My love affair with Sitka Spruce continues. Fast forward now to 2020. The Sitkas planted years ago are still going up. And so I decided to plant more in another patch of impenetrable Himalaya blackberry vines. I cleared openings just big enough to plant a baby tree, put a very tall bamboo pole next to it with a pink ribbon on top, and planted 11 Sitkas.
This was my first time to order from LeBeau Bamboo Nursery in Medford, OR. I am very impressed with the quality of the trees I received. Plus I paid for ten but they sent me eleven. All with lots of fibrous roots. I felt a little guilty sticking these lovely trees in the middle of berry patches, but I have faith in these remarkable trees. And I just cannot clear all this land of berries. My husband is a forester and says spruce don't need sunlight to get started, like Doug Firs do. Good thing!
Here are the Sitkas, in the background, that I planted earlier and have fought there way up and over everything.
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| The sequoia (left) grew so fast it outpaced everything, but I kept the berries at bay around it for several years. The evergreen to the far right is a Sitka I did not baby. It is currently outgrowing the sequoia. The little sitka front left is from a later planting. |
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| Sitkas up and above the riffraff |
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| This one and the next two are from the later planting several years ago. They had to work hard to get up through the brush and berries. |
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| This one was planted near the Alaska Yellow Cedars in hopes it would keep the deer from destroying the cedars. It did not. I have to hang bags of smelly dog hair on the cedars to keep the deer from rubbing the velvet off their antlers on the trees, breaking and debarking them in the process. The deer don't rub on prickly spruce! Another Sitka in the Alaska Yellow Cedar grove...  |
