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Aurora's Ramble
Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001
HI Sara! I'm sorry to hear about your knees. I know it's hard to not be able to run around in the woods when you want to. We don't get out much either because we haven't found any good foraging places yet down here. Most of the old growth stuff has been clearcut and replaced with long, straight boring rows of pine. Not much of anything will grow with such a lack of biodiversity. And we'd be trespassing anyway (You can really get shot for that around here!). We used to live in an old farmhouse on 100 acres. Most of that was fields, but there were some truly majestic woods nextdoor, and the owners of *that* land were out of state. I was out there all the time! LOL!
Though we never had much luck finding morels, we used to find tons of oysters and bags and buckets and baskets and whatever other containers we could grab full of chantrells. Now *that* was fun! We used to put our little boy (who was much smaller at that time!) in a backpack and hike all day! One of his first words, in fact, was "dadoom" ("mushroom" in toddlereze). The last summer we were there we even found a nice big patch of the black chantrells! What a treat....it was as if that land was saying goodbye to us. I still miss it there. Been away for a year and a half, and I've gotten to the point I'm not as homesick for our friends as I was; but boy, do I still ache for that land.
There was wild ginger and ferns and mayapples everywhere. Huge boulders sticking out of the ground with thick pillowy moss growing all over them. Little creeks running everywhere. There was even a goat (!) that somehow had wound up back there and was running around wild. It was too cool....every once in a while, you'd hear the goat. We didn't know what it was for the longest time! LOL!
Anyway, now we're confined to our yard in the middle of town. What a change. We fenced up our poor dogs (one of which had only known the freedom of 100 acres all his life), and fenced up ourselves too. My solution is to keep planting trees and keep collecting native plants to stick under them. Hopefully when I'm done, this house will be surrounded by woods with no grass to be seen anywhere! :D The backyard is full of wild violets already, which I'm carefully transplanting into my "wild" beds that I put in under the already established trees (pecans and a pear). So far they're doing really well. I hate to move them at all, but alas, I have to because I have to mow where they are or we will be overrun by privet. I #$&*^# hate privet. The stuff is incorigable! (sp?) There's some beautiful plantain that looks like it was planted there on purpose, too. Bunches of wild lettuce, some dock, wild garlic, and a mystery plant that I'm trying to ID. Waiting for the blooms to pop out on that one. One of the nicest surprises was the roses I found buried under a bunch of honeysuckle! I cleaned them up and now they are going nuts! Not too many dandelions, though. :( I've also planted trillium, jack-in-the-pulpits, wild ginger, and elderberry. You know, I got those plants from Henry Fields, and I'm really disgusted with the order they sent me. Only about a third of it came up. Grrrrrrr. I go and look at the little maidenhair ferns they sent every day and nothing. It's been about two months since I put them in the ground Only one of my two elderberries is growing (and doing great!), only two out of nine gingers came up, and the yarrow is no where to be seen. Oh well. Next time I will know better. BTW, do any of you guys know how long it takes for nasturtiums, hollyhocks,and calendula to come up from seed? Anyway, here's to spring!
Light,
Aurora