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Mighty oaks

The other day I was looking over our "lawn" (the weeds are sometimes the only thing that make it look green...) and I noticed little red sprouts, about 4 inches high, peeking over the grass. "That's odd," I thought, and went to pick one up. There was an acorn attached. Looking at the rest of the lawn, I began to notice more and more of these sprouts popping up all over my lawn. Oh no, I thought, they're oak trees...

You should understand that last fall our oak trees decided to re-forest all of central North Carolina single-handedly, and dropped a record crop of acorns. My inlaws were visiting while the acorns were falling, and we took thousands of them off the lawn. I thought that the squirrels would take care of the rest, but aparantly they were not doing their job. So now we have hundreds of little oak tree sprouts growing in our lawn, and it turns out to be my job to remove them.

Amanda considers it her personal job to remove all the wild garlic growing in the lawn, but she only worked on the oak sprouts for a few minutes. I think they hurt her fingers, and she's not quite strong enough to get to some of the root.

My efforts to remove the acorn sprouts are constantly challenged by Luke, who objects to my using the garden fork. He keeps taking it away from me and putting it in the garage, for some reason known only to himself. It is not impossible to remove these sprouts with only your fingers, but it is slow going. For the last session, I gave him a trowel and he started moving mulch from the garden to the box with the oak sprouts in it. There is a big hole in the garden bed ("Dig! Dig!") but I was able to get much more done, so it was worth it.

As I was picking up the acorn sprouts and throwing them in a box, Eleanor came by and wanted to know what I was doing. "But we want new trees to grow!" she exclaimed, clearly having heard my laments about the trees that needed to be cut down for new construction. So I offered her the box of pulled trees so she could "plant" them in the back yard.

Of course, as I try to remove these baby oak trees, I remember the tree my sister planted in our front yard as part of an Arbor Day celebration, years ago. It got mowed down not just once, but at least twice. Today it is still standing in the front yard of the house, as attested to by Google Earth. Hopefully whatever I am doing to the acorn sprouts will not make the growing trees stronger. Maybe I could figure out some way to get the deer and the fire ants involved...

Comments

Lenise said…
I think if they're mowed fairly regularly, they'll succumb without putting up a real fight. That's been our experience!
mathmom said…
I hope you're right, because I've decided I'm not pulling up any more oak trees on the lawn. I discovered another patch yesterday, and I just gave up.

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