Grab your work gloves, boots and a shovel and come join us at CoVo Hills farm to plant some trees! We're having our second Arbor Day Festival weekend at the farm and would love for you to join us. We promise fresh air, sustenance and camaraderie in exchange for a little bit of fun hard work. What a deal! We're ordered 500 bare root trees to plant along with wildflower sees so we will have plenty of work for all comers ~ Dan
The morning of ~ fresh and damp from overnight thunderstorms. Dan and Jeff take precautions, erecting a canopy for shelter should the rains return while our crew is out in the fields planting.
Meanwhile, Deena and Marianne head to May Fest to check out the flowers and crafts, when Deena is suddenly missing ~ and found in the pie tent.
All homebaked pies on Saturday are supplied by the Catholic ladies. Come back on Sunday, they say, for the Baptist pies, but ya know, there won't be as many cause they're a smaller church.
ARBOR DAY
The management and staff at COVO Hills heartily thanks all of you who participated in this year's Arbor Day event. I would have used the word festivities but due to grumpy Mr. Weather not cooperating very well, we had to cut out the fun stuff and focus on the task at hand ~ planting trees. And boy did you all focus. We made excellent use of our 3 1/2 hour window of no rain and power planted 500 trees in roughly four hours. Damn! ~ Dan
Our Crew
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| Mark, Jeff, Brian |
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| Cash |
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| Tom, Mary, Deena |
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| Janie, Marianne, Dan |
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| Jessica, Tim, Deena, Dylan |
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| Tom and Staley |
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| Deena |
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| Mark |
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Janie and Brian
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| Janie and Jeff |
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| Deena and Tim |
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| Every flag, a tree |
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| Break time |
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| Mark, Mark, Tim |
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| Jeff with Bella |
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| Jess, Tim, Deena, Dylan, Mary chillin' after being out in the rain |
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| Lighting the stove |
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| Nita |
And this is what we planted, thanks to Dan's initiative, foresight and passion to reforest the farm!
- 100 White Pines ( the long, soft needled pines)
- 75 Norway Spruce ( the other conifer with stubby branches)
- 100 Swamp White Oak
- 100 Burr Oak
- 75 Cherry
- 50 White Oak
All of these are excellent habitat trees that will provide food and shelter for a multitude of critters and which are native to the area.
The plan is to try to protect the hardwoods with either plastic tubes or metal cages which will keep the deer hordes from crunching them down to the ground. Without that protection, we would be lucky to get 10% of our trees to survive from the combined forces of deer, weather, mice girdling the trunk, rabbits eating the stems, natural causes. With the tubes or cages we can expect around 60% making it through the first 10 years.
