Choke cherry and choke berry planting

Choke Cherries and choke berries

The ground was finally was dry enough (just barely) to plant the remaining trees from my Cold Stream Farm order.  30 Choke Cherries and 25 choke berries.  They get planted close together so they don't take up a lot of space like the other trees.  All of these pretty much fit into the old garden plot! Fortunately, these plants supposedly do well in wet soils, otherwise this would be a very bad place to plant them.    The evening of the day that I planted these it rained again and this area was back to being a big mud puddle!

At the end of the row on the right I extended the row to hold an extra 3 choke cherries and one leftover chokeberry

It was still damn muddy!  Water was standing at the bottom of some of the holes I dug for these trees

Transplanted some pine trees and some locust trees

I dug up some of the locust trees that volunteered in the front patch last year.  I moved them to fill in the 3rd (bottom) row along to steep hill where the other locust trees are.  I also replaced a few of the ones that died last year.  I didn't swap out any of the ones that the deer damaged. I am hoping that they recover on their own. The deer tore the tops clear out of some of them, but these are tough trees and the root system should be in good shape.  We will see.  I transplanted around 33 of these little guys.

Definitely  need to get more surveyor's flags!  These things will be hard (harder) to see when the grass kicks in!

These trees are really taking their time in growing.  I have some locust trees (in more hospitable areas) that have grown to almost 10 feet tall in the same period of time!

I dug these pine trees up from near my wood shed.  I think there are more here this year than last year!

Different varieties too.

Dead

A survivor!

Several of these died last year during the drought.

Deer trimmed this one pretty hard.  I hope it will grow ok.

I believe I took three bucket loads of transplants

I am planting some of these closer together.  They were plenty far apart.  I want to reforest this area since its so steep and otherwise unuseable.

I figure I put in at least 15 new pine trees and probably replaced 4 dead ones.  I really want to reforest that back hill.  It is so steep and rocky, I don't think I would have used to for pasture - I would be afraid the animals would hurt themselves on that slope!

Plane reconditioning continues

I unpacked all of my planes and ebay buys for some pictures.

My Wooden wood planes!  These have blades too wide to sharpen on my Worksharp machine I think

I don't think that any of these "extra" components that I bought will be useful 

My Adze!

I did start sharpening some of the blades for the "extras" and the small block planes.  I got about 5 done I think.  So far, the plane blades aren't as bad as the chisels were.  I am able to start with 120 grit (I ordered a bunch more 120 an 400).  Keeping the blades square in the sharpening jig is not as easy as I would like.  When making the micro bevels I have to be careful to get them even.

More snow and tree planting begins!

More snow 

Big snow-storm over past week.  Well, not really that big it turned out.  Only about 4-5 inches in Silver Spring.  Had about 12 inches at the farm (I wasn't there at the time).   I got notified by email that my tree shipment from Cold stream Farm was on its way and should arrive Wednesday!  I had it shipped directly to farm for some reason.  I got on the UPS website and delayed the delivery until Thursday (I actually meant to delay it until Friday).

First wave of the 2017 tree order is in!

Just in time for the snow!  As I said above< i was able to delay it, but I really don't want to delay too long before planting.  Fortunately the weather removed most of the snow by Saturday and I was able to get 25 Osage Orange, 25 Black Walnut, 25 Gingko Biloba, 25 filbert (hazelnut), and 4 pecan trees planted!  I got 1-2' trees because they were cheaper and small trees transplant better in the long run (it does take them a couple more years to get to size though).  Here are some pictures, although the trees are hard to see since they are small - heck, even the orange surveyor flags are hard see!

Here are the filberts (hazelnuts)

Hazelnuts, see the orange flags?

They are there!

A little easier to see in this picture

Here you can kind of see the row of flags for the osage orange along the road.  If you look to the left there is also a longer row of gingko!

The row of Osage Orange didn't quite reach as far as I wanted (I planted them 10feet apart) so I ordered another 10 Osage Orange to fill in the space.   I would have liked to plant the 30 choke cherry and 25 choke berry trees too, but that area of the property was just a big mud puddle!

You would sink 8 inches into that mud! (I know - I tried it earlier!)

Chisel sharpening 

While waiting for the snow to melt down I worked on sharpening my "new" chisels.  I had planed on doing the sharpening by hand, but after doing a couple I decided that was not going to work for me.  So I did some research and decided to buy a WorkSharp WS3000.  After watching some youtube videos of others using it I gave it a shot.  I did read that you could use any grinder paper that you want on the glass disks and since the roughest they provided was 120 grit I went out to the shop and found some 80 grit so I could grind the horrible edges off faster!  Some of these I must have taken an 8th inch of metal off! Well, maybe a 16th.  Still, it was a lot of grinding.

It is a reasonable size machine - actually fairly sturdy considering it cost about $180

Notice that this edge looks "un-square"?  It is because of the uneven belt-grinding I did,  not a flatness or out-of-square issue.

I put a micro-bevel on each as advised by the manual.  Even though I only took them to 1000 they are sharp enough to shave!  I haven't decided if I will strop these or not.

Most of these are quite useable!  

They cleaned up nicely!

I used a belt-grinder out in the shop to clean off the rust and grime.  I did it freehand so some of the edges aren't as crisp as they could be.  Although, some were not so crisp when I started!

Some of the filings from the considerable grinding my chisels needed.

My setup.  Too cold to go out and do this in the shop.  It takes a while!