of watching the full moon rise over Buck Mountain.

The maple leaves are budding out, coating everything with insidious yellow pollen—which is fitting, as April brings the first full moon of spring.

One name for April’s full moon is the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, which is also appropriate as it coincided with the first of the season’s mowing here on the farm. The dark, clean and dry days of winter, with their hibernating around the woodstove, are over. Bring on the weed whacker, the grass-flecked pants, the ticks, the heat, the sweat, the life. Full steam ahead toward my favorite season.

I took delivery of 10 yards of mulch from my mulch and compost purveyor, a 50-something man who was born and raised about 20 minutes from my farm. He wears Carhartt overalls, a camo baseball cap, and spends all day wheeling and dealing mulch and compost from his cellphone. He is unfailingly polite and helpful to everyone who calls, which I know not only from my own calls to him, but also from overhearing him speak to his other clients on the phone while at my place.

He backed his dump truck into the pasture and dumped my mulch. And then we got to talking. He noticed the garden space I just prepared, and noted that the soil looked good. He pointed out the broom straw in my field and told me I needed lime. We shot the breeze about our shared middle schools and the recent wind-fueled wildfires down the road. He walked over to the guinea coop and peeked in, talking to the birds. He noticed the old oak tree near the well house and that it had been topped by a previous owner of this property. Which led us into a discussion of trees. He looked into my woods, said, “Let’s take a walk,” and shut off his truck.

We scrambled around the woodline, and he pointed out all the different trees that grew there. “I used to work for the forest service,” he told me, as he spied an old cherry tree growing amongst a group of “Paradise Trees,” which he said I should cut for fuel because “they’re good for nothing else.”

When he found the big old white oaks further in the woods he stood still, calculating in his head. Finally he spoke. “Now don’t go cutting these just yet. Save these for the future, for when you need a little bit of money.”

It took me a minute to process what he’d meant. A little bit of money?

“I bet you’d get a tractor trailer load of lumber out of these woods,” he said.

It all became clear. He was looking at my woods as a cash crop, something I’d never considered as I’d tiptoed beneath these beautiful old trees, willing them to withstand wind storms and time.

“Well, I kind of would just like to leave them as they are,” I said.

He considered that idea, head cocked to the side. “You never know,” was all he replied. Then he told me a story of a huge old cherry tree, “growing up in the hollow,” that he’d kept tabs on for most of his life and how the minute the property it was standing on was sold, the tree was cut for lumber.

We walked out of the woods and he pointed out scars on the oaks I’d never noticed where an old wire fence had been subsumed by bark. That’s too bad, he said, noting that the embedded wire lost me several board feet of timber.

Our talk turned to the future as he advised me to go back in my woods and dig up any little beech trees or dogwoods I could find to transplant around my house. He looked me up and down. “Not higher than your waist,” he said. “Any bigger and they won’t take.”

Then he shook my hand, climbed back in his dump truck, and drove away.

Last night. This is the second hailstorm in less than two weeks.

One thing I’d like to become more knowledgeable about before I die is tree cultivation. I’ve started by planting a few trees each year at Bonafide Farm, and you’ll find academic arborist texts on my bedside table. Hot, I know.

I planted a peach tree last year—or was it two years ago? I forget. Anyway, as I rationalized that it needed some time to get established, it had grown tall and spindly and leaned in a most unattractive way. I finally resigned myself to the idea that it was ready for obedience school. On the advice of a friend, photos of a local peach orchard, and a very thorough booklet from the Virginia Cooperative Extenstion, I gathered my instructions, tape measure, and loppers and headed out in between spring thunderstorms to do the deed.

At precisely 35″ up the trunk, I applied light pressure with my lopers and more than half of my still-blooming tree fell to the ground. It was a bit horrifying to make the cut, but I have to trust in my instructions that state that instead of a central leader, I want to develop a nice “upside down umbrella limb structure.”

I say we’re closer already. Only time will tell if this was indeed the right move, but at least I got rid of the annoying lean!

While weeding the front flowerbed last weekend, I poked around the bases of some dried-up, dead-looking plants and was surprised to find tiny new growth. I am excited that last fall’s landscaping rampage may just pay off this spring.

