By Andrew Haupt
Pope Tree service spent several hours attempting to unstick their chipper, and more or less destroyed the section of the property in which they operated. They ran over several manzanita, unearthed some huge boulders I’ll need machinery to move, scraped the bark off several more manzanita, and completely tore up the path down to the meadow. The meadow itself has tread marks and clods all over it. They also girdled a couple mature oak trees trying to turn the chipper, and shot chips directly at a large manzanita, stripping the bark from it.
Things like this gnaw at me, and surface half-hidden doubts around what we’re doing here. I’m pretty sure it’s not true, but now and again it feels that while we’re working incredibly hard and investing tons of thought and emotional energy into this piece of land, we’re causing things to go backward. I have to remind myself that there’s bound to be mistakes when reviving a landscape, and you can’t look too hard at the failures. Learn from them, keep an open mind on how to nudge sensitive systems in the right direction, and get your nose back to the grindstone.
After awhile of losing my damn mind over the destruction, I got to work planting the rest of the hazelnuts, planting most of them on the upper side of the hill heading down to the meadow. Now we’ve got a total of 13 native beaked hazels, 5 Halle’s Giant, 5 Yamhill, and 2 Jefferson. They’re tiny guys right now, so really curious to see how they do.
