Come Ye Thankful People Come,

Raise the song of harvest home!
All is safely gathered in....

Well, not quite all.....not quite yet. But a good start has been
made.

We picked the hazelnuts early this year. Got them all in at about the
end of August or the beginning of September. We took the advice of a
couple of experts we heard on Wisconsin Public Radio back in March:

http://wpr.org/wcast/download-mp3-re...&iNoteID=88938

For those few not interested in hearing the whole program, the salient
point, for our purposes, was that hazelnuts can be harvested a week or
more before they are fully ripe. They will continue to ripen after
picking without suffering any detrimental effects. So what? Well, it
turns out that the squirrels don't know this. They wait until the
nuts are thoroughly ripe before committing their thefts. So this year
we beat them to ALL of the nuts! Not that it did us much good in
terms of overall yield as compared to last year. A late hard frost in
May killed the flowers on most of the hazels as well as the walnuts
and butternuts. The chestnuts, late bloomers, suffered lesser damage,
though still enough to put a severe dent in nut production.

Thus, despite beating the squirrels to all of the hazelnuts, our share
was still considerably less than half of what we got last year.
Disappointing, yes, but not disastrous as nut production has always
been a sideline, mostly for home consumption, in what is after all an
operation based on the production of veneer quality hardwoods,
primarily red and white oak and black walnut. The only seeds in which
we have a great interest for purposes other than consumption are those
of the butternuts and the chestnuts, both of which (as some may
recall) are severely threatened species.

Larry grows both butternuts (Juglans cinerea) and chestnuts (Castanea
dentata) as a part of widespread efforts to save both species from
their respective fungal nemeses; Sirococcus clavigigenti-
juglandacearum and Cryphonectria parasitica. The loss of the
butternuts is especially keenly felt because the trees they grow on
are hybrids which may (or may not.....too soon to tell) be resistant
to the blight. If so, the seed is valuable for the obvious reason.
This year's complete loss of the entire crop is all the more dire
because our yield last year was also exactly zero. Last year the
squirrels got them all a week before our scheduled picking date. This
year the frost killed all the flowers.

The chestnuts, as mentioned earlier, fared somewhat better. In fact,
most of the trees produced no nuts at all this year, and those few
that did that did produce behaved badly. Typically, chestnut burrs
hang on the trees late, till most of the leaves have disappeared from
most species of trees......in other words, till about now.....and then
drop to the ground intact. This makes collection easy.....provided
one has stout leather gloves to handle them with. Then it is just a
matter of waiting till the burrs dry enough to split at the seams and
extracting the nuts. This year, virtually all of the burrs split and
discharged their seed while still hanging on the trees, and they did
this early. By the time we discovered what was happening, perhaps as
much as half of the crop had already fallen to the ground and the
squirrels. Morevoer, harvesting what was left was problematic in that
the individual nuts are much harder to spot than the intact burrs in
the leaf litter and vegetation under the trees.

Luckily, the three most prolific producers (out of a hundred or more
old enough to produce nuts and only a dozen or so that actually did)
this year are all in places that were mowed recently enough to be
clear of detritus other than fallen leaves and a few twigs. The
problem of finding the nuts was solved by using a leaf blower. It
turns out that chestnuts are not quite round enough to roll away
through the grass if the blast of air from the leaf blower is managed
carefully. The leaves blow away and the nuts remain. It's still a
bit of work and it takes a fairly keen eye, but with a bit of practice
we managed to collect several hundred fine young embryonic trees.
There WILL be enough to send another shipment to interested
prospective growers come late winter/early spring. Huzzah!

One last search for errant nuts will be conducted later
today.....might get as many as another dozen.

Ere the winter storms begin.

And while all is sunny and bright and warmish and pleasant right now,
winter's storms are waiting in the wings.....but not for long.

Autumn, as the old hymn reminds us, is the time of plenty. The
larders, cellars, pantries, granaries and other storage media are
full, or at least we hope so. We humans, unlike many other species,
are incapable of living off of stored fat for long periods. Nor can
we simply go to sleep for three to six months awaiting the return of
new growth. We used to (or, some of us did, anyway) emulate some of
our more mobile cohabitants on the planet by heading for balmier
climes during the bad months, but that is no longer practical, or even
possible, for most of us. We pretty much have to stick it out where
we are and make the best of what's available.....and god help those
with little available.

The robins (Turdus migratorius.....hey I don't make this **** up!)
take no such risks; they fatten up and head south. Common knowledge.
Common, yes, but most people never actually witness the event. I
never had till yesterday. Standing out on the deck in the predawn
light with a cup of fresh hot coffee and a cigarette, I was greeted by
the usual chorus of early risers.....robins, chickadees, nuthatches,
various woodpeckers, bluebirds, crows, and several others. What was
NOT usual, I soon noticed, was a more or less steady stream of birds
coming out of the north, in front of me, and passing to the south,
through (well, over, technically) the valley in which the tree farm
sits. It was already light enough, and the birds were low enough (no
more than two hundred feet or so) to see that they were almost all
robins, with only a few small clusters of smaller birds. The robins
were unevenly spaced. Sometimes there were as many as a couple
hundred visible at a time, and sometimes only a few scattered birds,
but over the next half hour the sky was never entirely clear of robins
and, in all, several thousand flew over. A few of the resident birds
could be seen joining the stream ("flock" doesn't seem like the right
term given that the birds were so widely spaced, though they were
still close enough that all of them could undoubtedly see those ahead
of them). By 7:30 the show was over. Most the residents were still
here.

Later, around midday, I saw my first junco (Junco hyemalis) of the
season.

This morning the robins reprised their perfomance, but there weren't
nearly as many as there were yesterday. On the other hand, there were
several juncos flying about and landing on the lawn at the edge of the
deck, where the seed scattered by other birds at the feeders comes to
rest. Even in the very low light of early morning they were easy to
identify by their habit of staying on the ground under the feeders and
by the telltale white feathers at the outer margins of their tails.
The juncos are an unmistakable portent.....winter is not far off.

Come to God's own temple, come,
Raise the song of harvest home.

giles
at play in the temple of the lord.