Making Hay and Distinguished Visitors

 

 For the last three days, a contract farmer took advantage of the facts that (1) most of our snow had melted and (2) spring rains hadn't yet made the soil too wet for equipment.  He and his crew came to our grasslands and cut and baled 150 acres of native grasses.  The grasses are of low quality, so they're not valuable for feeding livestock or for animal bedding.  Instead, the baled grass will be used to grow mushrooms in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, "Mushroom Capital of North America."  Sometime in the next few months, if you buy mushrooms and they've been grown in Kennett Square, you may (indirectly) be eating our grasses!

A wider view.  Watch out, visitors on foot; the farmer stops for no one!

On Tuesday, we had a visit from the natural land stewardship crew from the Mt. Cuba Center in Hockessin, Delaware (suburban northern Delaware just west of Wilmington).  Mt. Cuba was a DuPont estate that was turned into a horticultural showplace for displaying native Piedmont plants in designed landscapes.  Fifty acres of the 385-acre estate are formal gardens; our visitors are responsible for the other 335 acres of fields, woodlands, and wetlands.

Because the du Ponts are/were fabulously wealthy, I had assumed that Mt. Cuba was like heaven on earth - that Mrs. du Pont would dispatch armies of gardeners to rout every weed on her estate.  I was quickly disabused of that notion by our visitors, who assured me that they had the same same problems with invasive plants, superabundant deer, and stormwater flooding that I face in my preserve.    

My two stewardship staff members (left) pointing out a land management feature to our three guests from Mt. Cuba.

My staff and I are going to pay a reciprocal visit to Mt. Cuba - when the weather gets better in May.  It was really cold on Tuesday.

The Machine in the Garden

On Saturday morning (January 26), following a 2-inch snowfall overnight, a local land clearing company arrived to clean-up five fully-grown Norway spruces uprooted by Hurricane Sandy three months ago.  During the week after the storm, my staff had removed the smaller branches from the trees that had blocked the trail in the vicinity of the blow-down, but the massive trunks and the sheer volume of the branches and needles had overwhelmed the staff - who had plenty of other trees to deal with in the aftermath, anyway.
  

The huge root masses on two of the uprooted Norway spruces

"My" residence (owned by my employer but occupied by Kali and me) is visible in the background

The land clearing expert and his son worked all day, finally finishing up late in the afternoon.  They used a skid loader with a huge grappling claw to grab pieces of the trees...

...which they then moved out into an adjoining meadow...

...where they proceeded to reduce the woody material to small pieces by sending them through a chipper.

This project cost us $1,500, but the best the staff would have been able to do would have been to "whittle away" at the pick-up-stick mess over a protracted period, and the spruce logs would still have remained.  This way, the whole job was done at once, and we can replant with native trees this time.