Old trees

We went to the farm near Grand Rapids this weekend. There is still some snow there. It is nice to see the snow on the two-track, because it lets us know if there have been trespassers or not!

I spent the weekend taking pictures of the trees in one of the orchards. Some are still in healthy condition but others are really in bad shape.

I took 359 pictures, all are of individual trees except for a few at the end of the rows. It is overwhelming how much work we have to do. I did the biggest orchard, but I suspect there are nearly as many trees remaining, if not more, in the other sections. The corner of this orchard has really old, standard-size trees. The blackberries and raspberries grow really densely in this part of the orchard. There are quite a few limbs down and we can't get in and get the mower to mow down the berries until we remove the fallen limbs. Since we're not able to get there every weekend, and have a limited amount of time when we are there, I'm not sure we'll ever get done.

I originally had an idea to catalog each tree and document the process of bringing it back into production. I am wondering now if maybe I should just heed DH's advice and bulldoze them all.

If we have 1000 trees, and we saved 10 percent, I would have to identify the 100 best trees. That still seems like a lot of trees to take care of.