Wagmore Farm: The Bloody Great Forest Begins to Take Shape

My last few blog posts I've talked about the need to create a Bloody Great Forest on one edge of our property.  I made the plan, I found trees, and now….  The Great Forest is taking shape.

A couple weeks ago The Husband spent a long (rainy) weekend at Wagmore, working with a crew to put 146(!) trees along the fence line.

Here's the story in pictures:

The First step was to clear part of the fence line. 

Apparently, the crew cleared this out really quickly. 

Which makes all the time I've spent clearing brush on the property seem like a silly pastime.

As an added bonus, I can do some burning next time I'm at Wagmore!

If anyone wants to come over for S'mores, I'll give you a call…

The first shipment of trees arrived.

These are the Excelsa cedars for the fence line screen.

Once the line was cleared, the hole digging began.  

The Husband and his post hole digger couldn't keep up with the trained crew.

It was a rainy day, so digging was a little sloppy, but the trees were well watered in.

Then the crew got to work putting the trees in.

The crew was vital to getting this done, we could NOT have done it on our own in a reasonable time frame.

The Husband used the tractor to move trees into place.

Here's a shot of the line of Excelsas all in place.  

But our Great Forest is not just Excelsas.

We've added other layers of trees to select areas, in anticipation of blocking site-lines.

The trees in front are Green Giants - another fast-growing evergreen. 

In other areas, we added even more depth.  

Here we have Incense Cedars, too.

Here's an "in The Great Forest" view.  

I'm so happy we were able to get such large trees for such a good price.

And I can't wait for them to grow!

We even added more trees to the screen we planted earlier.

This will help to build a more dense forest with a nice diversity of evergreen trees.

This one's a Deodar Cedar.  

It grows to be a tree with a lovely shape and a lot of appeal, 

so we planted them on the side of The Great Forest nearest the house.

And my favorite picture.

I think Mother Nature approves of the beginning of The Great Forest, too.

I'm so thankful that The Husband was able to get all this work done.  Thanks, too, to My Dad and My Brother for helping out during the weekend.  I feel a sense of relief and purpose that we're doing SOMETHING in advance of the potential Monstrosity next door.

Wagmore Farm: A Bloody Great Forest

We recently had some very bad news relative to Wagmore Farm.  The 20 acre property next to us was sold to a group that plans to put up a very large building (about the size of a Kohl's department store) with an accompanying parking lot the size of a Walmart Superstore parking lot (enough to park more than 600 cars!).  And all of this will be within approximately 250' of  our house.

To say I was upset when I found out about this is an understatement.  I think I went through all the stages of grieving - maybe staying in the anger phase longer than most.  After all, I've dreamt about a property like this for as long as I can remember. The property is so peaceful - a really special place to be.

Now I've come to acceptance and we've tried to figure out what we can to do maintain the bucolic setting of our dream property - despite the monstrosity planned for next door.

We realize that there are a lot of hoops to be jumped through before anything of this size can be built, but I dread sitting by and doing nothing.  So now, with acceptance, has come a plan.

We've decided to move the location of our planned barns, and create a bloody great forest instead.

Here was our original tree plan and barn plan:

The blue ovals, purple line area, and red triangle are where we have planted our baby trees already.  

The blue rectangles near the bottom of the property indicate where we planned to put the barns.  

Knowing what we know now, here's the plan:

The orange area indicates (roughly) the area we plan to forest.  This also shows the general area we'll likely relocate the barns.

So instead of looking out our window and seeing what we see today - a lovely field that goes on for a long, long, time...

On this side of the second fence (the one in the back w/ the scrub trees in it) - we'll now see something like this:

Which is a WHOLE lot better than seeing something like this:

Now that I have a vision, it's time to plan, and I almost have a tree plan finalized.  I hope to have things nailed down later this week.  I'll let you know what I figure out.