Spring Beckons

Punxsutawney Phil may have predicted 6 more weeks of winter but with temperatures bouncing from freezing to 70, we wanted to get our hawthorn tree transplanted before growing season really began. We felt like we had to race the clock.

As you may remember from this post, we had a new maple planted very close to our hawthorn, planning to "get around" to moving the hawthorn later future back towards the house. Well this weekend the climbing temperatures and the very damp weather (meaning that the ground would be soft) made us think we could put it off no longer. First we dug a hole where we wanted to move the tree, to minimize the time the tree was out of the ground. We had, as you may notice, some assistance from smaller members of the family. Even the baby wanted to help until we feared she would tumble into the hole and hurt herself.

Second, dig up the hawthorn. This was no small feat and we were lucky that our two very knowledgeable gardening neighbors were around to provide moral support. We had started digging up a circle that was much too wide until we learned we could get by with a smaller hole and still catch most of the roots. (Side note: that maple tree looks drunk. The gardeners who installed it gave us some excuse about it self-correcting towards the sun or something...more on this in a moment.)

 Our neighbor also suggested using a tarp to drag the tree to its future home. Brilliant!

And here it is, ready for its new home:

Ta-dah! Closer to the house (and further from the maple), in a way that frames our house between the cherry tree we inherited and this one (both will grow to be relatively small trees). Note the creative use of snow from earlier in the week as an aid to keep the tree well-watered.

Our neighbor also suggested giving it a trim by taking all the larger branches down by about a third, to give the tree less work this spring above the ground and more time to regrow roots below. So it got a bit of a haircut.

And finally, the last piece of advice from our neighbor - don't believe the gardeners who planted the maple. It needs some help to start growing straight instead of at an angle. We found the perfect, very random stretchy band in the garage (Seriously, we have no idea where it came from. Maybe we also could use a perfect few million dollars lying around? Hint hint, magic garage...). Maybe in a couple months, we will have trained it which way is up.

 (Baby for scale.)