I woke to a very cold frosty morning on Saturday. It was about 22F.
There was hoar frost on everything when I went out to do the chickens. That’s a rare thing here.
After a morning spent learning the IPad, I had 2 volunteers coming to help prep the little trees for winter. I’ve never done winter prep on trees, so this was a learning curve for all of us. It had warmed up a lot, but it was late afternoon and rapidly got colder as we worked.
We did the little maple first because it seemed the easiest one, also the most exposed.
I had gotten these spiral wraps to protect the trucks from rodent damage in the winter. I’d also been gifted a big bag of burlap on BuyNothing a while ago.
This Juneberry and the maple had stayed within their cages, so we tied the burlap to the cage.
This #10 York elderberry had far outgrown its cage. We had to take the cage apart to get it off the tree. I used some stakes from the pea fences to hold the burlap.
We found the bark mulch had fallen back down around the trunk again. We’d moved it off in August when we’d weeded them. The trunks looked so pretty in their white wraps, almost like a birch tree.
I discovered that I was going to need a lot more trunk spirals and about 100’ more of the burlap to finish the rest of the trees.
We only got 3 of them done. We’d pulled up all the hoses as we went and drained them to be put away. There wasn’t much weeding needed done since August.
I hope to get the rest done by the end of the week. It’s supposed to warm up a bit by then.