I'm falling behind on keeping up with these little adventures in Brimson, or is it misadventures.
We went to Brimson on midmorning Sunday, May 24, with our 25 basswood seedlings and hopes of planting them all.
We just moved stuff out of the way with numerous breaks to rest, to drink water, or nibble something. I moved bolts and rounds and my wife moved branches. I piled the bolts in sort of neat piles for later cutting, and I threw the rounds on the to-be-split pile. The latter pile is getting so big that I'll have to move it again as I split rounds closer to the stump. My wife trimmed some branches into more manageable pieces and put them in piles along one of our trails for later chipping.
This was a lot more work than we had anticipated. I think we finished around five, or maybe later. We wouldn't be planting that day.
Before or after supper we took our first walk on our main loop in many weeks, probably only the second since the snow melted. It was enjoyable to see all the green, to see the birch volunteers getting more numerous and bigger, and to see that some of the spruce we had planted along the back line had grown faster than in some previous years. It was depressing to see how much work we had to do to keep the trail open.
Before we went to bed I told my wife that the next day we would only plant the seedlings and then return to Duluth. My skin was red and irritated from being anywhere near balsam fir. It took me quite awhile to go to sleep.
After a leisurely breakfast with the unread part of the previous day's Star Tribune we started on a tree planting venture. Poke planting bar in ground. Clunk! A rock! Move a few inches away. Poke! Schlump! Into soft ground it goes! Leverage back and forth to make an hourglass-shaped hole. Oops! There are rocks on either side of the bar! A little more back and forth and I guess the hole will do.
My wife trims the roots of a seedling and sticks into the hole. I poke another hole next to the first hole and make into an "hourglass". If I'm lucky there is no rock. She scrapes some of the loosened dirt into the first hole and then I tramp on the second hole to close up the first and to make a water pocket of the second.
I try to make a random arrangement of holes rather than a grid; my only criterion is to keep the trees two big steps from each other.
Poke, stick, stomp! Twenty-four more times and exactly twenty-four. We didn't get any extras this time which is just fine by us. Our backs were stiff, we were tired, it was time to go back to Duluth.
We packed up and put everything going back in the truck. Now comes the sad part. No matter how tired we are, no matter how sweaty or bug-bitten or otherwise physically irritated, we are reluctant to leave. The drive to the road through the balsam stand, yes, a balsam stand, is a sign we won't be back to our little paradise for a week or more.
