Tearing down and building up at the farmette

It's a rainy day at the farmette, and the plants are celebrating! It's been so dry, I could almost hear the grass, trees, gladiolus and smoke bushes sigh with relief when I was out checking the rain gauge, which contained more than an inch of the wet stuff. Yay!

The world is just weird right now, with Trump grovelling at Putin's feet and Europe tensing up ahead of the Zelenskyy-Trump meeting tomorrow. Everyone's worried. Me too.

Getting on with things we can actually control on the farmette, we hired Derek Matthews and his crew at Matthews Tree Removal a couple of weeks ago to take down some of our huge, dead trees and trim up the scarier bits of the maple that overhangs the deck.

Here's the young man on the ground who was receiving the limbs from the maple. Apparently, his colleague who climbed up to nose-bleed heights to do the cutting, said the old girl is in great health, considering her advanced age. Good to know.

The line of big old trees at the front of the property got a bit thinner. The maple that's closest to the left side of the driveway didn't even try to put out leaves this year, so we made the hard decision to have it taken down. Well, mostly down. I asked Derek to leave about 10 feet of stump as a condo for the birds, rodents and insects. Which he did, of course.

The big old pine tree at the corner of the east side driveway had to come down, too. It was dying from the top down and Derek thought it was probably infested with pine beetle.

So we had it removed as a preventive because we didn't want to lose our other, majestic pines. Especially the Group of Seven tree on the west side.

The company is located in Minto, just south and west of the farmette and Derek told me they were extremely busy earlier in the year, with all the cleanup from the brutal winter we experienced.

While we hate to see the oldies go, we have also planted newbies over the years. The poplars on the west side have grown so very quickly over the 10+ years since I planted them.

Compared to the blue spruce I planted around the same time, they're ginormous, although the wee conifer is looking strong and straight at about eight feet tall.

My arboreal triumph is my tulip tree. Which, at the time of planting, I had no idea that it is Carolinian, so it's more accustomed to the south and has no business growing in Grey County. Nobody told the tree, which is flourishing despite the extremely harsh winters.

It's fantastic to have a reliable service with professionals who know how to remove trees without hitting power lines, the farmette house (yikes), or any passing humans. It's also very satisfying to watch our own plantings, which will long outlast us, thrive at the farmette. Until next week.

Gratuitous cat photo courtesy of Wilma, who just wanted the window glass to disappear for a second...