When Tractor Guy gets going, stand back!

 Early in our sojourn here on the grounds of Fussing Duck Farm, I attended a tree sale at Fedco, one of the local organic growing institutions here abouts. I picked up an order and browsed around for other goodies and bought a couple more blueberry bushes. 

Yes, the wild ones DO grow .... er... WILD... here in Maine but most of the best places are not nearby and as I have gotten older, they are a PITA to pick. Most folks "rake" them with a special tool, but that gets both ripe and unripe berries and I do not want to do that. I does not respect the plants and is wasteful. But I like blueberries and  am getting a nice stand of the cultivated "high bush" ones going here. All of the plants are from Fedco. But one year, in their display area, something *else* got improperly filed in one of the blueberry bush slots. That happens in all retail, we know. Wrong sizes, wrong items, misplaced by distracted shoppers trying to help, usually. In this case, I ended up with a tall deciduous and decidedly not fruit bearing TREE in my row of blueberries. I did not recognize it, but let it grow, hoping it would eventually bear some kind of fruit. But Fedco sells both ornamental and fruiting plants and all this one wanted to do was host web worms and grow taller, so it really needed to leave the berry row. 

Today it did. The Other Half, affectionately known as Tractor Guy in the warm side of the year, got Fergie, the tractor on the job. The tree did not want to give up, but TG and Ferg won the day!

And once you get a Tractor Guy going, it's hard to turn him off! LOL  Nothing like tilling up the driveway to help even out some of the winter's ruts!

The blueberry patch is back as it was, minus tree, with cardboard and mulch on the nearest 6 plants and plans to finish mulching the ones beyond where the tree stood after we spend some time with a mattock and shovel, after the rainy period this coming week, to remove much of the stump. That tree was tenacious though, and I suspect I will be fighting it for some years to come.

The big project for me, after the tractor work was done, was collecting the electric fence wire, resetting all the posts and re-running the wire to keep the deer at bay. I was not sure how they would react to the sudden disappearance of a tree...something that, in their world, usually stays put. Would the space make them leery and put them off approaching, or would deer curiosity win the battle in their brains? I was not willing to gamble my juicy, freshly budding plants so round and round I went, coiling up the wire and then round and round again to re-deploy it... 5 strands on the outer fence and three on the inner one. They are 3' apart and designed to keep the deer from jumping over. So far, it has worked. 

But my feet were dead, my legs were bitching and damn, was I tired! But it felt good to get this big project this far along. 

I have 4 more blueberry plants coming next month, so I will watch over the patch until then and finish the mulching when they arrive and are planted.  What a day!

But spring is here, with my favorite spring flowers greeting me on my way to the berry patch this morning and the trees and bushes are beginning to bud. Yeah, I know that begins the allergy season for many of us, but without all of these wonderful green things bursting forth, why would be bother to keep putting one foot in front of the other!

lilac buds

Maple tree budding