When we lived on the farm in Tay Creek, NB, one of my daily chores was to try to kill a spruce tree.
To a farmer in New Brunswick, spruce trees are almost like kudzu in the south. The spruce trees will take over pasture quickly. Cows will eat hardwood seedlings but not spruce.
Of course the trees in the picture to the left are long leaf pines. They provide those of us on the NC coast with needles to mulch our flowers and lots of mess to sweep off our decks. I am sure we see some of the wood also.
The forestry officers do lots of controlled burns down here. It actually helps the pines to germinate and keep the vegetation from becoming too over grown.
While we had some pretty good sized spruce trees on our farm in Canada, I don't think we had anything to compare to the large pines here in North Carolina.
It funny but some people love to be surrounded by trees and others love to be out in the open. I like having my trees at a distance. They help with the winds and keep the scenery interesting. Too many trees make you feel claustrophobic and can engulf your home with flames in a forest fire.
The trees around our Virginia place are much more varied they are at our coastal spot in NC. We have poplars, ash, walnut, oak, and maple among others in Va.
Of course we do have a couple of palm trees in NC to go with all the pines and our one swamp oak. I would love to have a live oak, they are one of my favorite trees.
Somehow in the states, I don't feel as threatened by all the trees like I did in Canada. Maybe it is because I know that under all that greenery seen from my deck in Roanoke, Va there are a bunch of people living.
Even here in Carteret County where we have the 158,000 acres of the Croatan National Forest, there are still over 65,000 people and not many area far from human habitation. There's actually plenty of room down here for extra Canadians. Based on the way our area voted we could use a few Canadians to straighten things out.
While we are relatively close to town here in Cape Carteret, our farm in Canada was isolated enough that we did not have fences in the back, there was no place for the cows to go.
On another note I noticed it snowed in Calgary a few days ago. I think it is time to light up the tar sands or something to warm up western Canada.
While we had a great day here on the NC Coast with the temperature hitting 84 degrees, I notice another front (from Canada) is going to cool us down Monday. This isn't helping.
I'm on a mission to have a ripe tomato by the first week of June.
As a former resident of Canada I need a little cooperation on the weather. If it is going to be cold keep it north of the Mason-Dixon line. Most people up there never get warm anyway.