(Rosa) ‘Pat Austin’

Last weekend I noticed that the buds on the forsythia were swelling. So I cut a few stems and brought them inside, where they started to bloom the very next day. With this week’s anticipated temperatures in the mid 60s, I bet we’ll see a few blooms on the bushes outside as well…probably right before we get a blizzard.

One of my favorite wild plants is Virginia Creeper. It’s that red plant in the photo below, which I took more than two years ago while wandering back roads in Central Virginia. I think it’s incredibly beautiful vine with an ideally shaped leaf and a gorgeous fall color range from green to gold to red.

I was lucky enough to have some creeper growing up my chimney, but in the course of taking the old house down and building this new one, I seem to have damaged my vine. On a whim I stuck a scraggly stem in a vase of water and set it in my kitchen window. I forgot about it until the other day when I looked up from washing dishes and saw a brand-new leaf, pale green and translucent. Maybe it’s not the end of my creeper!

I’m one step closer to redneck cred with my latest purchase:

Meet my new flamethrower. This baby dragon spits out 450,000 btus and sounds like a hot air balloon. If that’s not enough, it’s made in Italy, which makes me happy as I try to buy less cheap crap from China. This is the Ferrari of implements of destruction.

Now before you go writing to me that flamethrowers aren’t the most practical tool for self defense, understand that I bought this thing to wreck havoc on my renegade pasture, which is crawling into my driveway, instead of on household intruders. My plan is to kill back the overgrown weeds and grass, and then dump a bunch of new gravel on the driveway to make things pretty. Thus far, my plan appears to be working:

Not only is the flamethrower effective, it’s also hella fun. I feel like a smokejumper as I torch lines in the ground, stomping out sparks and flareups. I love this thing so much that I sleep with it under my pillow. Right next to my shotgun.

Yesterday Tropical Storm Nicole slowly spooled up the East coast, dropping a much-needed four inches of rain on the farm. The rain had tapered off by sunset when I looked outside and saw the landscape suffused with the eeriest yellow/red light:

I didn’t make the connection until today, but I believe the strange sky was a harbinger of a wild weather night. After sunset, the wind picked up. I went to bed with the windows open to the breeze, but awoke around midnight when the sound of the wind grew too loud to sleep. I got up and shut all the windows. Around two, I awoke again to the sound of large objects flying around outside. I got up and went out on the back porch to bring in the glass-topped coffee table, as I was afraid it would go flying and break. I could barely control the door, the wind was so strong, and the river birches I planted near the porch were blowing parallel to the ground. My chairs had blown off the porch and unceremoniously landed in the mud of the unfinished crawl space hole. I fished them out, fought my way back inside, and slept fitfully the rest of the night as the sounds raged around me.

This morning I woke to this:

One of my favorite trees, a beautifully shaped Chinese Chestnut in the front yard, had taken a hit. There’s nothing to be done but cut the broken pieces out and live with a lopsided tree. It’s sad, but I could as easily controlled this outcome as I could have controlled the wind.

I was talking with my grounds manager at work today when she dropped off a pruning book for me to borrow. I told her this makes me even more interested in planting trees for the future, though I know that when I do that I open myself up to heartache when things go awry. “Yes, but nothing ventured, nothing gained,” was her reply. And I think that’s very apt advice that applies not only to trees, but to the farm and the whole of a life lived on it.

I was on a walk a few nights ago when I looked up and lo and behold, right before me was a holy grail I’d searched for since moving to the farm. Native persimmons, or the poetic diospyros virginiana!

This particular tree was maybe 20 feet tall and growing at the edge of the woods along a road. Its branches were full of orange fruit. I picked up a persimmon that had fallen to the ground and took a bite. It was a delightful taste I’d never experienced—and very different from the cultivated Japanese persimmons I’ve bought in stores and greatly enjoyed. This wild persimmon tasted like jellied honeysuckle, if you can imagine that.

I couldn’t believe my fortune and gathered a couple of the less-rotten looking fruits and ate them for dessert tonight. I kept the seeds and will plant them to try to grow my own trees. Though research tells me that the optimum fruit-bearing age for native persimmons is 25 to 50 years, with luck I may start to enjoy fruit by my mid-forties!

In the meantime, I plan to brave the ticks to again walk my woods looking for my own wild-growing tree. And last year I planted a tiny Fuyu persimmon tree, just to hedge my bets!