Some Firsts
I searched my photo archives for an image I wanted to include in yesterday’s post, but didn’t find it until it was too late. It was a shot of the boulders in the center of the labyrinth after Cyndie’s cousins and brothers helped me place a rock on top back in the fall of 2017.
I was excited about having that smaller rock resting on the two boulders and ending up the tallest. It didn’t last in that position for very long. At one point, I ended up wrestling it sideways all by myself, to avoid having it tip over and roll off of both of them.
This is what it looks like now. It’s not nearly as interesting looking. I’ve added the little egg-shaped rock as an accent, but it never lasts very long there. I think birds land on it, then push off when they fly away, knocking it to the ground.
That’s the first picture of the center since the maple tree has been removed.
Yesterday morning, Cyndie and I experienced a first when she discovered she had a black eye for no known reason when she woke up. I asked her if she feels safe at home. She wakes up all night long at any sound or activity, so we have ruled out a possible stray elbow while we were sleeping.
I suggested she do a little research with Dr. Google. Of course, the list of possible causes included cancer, brain diseases, or impending death. Undaunted, she kept reading. Toward the bottom, it mentioned allergies, of which Cyndie has many. She recalled blowing her nose after working in the dusty barn and raking the winter accumulation of debris out of the labyrinth, and said the tissue was blackened. I pointed out that my weather app had alerted me to extremely high pollen levels, as well.
Those triggers, along with aging blood vessels, combine to logically explain how she might have developed a black eye overnight.
“That never happened before…”
In a first-time experiment of using pallets to frame my pile of composting manure, I peeled them off to turn the pile and add air.
I broke the composting manure apart and shoveled it back between the pallets for a second round of aerobic decomposition. This setup definitely allows me to work with larger amounts of manure in one pile. It’s inspired me to want to rig up a second set of pallets so I can start a fresh batch while this one continues to break down.
Other firsts of the season accomplished yesterday include hooking up garden hoses, pulling the leaf net off the landscape pond, and mowing grass with the push mower in four different spots where it has already gotten surprisingly tall.
It would be a more inspiring indication of our transition from winter to true spring if we hadn’t lived through so many April or even May unexpected snowstorms in our lifetimes. It’s awkward, trying to decide when to hang all our snow shovels in storage for the year.
Too soon feels like it would jinx things. It wouldn’t be a first.
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Tree Removed
The dead maple tree is gone from the center of the labyrinth. My new Silky SUGOI pruning saw arrived on Monday afternoon, and I put it to work immediately, trimming tree branches. In the case of the dead maple, I cut off the top branches and then rocked the trunk back and forth to snap the roots, allowing me to pull it right out of the ground.
It dramatically changes the visual of the labyrinth. Without that feature in the center ring, the focus returns to the boulders, but they have shifted significantly over the years and lack the artistic flair they originally featured.
Our whole experience with creating and maintaining this labyrinth has vividly revealed how fluid the “solid ground” actually is. I wish there were a time-lapse recording of the last 13 years to show how much all the rocks move throughout the freezing and thawing, and the soaking and drying.
April 2013
At least the smaller rocks defining the pathway can be lifted out of the mud and reset. Those boulders are pretty much doomed to sink and tilt with little hope of being reoriented. I used the loader bucket on the big tractor to stand them up when we started creating the labyrinth and didn’t have the rings of rocks in place yet.
If I wanted to use the big tractor again, we’d need to move enough pathway rocks to make a lane for the tractor to reach the center. We would also need to wait until the ground was frozen enough to keep the wheels from sinking into the soft turf. The reason I was able to pull the trunk of the maple tree is that it is so squishy down there right now.
I’m undecided about immediately replacing it with another tree. Looking at the sinking/leaning boulders, the thought occurred to me that I could just keep adding other big rocks and turn it into more of a pile. The center circle isn’t very big. The rocks take up most of the space anyway. It would be nice if they were more conducive to being climbed on in order to sit on them.
I need to think about it. Preferably on a warm sunny day, while I am right there in the center circle, gazing at them.
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Opposite Skies
For your review, I present two skies at opposite ends of the day yesterday:
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Early Preparations
The arrival of humid air was certainly palpable the second we opened the door yesterday afternoon as the clouds thinned and peeks of sunshine appeared. The temperature climbed into the 70s (F), inspiring us to spend a little time down at the labyrinth.
World Labyrinth Day is only three weeks away, and we would like things to look their best, despite this being way too early in the growing season for plantings to look healthy. The vines climbing the gazebo look rather skeletal.
I pruned the weeping crabapple tree, contemplating the odds that it will be flowering in all its glory during the first weekend of May. The log stools around the fire pit had rotted to the point of disintegration. I toppled them and rolled the pieces into the brush beyond.
