Burgaw is about an hour away and is a cute little town that is the county seat for Pender County. The Pender County Courthouse was really pretty, but doing some construction so we couldn't get too close. We found an amazing pizza place that we have already gone back to again on our way to Columbia. The kids loved climbing on the train and going to the dollar store. Milton picked out the huge tank.
We have 39 alive trees that made it through their first winter! One is totally dead with two coming up from the base. The 3 currants that came late last summer were total gonners. The fourth currant did amazingly live. The short alpine shrub things are super adorable and all survived the winter. Two of the other small front plants survived. Of the stark trees, only 5 are alive from the stick. Then 6 of them are coming up from the root. Around these trees I won’t do any pruning, just weeding out the thistle and others. Our front linden I am officially calling deceased as when I was fertilizing that row of trees those twigs were brittle. We have another linden in the middle of the row that is doing amazing so these trees can indeed live in Star Valley. Also, in the front row, a tree that I think was a willow is no longer alive, but there is a sprout coming up from the base. I won’t be cutting down any of these this summer. In the front the aspen by the road has not made it. All of the plants were fertilized with a mix of two different fertilizers from Kearsley’s. Next summer I am leaning toward getting the $1 per stick that goes into the ground next to each tree. I am the most shocked by how well the raspberries did. They are taller than Owen! He loved picking off all the berries. After swimming one day Owen really wanted to get a new plant (when I was getting the fertilizer) so we got a sunflower-looking thing to put in one of the spots where the currants didn't survive. I did a lot of pruning and a ton of weeding. One of the trees had a thistle that was taller than the tree! One of the service berries had an evil Canadian thistle that was almost as big as the serviceberry. I chopped it all down but then a few weeks later it had a sprout coming back up! Thankfully by the end of the summer the serviceberry was able to beat it out and I didn't have to resort to putting on Round-up. I was nervous to put round-up on it for fear of hurting our serviceberry. We have a ton of wild serviceberries at the back of the lot too, but the ones we got from the nursery have much smaller seeds and are a bit sweeter. The biggest change for the back lot was Rod bringing over the tractor to trim down all the 36" tall grass. Getting the grass closest to the t-posts was a majority of my trimming.
