Transplanting lives…

May, 2005
Kåre planting some basswood
seedlings culled from the forest.
















Some basswood seedlings
and cotyledons in the pot.










May, 2005
For all the abundance of plants and trees indigenous to our land I found myself bringing still more to our place. Small bedding plants for the new flower garden either bought or culled from others' gardens. Many brought plants for me just knowing I was starting a flower garden. I bought organic vegetable and herb seeds from a friend running a hydroponic store in Toronto called GROW. I went to a local garden shop near our old house run by an elderly lady and her daughters. That's where I found the lemon verbena plants with which I had developed a serious love affair. Then, from our old house, since the new owner did not want them, I dug up maple saplings, children of the lovely 150-year-old silver maple that we had to cut down.

They had been put in a planter box filled with mushroom compost and had been forgotten for three years. They now stood about six-feet tall and their roots long since punched through the netting at the bottom of the box.The kids played in our old backyard while I went to work unearthing them. I dug them out feeling quite sure I had compromised the root system too much, but quickly wrapped their root balls and stuck them in the back of the wagon. Off we took to return to Newcastle, trees sticking out the back of our car on the highway.

I planted them on either side of a dirt road leading to the barn. I had learned from Tim's mom Hilary that the best way to plant a tree or plant was to dig the hole, fill it with water, put the roots into the soupy mixture and then fill with soil and compost. That may have saved the trees as this was a summer of hardly any rainfall. It was a VERY satisfying experience to bring part of what was important about our old home to the country with us where these trees, if they survived the transplanting, could thrive unfettered. I later went back to dig up two ancient forsythia bushes with Tim's dad Kåre and brought these out as well.

Tim's dad is a Silvaculturist. Works with silver I thought. No. Works with trees and forests. Quite respected in his field he still travelled abroad after his retirement to give his thoughts on tree management, most recently in China. A good thing I married Timothy as this gave me access to his Dad's knowledge in this area. He came to see our land in late April and stayed into May. We stood there on our front porch proudly showing him our new home. We already knew we were talking to the converted as he is not a city man. He immediately put himself to work. If he was not freeing our many paint-layered windows to allow the fresh air in, he was in our forest collecting tree seedlings to transplant in a section of my vegetable garden. This was in the hopes that we could bolster them and then replant them in our back pasture, slowly over time returning it to the woods it once was. It was extremely satisfying to see Kåre learn something new from our land. He came upon the cotyledon, the sead leaf of the basswood or linden tree. Very different from the later leaves. Unless you knew it you would never guess it was a young basswood. He had never seen this stage of the basswood before and now I knew how to make a silvaculturist happy.

I was beginning to see why farming kept one busy. Two aspects I had not considerd so time consuming and demanding were weeding and watering. It made sense, in our small lot in the city those factors couldn't get too serious but with a new and large vegetable garden, flower garden, ten little maple saplings, many little lilac trees I literally found myself, running from one plant to another, trying to take time when I was not with the kids to keep my new transplants alive. Not knowing what to expect from the land in the form of water I had planted an awful lot at a time when they all needed heavy watering at least daily. Luckily our well water provided most of what I needed but I could be found most any time of the day trying to unknot my lengths of hose or more often, tangled within them myself. I caught Kåre laughing at me one time as he watched me running to check if the kids had enough lunch, then barrelling outside to drag 200 odd feet of hose from the new raspberry canes to the wee maples to the lilacs to the flowers to the vegetables.

And this is where I bow low, scraping really, to the dry ground, in front of Lee Valley. I came in one time looking, again, a little too fervent. A knowing glance from them had me pivoted and placed in front of their irrigation display. Angels wept. Dripper hoses, soaker hoses, all that attached to a mainframe hose that then attached to your garden hose. Merely set it up and turn on your water supply. The time difference? From hours a day of running around to perhaps a total of five minutes to turn on, and then a couple of hours later, turn off the water supply. Life in the garden changed for me that day. Apparently other fervent folk were sharing my reverence of Lee Valley as well as, with the low rainfall, a lot of their irrigation parts were continously sold out that summer.

So, my vegetables and raspberry canes were drip fed water in a slow method that made sure most got to the roots and did not run off. The maples got another cool invention from LV, orange spikes with holes in them that were attached to the opening of juice containers, the large 5 gallon ones, with duct tape. Then the spike was filled with sand and inverted so the spike went deep into the ground near the saplings. The juice container was then filled with water which slowed by the sand would trickle out of the holes in the spikes to water the saplings. It didn't replace me but reduced the panic level.
One could go positively batty about the devices for watering but I hadn't lost the perspective that the plants were where my attention should stay. So I still ran about but it was manageable on a good day. And I haven't even got started on weeding…



Owen and Kåre
studying an acorn
at Orono Park.