Cyndie wanted to make a mossy boulder in the brush beyond the labyrinth more visible, so I trimmed away the shoots growing up in front of it. I have no idea if its glory will continue to stand out once all the leaves around it show up, but it is worth a try. It is a beautiful specimen.
It has come time to deal with the dead maple transplant at the center of the labyrinth. The young trunk has developed a nice covering of lichens that accentuate the fact that it is no longer living.
I wrapped my hand around the trunk and pushed and pulled to see how much it would sway. The saturated ground made it sound like the roots were moving in standing water. Not having a saw with me at the moment, the tree stands for another day. One of the upper branches has already snapped off. I found it scattered on the ground below about a month ago.
On my way back to the barn, I noticed a young willow tree had sprouted its catkins. Leaves won’t be far behind.
I am very curious to find out how much different everything will look by May 2nd. It is already evident that there are places where the grass will need to be mowed between now and then to give our place the most welcoming of appearances for the number of first-time visitors we are expecting this year.
Whether or not we get several consecutive dry days sometime during that span will go a long way toward determining whether the ground will be firm enough to support wheeled equipment without making an unsightly muddy mess.
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Dodging Downpours
Thunder and lightning dominated our morning, all the way from the wee hours when I was trying to stay asleep, through our walk with Asher in the woods, and tending to horse chores. It wasn’t a constant storm, though. The rain was intermittently gushing and then stopping completely for varying spans of time.
We chose to delay even starting out the door until one obvious radar blob cleared our airspace. Our walk was pleasant, and we stayed dry everywhere except our boots, awash in the sloppy footing.
During the interval we were with the horses, we ended up trapped under the overhang two different times, waiting out short cloudbursts that suddenly occurred. Each lasted only a short time, allowing us to continue with our tasks without getting soaked.
Cyndie noticed a new level of hair rubbed into the braids of twine we wrapped around the overhang support posts. The mares were biding their time under the protection of the roof with some self-grooming while the deluges were pouring down.
Now that the rainstorms have moved beyond us, the world outside looks too soggy to be inviting. A little sunshine would do wonders to inspire us away from otherwise leisurely indoor pursuits.
I expect that Asher will encourage us to get back outside on his regular schedule, no matter what the weather offers. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
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Real Reality
One of the precious things about spending a lot of time in the great outdoors is how it contrasts with present-day depictions of various versions of reality projected in the media and social feeds of our fabulous world wide web. Each day, it becomes harder and harder to sift through the enshitified world of the internet.
Cyndie and I spent a couple of hours following along with the return of the record-setting Artemis II moonfarers last night, mesmerized by the spectacle that brought back memories of the thrills we experienced watching the Apollo splashdowns when we were kids. This morning, I noticed a Redditor lamenting that all he could find in a search for information on his Instagram feed about the astronauts’ return was posts by flat-earthers (or scheming antagonists with some psycho agenda from a bizarre villain world-domination fantasy script) flaunting how dumb grown adults must be to believe the “theatrical performances” by NASA.
Oy. I can’t even…
What is absolutely real is standing on a large mound of the winter’s worth of horse manure to break it up, turn it over, and shape it down with a pitchfork and rake. In a slow process of years, I am endeavoring to develop a high spot in the large paddock that protects a drain tile line from the spigot in the barn that comes to the surface within the horses’ domain.
Why would I make up something like this?
While I worked the pitchfork yesterday, with Asher watching over the horses and me, I was enjoying the sounds of nature around us. At one point, as my inner narrator was marveling over the call of a pheasant across the road, my brain kicked in to clarify that I was hearing, “Gobble gobble gobble.”
That’s no pheasant. It’s a turkey! Some Tom was announcing something to the world. We’ve been noticing a remarkable presence of a larger-than-usual pheasant population this year. Maybe the wild turkeys are competing for territory.
The reality in the kitchen this morning is a full-on production of Cyndie’s popular scones being baked.
If the internet provided you with aromas, you would surely know how real this is. Go ahead and check the image to see if it is AI. No, I did not Photoshop those ingredients onto the counter. Some lucky volunteers for an organization Cyndie is involved with will be getting a treat today!
I will not be left out, since my role as taste tester gives me the privilege of finding out if they are good when still warm out of the oven. It’s a tough job, but that’s my reality.
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Early Sprouts
Into the woods we headed, Cyndie with a plastic bag in hand, Asher and I tagging along randomly behind. It was a multipurpose jaunt to give Asher some free time outside, to take advantage of some welcome sunshine, and to eradicate as much invasive garlic mustard as possible.
