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Crow’s Nest: Making lemonade with lemons, or, the onion snow…

March 25, 2013

 

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This is a small meadow at Crow’s Nest in which we would normally be conducting a prescribed burn in late March. That, and several other projects planned for this week, is not happening any time soon.

But over the winter some storm-damaged trees had fallen into this meadow, a wet site into which we can’t take the tractor or other equipment, so we have been cutting up the trees into firewood and carrying them out to the road by hand (we give away the firewood to neighbors). There remained many large chunks that we just couldn’t carry.

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Enter the onion snow (a late March snow; neighbor Jack just rototilled his garden this weekend and planted onions).  Add the Flexible Flyer from my childhood, safely stored in our basement lo these many years. I whisked it out of the house with only mild protestations from our four-year-old. The snow made it possible to move the heavy loads with minimal damage to the surrounding woods.

We told intern Aubrey (who is from Phoenix, Arizona) that this is what we call sledding in the northeast; I don’t think she believed that. Or maybe we looked out the window and said, “Whee, it’s snowing! Let’s go sledging!”

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In any case we had a good time moving log sections on the sled, and now the meadow is ready to be managed with a prescribed fire—as soon as the snow melts and the surface grasses dry out again.

Posted by Daniel Barringer on March 25, 2013.