A few of us met in the field on this beautiful sunny day to check on our winter crops in the hoop house. The young plants look healthy, but they have been waiting during the past month for longer daylight hours before they can resume growing.
We have tried several strategies for making winterized windproof caterpillar tunnels, and found that we had to make a few repairs to some of our tunnels. Fortunately, they must have blown off during a windstorm that occurred in recent warmer weather, as the plants under them were not damaged by frosts. We are still learning a lot about this land, it’s challenges, and how to make use of limited supplies.
Our main task for the day was to put a small dent in our eradication effort of invasive bittersweet, which is strangling some of the large trees at the edge of the field. It will likely be a multi-year project to fully remove the bittersweet, but for our first efforts, we focused on freeing the trees from their strangulation by cutting the vines to the ground, and carefully gathering and bagging any berries from the brush that had been freed. Many of the berries were way too high in the trees for us to access at the moment, so we will likely have to pull seedlings again as they sprout in the Spring.
