It was super foggy in the morning on the sound, but at 180 feet elevation on the land, it was completely clear skies.

Usually a marine layer makes the stream and the sunbeams around the fern gully pretty magical, but the air was dry.

The birds and frogs were in rare form. I took this in the wetland just off the road. You can hear a foghorn from a ship down the hill on the water…seems it was still foggy down there. I try to keep my trips to this particular little marsh to just a few times per year because the ground on the approach is so spongy and delicate. Today I decided it was worth a check in.

I’ve been putting off getting a big delivery of gravel because I’ll probably trench up the driveway, meanwhile the drive access has been too mucky for regular 2WD cars.

Today I resolved to get the remainder of my bare roots into dirt, no matter what. I did what everybody said to avoid doing, and I got way more than I can plant in a matter of weeks. I’ve been chiping away at it since the last freeze.

I figured I’d get half a bed of rock for the muck, and half a bed of dirt in the same trip. The woman at Morrison’s suggested 1 1/2″ clean basalt, which worked great, but half a bed was already 1000 lbs. The truck is rated for 770. The bill came to $18.

The half bed of rock seemed to be enough to firm up a lane wide enough for a 2WD, so a partial success.

I thought about doing a second run for the dirt, but the day seemed too nice to spend driving around. Instead, I mixed left over garden soil into dirt from the pile next to one of the year-old soil logs, about 40 feet from the pen. Some 1/2″ square mesh that I’d salvaged from the North Transfer station, that I got intending to use to protect seedlings from deer, worked great to filter out the large rocks and woody material as the dirt went into the wheelbarrow. I put the filtered out rock on the outside of the makeshift bed, which I’d started yesterday.

It would have been quicker, easier, and cheap to buy the dirt, but it felt great to make due with what I had on hand, and be in the woods instead of on the road. Plus survival with local dirt will be a better indicator of survival after transplanting, than whatever dirt I might have picked up from the quarry.