Happy New Year

As is traditional, New Year's is a good time for resolutions and we've started the year out with a few for Cora.  The resolutions take the form of a project plan broken into four parts; Forest, Garden, House and Barn.  Each "resolution" has a series of tasks.  It is easy to head up there and want to work on everything and get scattered. There is so much we want to do. Now we can easily see where we are, pick a task, head to the property and focus.  Thank you construction project manager Marc for suggesting that we do this, and Paulette for urging me on.

New Year's Day, we located our nursery and set posts to fence off the area.  We plan to baby some plants for a year or two in small containers before planting them out.  Now we  have a dedicated 20' x 20' area in which to do it, a hundred or so plants at a time.  We also took pictures of the old Bayliner we inherited with the property to put on Craigslist.  It and its trailer are soon to go to make room in our barn for more forest related stuff.  Our conifer seedlings are on order as well as some high-bush cranberry, blue elderberry and a handful of black walnut as an experiment.  These plants will hang out in our nursury this year and be planted next.  The walnut will join big leaf maples in their plantation we are planning in the west end of the property.  We are recruiting maple seedlings now.  

We've made application for current use taxation and separately for selective clearing for a septic system in a designated non-forest area.  Our forest stewardship plan has been included in both of these important applications, the latter of which we need so we an get a permit to remodel the little house.  So far, the year is off to a busy start.  The picture above is looking west from behind our barn at the hill in the front part of Cora.

Dale