).

After several hours of billiards, I dropped my friend at his apartment, and headed downtown where I had hoped to scoop several dozen photos of Downtown Crossing, Chinatown, the waterfront, the North End, and Faneuil Hall. The late start at the pool hall made me late downtown, so I barely got beyond the financial district before my scheduled visit with a childhood buddy whose career has landed him in Boston.

This friend has a windowed office on the 31st floor with an excellent view of Boston looking west. Before we headed out, we poked into a few other offices so I could shoot the views North and East as well. Whenever I’ve visited a high-rise office, I’ve been awed by the view and have imagined how easily I could squander hours simply watching the city undulate.

I chauffeured my friend north and then west through commuter traffic that quickly revived my appreciation for rural life: on the expressway, I could see more cars ahead of me at any moment than I’d be able to tally on a drive from one end of Lewisburg to the other. After a pleasant dinner, way too little catching up with my friend’s family, and a short night on an inflatable bed in the basement, I made the six-and-a-half hour drive back to Lewisburg.

For the last few miles of my trip, I hopped off the interstate, and drove a more leisurely two-lane road. Whenever I drive, I glance at the trees and fields, watching for anything that might make an interesting photograph. As I passed a hedgerow about five miles from Lewisburg, I glimpsed a herd of wild turkeys near the top of a rise, and I pulled over to take pictures. Wild Turkeys don’t seem all too fond of me: they left in a hurry. I managed to shoot a few, but their mothers couldn’t tell them apart in my photos.

When I rolled into Lewisburg, time slowed just a bit. My family was still in school, the dog acted very happy to see me, and I was happy to see her. The grocery shopping hasn’t been done this week, and the recyclables are escaping from their bin. Most importantly: my wife has kept the kids alive. I’m glad to return to rural living.

Technorati Tags: billiards, boston, lewisburg, pool, road trip, turkey

The 9-month-old, shriveled ornamental cherries at the end of our driveway attract Hitchcockean numbers of hungry robins when winter holds on past the end of February.

Migratory birds apparently don’t have the inside track on knowing when spring-like weather will start. Some years, it comes as early as the first week of March. Other years, it doesn’t come until April. The birds arrive pretty much at the same time each year.

This year, robins arrived from the south as usual in the last week of February. Snow still covered the ground, and it was very cold. I imagine that from a robin’s point of view, arriving in Lewisburg in February seemed like a huge mistake.

During warm weather, when I see a robin eating, it’s almost always eating worms. Though, just before our blueberries are ripe enough for human consumption, robins pluck them from the plants. I also remember as a kid seeing robins in my dad’s strawberry patch—presumably, snacking away. A Google search reveals variety in a robin’s diet: insects and fruit of all kinds. But it’s hard to imagine any of that being available in the snow and cold of late February… except for the ornamental cherries.

There’s an ornamental cherry tree nearly on the property line between my neighbor’s and my driveways. In late spring, gorgeous flowers cover the tree, and when the leaves drop away in the fall, bunches of tiny cherries cling to the ends of the branches. With the extreme cold and late-season snow, quite recently that tree was also covered with robins. There weren’t just a handful of robins; there must have been fifty or more kicking about in the tree. Apparently, in the absence of worms, caterpillars, insects, and fresh fruit, dried up ornamental cherries are good stuff.

The snow has melted, there has been another storm, and the snow has melted again. In fact, the lawn is starting to turn green, and there are worm castings between the blades of grass. Judging from the lack of robins in the tree, there is more interesting food available than nine-month-old dried up ornamental cherries. Maybe next year the robins will wait until mid-March to return from the south. I’d wait until May.

Technorati Tags: bird, birds, cherries, lewisburg, migration, spring

Only two days ago, four inches of snow covered most of the secrets in my yard.  With the snow gone, a couple of unfinished jobs have become apparent, and the first flowers of the year have appeared.

Two days of rain nearly melted off all the snow. It also revealed secrets: reminders that last fall, I left some projects for the spring. With the snow off the lawn, I see the grass is quite long. My son had stopped mowing in the fall when a cable popped loose on my mower. I’ll need to get that fixed before the turf thaws.

I see that both garden hoses still slither through the grass—well-entwined no doubt because we rolled them out after the last mowing, and left them as the grass grew over them. Oddly, a spray nozzle sits on the grass rather than in it, and I wonder if I had taken the nozzle off and tossed it aside when I gave the dog her last bath of the season.

The leaf pile my kids raked together in the fall has become a massive dead spot on the front lawn. Believe it or not, I wanted the leaves to kill the grass there—I plan to plant Zoysia this spring (a patch I planted three years ago now lives up to the claims in advertisements), and it’ll be easier to cut the plugs into bare ground than it is to cut them in through growing grass.

I’m not surprised to find other items kicking about the yard: there are a few lawn chairs, a jump rope embedded in the lawn even deeper than the garden hoses, a spool that’s supposed to hold one of the hoses, many golf balls frozen in puddles left by the rain, and a basketball half-covered by the forsythia bushes.

Just two days ago, the entire yard was beneath four inches of snow. Today, there are puddles standing on frozen turf. Until the sun struck them, those puddles were iced over. Still, there are daffodil sprouts in the garden, and on the south side of the house, one crocus blossom peaks out from under the leaves. Yard work has become inevitable.

I get no pleasure from doing yard work, but I stumble through the minimal to keep my neighbors from complaining. I did some serious rationalization and procrastination in the fall, and winter snows hid my secrets. The thaw has laid them bare.

Technorati Tags: rain, spring, yard