Have spent a few days at the Little Woods working on a couple projects in the past couple weeks. Biggest project is cutting the woods back along the south side of woods in kind of a "reverse feathering" dropping or dragging trees and brush back into the woods for bunny cover and to get it out of the way. The fruit trees were starting to show a little bit of a southward lean getting shaded some from the woods and I don't want the to have fruit trees have to compete with the roots from trees in the woods either.
As soon as the briars start to leaf on a flat calm day I'm going to spray with Crossbow to kill them off, they are getting out of control. I broadcast a mixed clover/chicory mix in the newly cleared area along woods.
We have a little over twenty apple and pear planted in the little orchard now, some have been in ground for five years newest stuff for one year. I am grafting a bunch of new varieties to me of apple&pear trees this week so I will be adding another ten or more to the east end of the woods next spring.
The oldest fruit trees are close to fifteen feet tall and getting some good diameter to them and are almost big enough to not have the wind support any more;
A Cortland
A Keiffer
A DropTine crab that is growing well
Collecting scions a couple weeks ago
The Koi pond has wintered good and is full to overflowing
We split one of the hives yesterday and started a new NUC hive to replace one we lost over at the Big Woods this winter, the bee's were not happy about that at all but were settled back down good today, I noticed a lot of them with pollen on their legs.
Lots of wildflowers starting to pop up in CRP strips
Found a bunch of rubs in the woods...I should have hunted this woods more last fall.
Also found a small tree that might make a good walking stick in a couple years
My goal is to try and keep at clearing up the volunteer and encroaching stuff in the orchard this spring, I should have gotten after it hard in February. I'm about half way done along south side of woods.
