While Pat Powers swills beer, I spend my vacation reading Wendell Berry:
A healthy farm will have trees on it—woodlands, where forest trees are native, but also fruit and nut trees, trees for shade and for windbreaks. Trees will be there for their usefulness: for food, lumber, fence posts, firewood, shade, and shelter. But they will also be there for comfort and pleasure, for the wildlife that they will harbor, and for their beauty. The woodlands bespeak the willingness to let live that keeps wildness flourishing in the settled place. A part of the health of a farm is the farmer’s wish to remain there. His long-term good intention toward the place is signified by the presence of trees. A family is married to a farm more by their planting and protecting of trees than by their memories or their knowledge, for the trees stand for their fidelity and kindness to what they do not know. The most revealing sign of the ill health of industrial agriculture—its greed, its short-term ambitions—is its inclination to see trees as obstructions and to strip the land bare of them [Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, Sierra Club Books, 1977, pp. 181–182].
May your trees grow stout and your farms be ever woodsy. Sláinte!
While we have lived on our acreage, we have lost at least twenty trees and we have planted and maintained at least as many. After our last storm just three years ago we planted seven and their all doing fine. They are all above average. Its not just for us, although it’s another reason for getting up in the morning.
In much of the Dakotas, there were no trees when the white
man came. Hence, the tree claims.
Your county extension service will sell you trees.
But I started growing Red Delicious apple trees from seed, after I found out Red Delicious is one of the few heirloom varieties of anything in the produce department.
So far I have a few dozen of them about 2′ tall. Deer and rabbits are a problem.
Eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) berries are a crucial, high-energy winter food source for over 50 bird species, particularly serving as a staple for migrating cedar waxwings, American robins, and bluebirds. These blue, waxy, berry-like cones are highly sought after by flocks of birds, providing essential nutrients during cold months. Additionally, pinyon and scrub jays each eat as many as two hundred juniper or eastern red cedar berries every day and every species of juniper traps loads of snow water equivalent wherever they migrate so choose your invasive, right?
Edwin is correct. Prairies dominated the landscape in most of South Dakota. Because of that, I would say that leaving or restoring native vegetation, whether trees or prairie or wetlands, should be the goal.
That anyone reads Pat Powers while not sitting on the commode remains a mystery.