Steve Batie: Celebration of The Year of the Maple
Is anybody out there interested in some maple trees?
Anyone?
Several thousand maple trees?
Each about four inches tall?
This surely will go down as the Year of the Maples.
Longtime HouseWorks readers may recall the Year of the Peaches — when the lone peach tree I planted at the old-old house produced in such prodigious quantities that I literally shoved fallen fruit into the trash.
My neighbors came over one day, with two kids in tow, and filled grocery sacks with enough peaches that they were still eating the canned fruit when I moved away five years later.
Or the Year of the Garage, the strangely soggy summer of 1993 that I spent building a garage/woodworking shop at the new-old house.
Every day that I went out to work on the garage, the first thing I did was sweep the previous night’s rain off the slab. (And every night, when I got home from the paper, I swept the day’s seepage into the basement floor drain.)
But 2008 definitely will go down as the Year of the Maples.
Here in Rancho del Fifties we nearly all have maple trees, towering monsters planted half a century ago that now shade our lawns, offer shelter to our squirrels and temper the winter winds.
So it’s not like we’re unfamiliar with maple trees.
Every spring we sweep those merry little helicopters of childhood into windrows, grind them under our lawn mowers, scoop them out of our clogged gutters so the downspouts run freely with summer rain.
And every summer we weed their progeny from our flower beds and vegetable beds.
But the spring of 2008 was a particularly prolific year for maple seeds.
I recall standing in the neighbors’ drive across the street back in April, looking up at the huge maple in my front yard and wondering if it might not be sick.
It wasn’t sporting the light green of fresh spring leaves.
It was, in fact, rather beige.
It looked for all the world like it does in the early autumn, when its leaves have turned but not yet fallen.
Those were not dying leaves, I realized.
They were seeds.
Umpteen gazillion maple seeds.
Hanging there in great basketball-sized clusters and waiting for the next windy day to send them spiraling to the ground.
It’s always windy here on the Great American Desert. Look at a map. Between the Arctic Circle and the Gulf of Mexico, there’s nothing to block the wind. When I blows over us, it’s just picking up speed.
So, in short order, the maple seeds fell.
Everywhere.
And, thanks to yet another strangely soggy spring, they took root.
Everywhere.
There wasn’t a square inch of bare soil on my whole lot that didn’t sport maple seedlings.
They came up in the cracks of the sidewalk and along the edges of the railroad ties that keep my raised-bed vegetable garden from wandering into the paths.
They came up among the woodchips that carpet the Woodland Garden out back, the semiwild area that I’ve been trying to “naturalize” the past four years. This was naturalization with a vengeance.
They even grew in the tiny clumps of dirt and detritus that accumulate between the planks on my deck.
If he weren’t particularly fastidious about cleaning his paws, I’m fairly sure they’d have sprouted between the dog’s toes.
I’ve been pulling maple trees daily since May, but there are still plenty out there.
Any takers?
Send your home repair and remodeling questions to: HouseWorks, P.O. Box 81609, Lincoln, NE 68501, or e-mail: houseworks@journalstar.com.
Anyone?
Several thousand maple trees?
Each about four inches tall?
This surely will go down as the Year of the Maples.
Longtime HouseWorks readers may recall the Year of the Peaches — when the lone peach tree I planted at the old-old house produced in such prodigious quantities that I literally shoved fallen fruit into the trash.
My neighbors came over one day, with two kids in tow, and filled grocery sacks with enough peaches that they were still eating the canned fruit when I moved away five years later.
Or the Year of the Garage, the strangely soggy summer of 1993 that I spent building a garage/woodworking shop at the new-old house.
Every day that I went out to work on the garage, the first thing I did was sweep the previous night’s rain off the slab. (And every night, when I got home from the paper, I swept the day’s seepage into the basement floor drain.)
But 2008 definitely will go down as the Year of the Maples.
Here in Rancho del Fifties we nearly all have maple trees, towering monsters planted half a century ago that now shade our lawns, offer shelter to our squirrels and temper the winter winds.
So it’s not like we’re unfamiliar with maple trees.
Every spring we sweep those merry little helicopters of childhood into windrows, grind them under our lawn mowers, scoop them out of our clogged gutters so the downspouts run freely with summer rain.
And every summer we weed their progeny from our flower beds and vegetable beds.
But the spring of 2008 was a particularly prolific year for maple seeds.
I recall standing in the neighbors’ drive across the street back in April, looking up at the huge maple in my front yard and wondering if it might not be sick.
It wasn’t sporting the light green of fresh spring leaves.
It was, in fact, rather beige.
It looked for all the world like it does in the early autumn, when its leaves have turned but not yet fallen.
Those were not dying leaves, I realized.
They were seeds.
Umpteen gazillion maple seeds.
Hanging there in great basketball-sized clusters and waiting for the next windy day to send them spiraling to the ground.
It’s always windy here on the Great American Desert. Look at a map. Between the Arctic Circle and the Gulf of Mexico, there’s nothing to block the wind. When I blows over us, it’s just picking up speed.
So, in short order, the maple seeds fell.
Everywhere.
And, thanks to yet another strangely soggy spring, they took root.
Everywhere.
There wasn’t a square inch of bare soil on my whole lot that didn’t sport maple seedlings.
They came up in the cracks of the sidewalk and along the edges of the railroad ties that keep my raised-bed vegetable garden from wandering into the paths.
They came up among the woodchips that carpet the Woodland Garden out back, the semiwild area that I’ve been trying to “naturalize” the past four years. This was naturalization with a vengeance.
They even grew in the tiny clumps of dirt and detritus that accumulate between the planks on my deck.
If he weren’t particularly fastidious about cleaning his paws, I’m fairly sure they’d have sprouted between the dog’s toes.
I’ve been pulling maple trees daily since May, but there are still plenty out there.
Any takers?
Send your home repair and remodeling questions to: HouseWorks, P.O. Box 81609, Lincoln, NE 68501, or e-mail: houseworks@journalstar.com.
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