Pine Tree Survival Rate

About a year ago I purchased 60 seedling pine trees from the Arbor Day Foundation. These were delivered to me at the end of November, which I thought was an odd time to plant trees. However, the Arbor Day Foundation stated that this was a good time to plant pine trees as more energy is put into developing the root system when compared to planting in the spring when the energy is split between developing roots and foliage/needles. So, I spent a long weekend planting 50 white pines and 10 eastern cedars at various locations around the property.

Fast forward to this spring and I discovered that only 2 of the trees that I had planted in December actually survived. I was not happy about this. It was in spring that I had another 10 trees to plant (various deciduous trees) and through out the summer they grew and flourished. I learned a valuable lesson this year; only plant trees in the spring.

With autumn upon us, the weeds in the field around our cabin have turned brown and are dying off. This past weekend, while walking around the property, I spied a previously unknown white pine sapling! I investigated some more and discovered two more. My total was now up to 5 trees that survived out of the 60. Still not the best average, but I feel a bit better now knowing that almost 10% of the trees survived. Maybe I’ll plant some more pine trees, but I will wait until next spring to plant them.

Water at the Cabin

Kettle Creek Well Drilling set up and drilling the well.

My brother-in-law, who has a camp just up the hill next to ours, and I decided we were going to invest in getting a shared well drilled for our camps. The idea was to place a well on our property line, run water lines to each camp, and install a frost-free hydrant so that we would have uninterrupted access to water year round.

We reached out to Kettle Creek Well Drilling to drill the well for us. To save on money (or so we had hoped), we would install the water lines from the well to our camps ourselves. With all of the rain we had, the well drilling went slow, but after a couple of weeks, the well drillers were able to complete the well with enough flow to supply water to both of our camps.

To install the water lines to each of our camps, we rented a mini-excavator. I picked up the 2-ton digger in Lewistown and transported it to our property in Potter County. That experience is a story for another time.

A friend of Jim’s runs the mini-excavator.

After three days of digging, we had our water lines installed. We had a small leak at one of the frost-free hydrants, but that was easily fixed with the addition of two more clamps. The ditches are back-filled but we still need to do some work to smooth out the dirt. We will be renting a skid loader to tackle those tasks sometime later in the month.

The water lines are installed but we still have a lot of work to do smoothing out the dirt.

To get the water line up to my brother-in-law’s camp we needed to put the ditch up the middle of his lane.

Inside the cabin I have completed some tile work for the pellet stove. This was needed for insurance purposes and now that it is finished, I do like the looks of it better than what we had before. I also installed temporary railing in the loft. This railing will be replaced with oak railing whenever we install the oak stairs.

Pellet stove on the newly laid tile.

Temporary railing in the loft will make it safer for anyone that has the tendency to sleep walk.

Finally, just a few pictures of the outdoors. This is why I love coming up to the cabin as much as I do!