We pulled out a tree stump on Saturday. It was the strawberry tree next to the raised beds outside the kitchen window. It was a beautiful tree but very messy and providing shade where none was desired. 20 years old, 20 feet high, and over a foot in diameter. The roots were large and many. It took three guys over three hours to chop and dig away so that the tractor could pull it out. I decided to remove it last week after realizing that that space was where the outdoor fireplace should go, along with an extended patio. It is nice to have the luxury of studying, living with, building sites before designing structures. It makes for much better decisions, with vineyards and sheds and pools and ball courts and gardens and fences, etc. It is sad when a beautiful tree, 20 years in, is in the wrong place. But these strawberry trees, of which we still have 6 or 7, are very messy. We also pulled out 5 of these trees last year from the front yard, and had moved 7 of them 6-8 years ago, into much less tarvelled spaces. These other strawberry trees, however, were all dwarf versions, now maybe 10 feet high.
June 30, tomorrow is July. Pandemic raging. First full change of olive fly yeast traps for front yard (10 trees), hill (6 trees) and gate (3 trees). I’ve set 17 traps on these 19 trees. We still have 16 trees in the back orchard with 6 traps set, first time in mid-June, and 2 new traps to add when I reset these mid-July. These back orchard trees were set later with fewer traps because they wer picked pretty clean in the harvest last fall, and they are generally younger, smaller trees, less history of production and therefore much less infestation. Last week’s weather was remarkable, in that it was a weather pattern we really haven’t seen for some years. It was cold, in the low 60’s, which was not that unusual, but we had fog coming in everyday around 3 pm and burning off the next day by mid-morning. Ten years ago I would have said that that was our usual summer pattern, but then it disappeared. The marine layer would drift in in the late afternoon, but without the fog. Look
Comments
Post a Comment