440 Growing Degree Days (B42)

Cool days and cold nights.  We had frost the last two nights and that was rough on grape vines and kiwi.

Growing Degree Days are accumulating slowly.

It is a pretty good bet that scion is dead.  Nothing to do but regraft it.

New one put in place.  I know it is a crappy picture.  So dock my pay.

I am out of parafilm-M so I went old-school.  I put a brown paper, lunch bag over the graft.  The Captain's back pasture is under water and he is struggling to find enough grass for them.  They don't want to eat hay.  They want grass.  The clover should come in very strong because they are hammering the early grass.

Any guesses as to what this is?

It is a new plastic bucket with ground limestone in it.  I mixed the limestone with Switchgrass and Ladino Clover seeds to give it some bulk.  Otherwise it is impossible to meter out by hand.  I was planting the wildlife travel corridor at Salamander's farm today.

We took the German Shepherds for a three mile walk.  Herc loves water.  The only thing special about this video is that Belladonna misses her dog.

A hickory tree bursting its terminal bud.  Pretty as a flower.

Poison Ivy.  One of the reasons this vine is such a hard target to kill with herbicides is that it leafs out later than most other weedy vines.  There is not much leaf to wet-out with herbicide.  Our extension agent recommends waiting until the vines are flowering.  That will be many weeks from now.

I intend to take a series of photos of this "Fortune" apple tree every two weeks.

This is a "before" picture.

I suspect that I removed 80% of the wood in the canopy.  It will be interesting to see how it fills in over the spring and summer.