 Dear Friends and Family, At the back of our yard, we have the “woods”. When Charlotte and Josephine (our girls) were small, these were a mysterious place, in which grew the “Witch Tree” with a twisted, hollow trunk, and where one might find treasures, such as an ancient china figurine of a man. I loved the woods, too, because we kind of let Nature do her thing there, with minimal interference, such as keeping choking vines at bay, and planting edible or medicinal native plants such as the Ostrich fern for fiddleheads, ramps, Black Cohosh, and sweet woodruff. But with this project, the woods need to be moved. The tall trees at the south end of the yard expand their shade over too much of our small bit of land; it is better to have the tall trees in places where they do not add to our shading. That is why I planned a new woods, with paw-paw trees, on the north-east side of our garden, where it is already shady. It takes quite a lot of work to move a woods (duh!). On one day, I moved the precious fiddlehead ferns – these had multiplied from five I bought about 10 years ago, to 87 plants (I counted, really). It was the only day I could do it before tree guys were coming with big boots and machines that would tread on and ruin the ferns. I dug out wheelbarrows full. Then I wondered: there is (scrawny) grass growing there, will the fiddleheads be strong enough to out-compete the grass? Should I spend a day getting cardboard, which I’d put down to block the grass, first? But then the roots of the ferns will dry out… Oh dear, so much planning, and then poof! you find yourself at an unexpected junction. I decided there was nothing to do but put them in the ground and promise to put leaves (which also block grass) around them. I laid them in the area planned for them along the curved garden path and dug them in. I felt extremely satisfied at the end of the day – it was like an instant-garden. The other plants, are still asleep underground, so these will come sometime in April after they pop their heads out. They will join the fiddleheads, in a blanket of grass-blocking old leaves, along with a few new valuable herbs for the new woods – five giant solomon seal plants; seven American ginseng plants, mitsuba for salads; and a to-be-decided-on shade-loving nitrogen fixer (bird’s foot trefoil, bush-clover/lespedeza?…). Tot Gauw! Babette  Comments are closed.
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