Plants on the farm #2 181230

      It's a cold and gray day here, late in December. It seems like a great day to write and display some past pictures of plant life on the farm. This first one is a vine that grew wild and would stretch out over the tops of other weeds in the woods and nearby. The flowers were beautiful and the fruit grew oblong and was a little bigger than a baseball and was loaded with seeds.

      This one is wild chicory. I would have liked more of it to grow, but it seemed to have a mind of its own. I was told there was a way to make a coffee substitute with the roots but I know there is no substitute for coffee as far as I am concerned.

      This one I have no idea of what it was, but I think it was stunning and delicate. It like the others above just grew wild.

      This below is a black walnut that sprouted in some very soft dirt in a flower pot right by the back patio. I thought I was so lucky to find it and pull it out intact to study it. The walnut was several hundred feet away from any walnut tree on the property. Those pesky squirrels liked to grab their nuts and bury them in places that were easy to slide into. Anyone who has ever tried to crack a walnut knows how hard they are and this one just snapped in two pieces all by itself. Walnut trees are a valuable commodity that when mature the trunks can be cut and sold for one-three thousand dollars apiece. The walnut tree is like a hog, when harvested every bit of it is used. The nuts are sold for baking, the trunks for furniture, the shells for sandblasting, and the limbs for firewood. One year my neighbor on the farm north of us harvested 30 of them from his property. I could see them spread out along the pasture. Early on I decided to gather my nuts and plant them all over the farm to grow walnut trees and eventually harvest them to pay off the mortgage. I had a dozen five gallon cans full of nuts and I planted them all over the open spaces around the edge of the woods. I watched how the squirrels did it and I followed suit. Not one tree ever grew where I buried my nuts, while on the other hand, they grew all over wherever the squirrels buried theirs. The only place black walnuts would not grow was under a black walnut tree. Unlike cedar and oak trees that will grow side by side, walnuts want their own space, their own ground.

      
Copyright Bill Weber 2018 and beyond.