Category Archives: Trees

Blue and green and a cat

Posted on by

We had some dreary and rainy days last week, and then a day with clear, blue skies and new, brilliant green leaves. Spring leaves. I took this picture up into the trees last week on my regular dog walk.

Then we had some more rainy weather, with wind this time. Some places south of here had severe storms and even tornadoes, but not here. And then Sunday dawned clear and cool. The leaves looked pretty much the same as the picture I took last week, so I’ll let that suffice.

But what about the cat? It’s Mollie, as usual.

You can see that her mouth is open. Imagine a cat meowing, and that will not be her. She can barely squeak out a pitiful-sounding mew, and as often as not, nothing comes out.

I’m embarrassed every time I take a picture inside the house where you can see the trim that isn’t completed. I am, though, working this very day on finishing the living room baseboards, so maybe the next time Mollie poses in her toy/catnip box I can take a photo without being embarrassed.

The cedar tree, plus the sky

Posted on by

I cut some more of the big cedar that I mentioned in a post back in January. Some of it has rotted so much that it falls apart when I pick it up, but a surprisingly large amount of the tree is good firewood. This is a section of the trunk near the base.

I counted around 50 rings. As you can see, it had split into two trunks at this point. There is some decay and a few holes just above the left trunk segment. Those holes lead to living quarters. It turns out that the cedar was a huge carpenter ant apartment complex.

The black in the chambers is actually ants. I had to use an insecticide on the firewood I cut from this tree to avoid bringing the ants into the house.

It hasn’t been all trees lately. We had a lot of rain, then some clear weather, and now some more cloudy skies and drizzle. This was the late afternoon eastern sky a few days ago, right after the rain and just before the clearing.

Trees against the sky

Posted on by

I like the way the trees look against the sky, especially in the winter. A couple of days ago the sky would have been deep blue, a color we haven’t seen much of lately. On Tuesday it was mostly cloudy.

There were a few clear spots.

It’s supposed to be rainy again soon, so we won’t see much blue for a while.

Big cedar

Posted on by

Cedar trees are not common on the mountain, but they once were. They exist today mostly, but not entirely, as fallen, dead trees. I have scavenged a few downed cedars in the past for firewood. My miscalculation on how much firewood I would need this winter sent me out in the yard on Tuesday to cut up another one.

This tree is about 30 feet from our driveway in the most overgrown part of our property. A small part of the property on the north end has fairly mature hardwoods. The eastern and southern parts of the yard were apparently clear cut, or almost clear cut, and have grown back in a thicket of densely-packed, small pines with a few larger pines and maples.

I have not seen one live cedar on the property, but this dead one must have been a giant among cedars. Here is my chainsaw for scale.

It’s hard to see the size of the trunk at its base. I counted about 50 rings in the branched trunk next to the saw. The main part of the trunk is a minimum of a yard in diameter. Here it is from a different angle.

My chainsaw is just visible on the left. Note that the bar on my chainsaw is 20 inches.

This tree was a monster of a cedar, or, more properly, a juniper. This is from the Wikipedia entry on the eastern red cedar:

Juniperus virginiana is a dense slow-growing coniferous evergreen tree that may never become more than a bush on poor soil, but is ordinarily from 5–20 m or 16–66 ft tall, with a short trunk 30–100 cm or 12–39 inches in diameter (rarely to 27 m or 89 ft in height, and 170 cm or 67 inches in diameter.

 This tree is certainly at the upper end of the usual trunk diameters.

Another web site calls the eastern red cedar a “moderate to long-lived evergreen,” and says that some specimens have been known to live more than 500 years.

Our specimen fell to the ground a long, long time ago. This type of cedar is resistant to rot and insects, so they can lie on the ground for years without rotting into mulch like most trees in our area. This tree has certainly been on the ground for longer than the almost 14 years we have lived on the mountain. It probably fell a good bit before I started building our first house, and that was 20 years ago. Given the rot-resistance and the condition of some of the tree, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it fell 30 or 40, or even 50 years ago. And, given its size, it might well have been growing on the mountain during the civil war.

There has been some rot. Some of the ends of the branches have dried out and have begun to simply disintegrate. But some of the wood is still firm, and it still produces that characteristic cedar smell when it is cut. Once the moisture from the recent rain has dried, I expect it will produce a decent, aromatic fire.

 

Rain watch

Posted on by

I have mentioned before that a fair number of trees in the woods around here died between last summer and this spring. The forest doesn’t look healthy. A lot of trees of all species on the mountain either never came back in the spring or barely made it out of the winter alive. Even the trees that seem less affected by the heat and drought of last summer don’t seem to have leafed out as much as in a normal year, at least to my uneducated eye.

Some trees are trying. A few pines whose needles all turned brown have come back in part. Some of the trees whose limbs never leafed out have sprouted tight bunches of leaves along their trunks. I suspect many of them will never fully recover and will eventually die, especially if we have another summer like 2016.

One of the hardest hit of species is the dogwood. As far as I could tell earlier this spring, we had only one or two dogwoods that seemed to have survived in reasonably good condition. This is one that grew just inside the woods next to our driveway.

Some vines have grown up into the crown, which makes it look like it still has leaves, but the only leaves on this tree are dead. But this is what I noticed at the base of the tree on Wednesday.

It’s coming back from the roots. It looks pretty good at this point.

Here’s a maple that lost about half of its multiple trunks.

And here’s its base.

I don’t know whether the dogwoods or maples will manage to survive, despite these signs of their struggle to live.

This die-off may be a normal cycle in the northwestern Georgia forest, but I worry.

I also worry about our front yard. I finally got the zoysia seed sown. I filled the ruts and depressions as well as I could, then spread about two inches of rich topsoil. Then I raked it as level as I could, which was not very level. Then I rolled it. Every place I stepped ended up with a deep footprint. I could and probably should have tried harder to get the lawn smooth, but I was racing what I thought was a nice downpour that never materialized.

Now all we have to do is make sure the seed doesn’t get too dry. I have watered lightly – very lightly – twice so far. Our well doesn’t produce at a very high rate, so I am being conservative when I water. I am sprinkling about a third of the lawn at a time, then waiting a few hours before doing the next third. Here you can see the middle third is slightly darker than the ground on either side, a result of watering just a short while before I took the picture.

As I write this on Wednesday afternoon, there is a wide area of rain heading from the southwest up towards us. Based on our history here, I won’t be surprised if we get little or nothing from this system.