After The Snow
At least I hope it’s after the snow. Today has been warm right through and sounding like rain, every gutter running, every eve dripping as the compacted layers slowly sink.
After the 1st and 2nd snowfalls, before the 3rd and 4th. That’s a 12 foot ladder
Up until a bit more than a week ago, I was in a pro-snow mood. Seemed like everyone else in the Eastern half of the country was having piles and piles of white beauty, while we had ugly patches of bare brown ground and nothing to ski on.
Be careful what you wish for.
When all is finally revealed, this viburnum will be about half as tall as it used to be. Those three broken leaders were due for pruning but I’d have preferred to choose where to cut without quite so much help.
For almost a week, day temperatures hovered near freezing, nights went down to 20 or so. It snowed and snowed, then it rained for a while and then it snowed again until I swear the stuff must’ve weighed about a pound per cubic inch.
Clearing the parking area wasn’t just a Sisyphean enterprise, it was also, eventually, a mighty long walk. By the 3rd go-round the blacktop was ringed with 5 foot piles of snow, and because I couldn’t lift a shovelful much higher than 3 feet, I had to drag each and every one to the only edge low enough to throw it over.
The area in question is about 50 by 75 feet. The low spot was on a short side. You may do the math yourself; I don’t care to think about it.
I don’t care to think about what I’m going to find when all’s said and done, either. The big triple-trunked arborvitae in the corner of the east yard is now a single, and one of the single’s major branches is ripped beyond repair.
Two trunks down; the other one will probably have to go, purely on aesthetic grounds.
We lost arborvitae trunks one and two in the second snowfall, so I went out in snowfall #3 and tried to knock as much snow as I could from the survivor and from our precious privacy hedge, which at least at this writing appears to have come through ok.
That’s me gently knocking snow upwards with an extension pole pruner, fully extended to about 10 feet. Invaluable tool.
Note: I have exaggerated for the sake of eloquent complaining. Truth is Bill did more than half of the blacktop clearing – that’s where the 5 foot piles came from.
As I sat here on my hillside last week, biting my nails between bouts of shaking snow off the deer-fencing, repeatedly shoveling the back walkway (forget the front one until spring), seeing whether, between plowings, I could get down (and more importantly) back UP the driveway, and wondering whether a tree would drop on the power lines that thread through them on the way to our house, I wondered how things might be across the street at your place, too. Well, now I know! Yes, let us hope this is over. Unlike earlier this season (see, for example, http://rainingacorns.blogspot.com/2010/01/world-of-white-and-snowy-scents.html, I have no fond, let alone poetic, thoughts about snow!
As I clear winter damage and prune for spring clean up, other than forsythia, what can I bring inside to force or propagate? Viburnum? Apple? Mock Orange? Keryi Japonica? Flowering Quince?
And is there a trick to get forsythia to take root before it rots and smells disgusting?