speak of the devil........

Well; In my last post, I mentioned the concern of dry weather the first year new trees are planted, so we have had the worst drought in 50 years. Many trees are dead, some have died back, and we will need to wait till spring to see if they went dormant enough to resprout. We won't know the total loss till then, but it looks like it is at least one third. And of course, the deer browse isn't helping. We talked with Mark and were looking at a plan B option of buying a large plastic tank and drip hose to try to save them, but a couple big rains in late July made us decide to save our money and cross our fingers.

Here is one of the little guys in late spring, before the drought started taking it's toll. We had already had a low snow winter, so the ground was not starting out wet as normal anyway. The white plastic tube is to keep rodents from chewing the trunk. I understand that will primarily serve it's purpose in winter. We are heading up this weekend for garden tending ( the garden didn't do so well either, that is a whole other post) and preserving tomatoes. We knew that remote gardening would be a suboptimal experiment, but this year has been pretty lousy because of the drought.