Cherry Trees and a Dozer

Saturday, Nov. 3, 2012

The Dozer needs to be woken up.

But first it needs to have it’s fuel tank filled with diesel, fluids checked and greased. That I did without too much trouble. I took my time and did it in a couple of hours. I still need to add transmission fluid, but I will wait until I’m ready to use it, because it tends to slowly leak out. The battery has been on a slow charge for a couple of months so should be good to go.

My purpose is to get it going and do some work with it on our family property. The roads on it haven’t been touched in quite awhile and have quite a few impassible places. Mostly, there are a lot of fallen big trees across the roads, which the dozer will make quick work out of. This I hope to accomplish next week some time.

Now,about those cherry trees?

Yes, I’m thinking of cherry trees right now. It’s not hard to grow cherry trees around here, but it is hard to get many cherry’s off the trees. For some reason cherry trees have a hard time producing cherries around here. Because of this, the ones it does have are hardly enough for the birds and me too.

I have six or seven cherry trees already, but my plan is to plant four more of them on one of the bestest tree growing spots on the property. This spot had a six foot diameter pepper wood tree growing on the spot that I cut down about twenty years ago. I planted a sycamore tree on that spot and it took off, however these trees have a lot of nasty dust on the leaves and they produce nothing to eat, so I cut it down and plan to plant four cherry trees of different types around it’s perimeter and see what happens.

Of course planting trees takes some prep. I’m digging the four holes out around the old stump so it will be easier to plant in the spring when I can get new trees. I plan to plant four different kinds of cherries. A Van, a Bing, and a couple others I can’t think of the names for right now. :O)

Below is a picture of the old stump I need to dig four holes around it. It’s already fairly low in the back, so I will have to get more dirt before I’m done with this to bring the dirt up to the finished grade, like it is in front of the stump.

Below, I’ve dug all around the stump in four places and put the dirt from one hole into the next hole I dug. Of course, a chair is a must for this kind of work. It takes a lot of sitting to get the holes dug.

Close up of the project. It’s real good dirt. I plan to leave the old stump in there to rot and feed the new cherry trees. The new trees roots can follow the rotting roots down, as they slowly rot. I figure I need to get about six wheel barrel loads of dirt to finish filling up that last hole. Another day. There will be four cherry trees planted around this stump, equally spaced.