We had just come from having pulled up a thick sheet of black plastic that had covered a poison ivy patch beside a pathway for two growing seasons. I thought we would find nothing but black dirt beneath, but there was a bleached-out layer of a dead, straw-looking mat of grasses that remained.
Since I tend to get overwhelmed when the invasives we are after show up everywhere I look, I let Cyndie focus on the garlic mustard, and I kept an eye out for vines on tree trunks. Even though I felt sure I had already scoured the area we were in for vines visible at the base of trees, I kept finding a remarkable number of cases.
During a pause in my efforts, the thought occurred to me that I should have taken a picture of what I was finding. The reason that hadn’t happened was that each time I would see vines, I jumped into action, yanking them off the tree and pulling up the other end from the dirt as far as I could before it broke. I think there is a fear that if I look away for an instant, I won’t be able to see it again when I look back.
I think vines might be shape shifters. There may be a secret technique to getting rid of them, though. It seemed to work for me. I decided to finally take that picture of them after thinking of it, and lo and behold, I wasn’t able to find a single instance of any more vines on trees in that area of our woods.
Speaking of that part of our woods, it is an area with a lot of ash trees, all of which are gradually succumbing to their inevitable demise via the emerald ash borer beetle. Have you seen what it looks like when an ash tree gets stressed?
They sprout sucker growth in a last gasp attempt to regenerate. Does this ever work for a tree? We don’t expect any of our ash trees to survive, but their demise takes a drawn-out 3-5 years. It’s an ugly thing to witness.
On a more beautiful note, the lawn of our backyard is sprinkled with more than just grass because we have little pink flowers that accent much of the slope, and the first blossoms of the year have begun to appear.
Thank goodness those little beauties haven’t been declared invasive and needing to be pulled by the roots. Our turf sports a natural look not found on sports fields and golf courses. Wildflowers are welcome here.
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Awkward Delivery
In the middle of the day yesterday, I received a text warning of a delivery of feed for the horses expected to happen in 40 minutes. I headed down the driveway with Asher, hoping to meet the driver on the road, in case he hadn’t been here before. Previous deliveries have gone the smoothest when they park their huge box truck on the road and use a three-wheeled forklift to travel up the driveway to the barn.
I’m glad I was there when the truck arrived, but it didn’t make much difference in the end. I don’t know how many drivers they have, but it was another first-timer. He appreciated my advice; however, the truck he was given didn’t have a forklift. It had a folded liftgate on the back and two versions of pallet jacks inside, neither of which would work on a gravel surface.
This was a first since This Old Horse started using this supplier for feed. I invited the driver to walk up and take a look at the situation himself to see if we could conjure up a method that could work. He decided it would be possible to back the truck up to the barn, and we could transfer the 40 bags by hand. I wasn’t worried about that solution, since I had moved one entire pallet-full by myself just two months earlier when the barn doors were frozen shut. Two of us could make quick work of moving 40 bags.
As the driver maneuvered the truck into position, I saw his tires sinking deep into the turf beyond the area of gravel. Those ruts will complement the many holes made there by horse hooves when they got loose on Cyndie a couple of weeks ago.
I don’t know what the load capacity of his lift gate on the back of the truck is, but it looked like he was severely taxing it when the loaded pallet settled onto the wobbling gate. He struggled mightily to get the tongues of his electric-powered pallet jack out from under the pallet because the significant bend of the straining gate made the angle almost impossible.
Once he was able to lower the gate down to stable ground, it was a reasonably easy effort for the two of us to move the bags a couple of steps to an empty pallet inside the barn. It was an overall awkward process, but a reasonable solution that avoided him driving the load back and waiting for a different truck to be able to re-deliver to us some other day.
I’m all for creative problem-solving. As a bonus, I kept the pallet the bags were on, instead of having him take it back, like I usually do. It looked like a good candidate for containing compost piles.
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Creative Solutions
In more than a decade of living here with horses, I have never gotten around to making an effort toward improving my primitive methods of composting their manure. If I were truly serious about maximizing my operation, I could have put in a base material on top of the bare ground and installed a roof to avoid rainstorms from saturating the piles.
Yesterday, as I was turning over the lone pile that has been cooking for a while, I was dealing with the inevitable tendency of the drying material to resist holding a cubic shape. It naturally slides off to become much more of a pyramid. Since the outer 6 inches won’t be actively composting, the narrowing top portion of the pile is much less efficient than a cubed shape.
Having contemplated a lazy man’s method of a walled fixture to square up the sides, I finally took steps to test my theory.
With my mindset of wanting to reuse materials, I headed down to the hay shed and scrounged for three pallet possibilities. Right in front, I found a scrap roll of 1/4-inch hardware cloth covered in pigeon droppings. How appropriate, I thought.
I stapled the hardware cloth to two of the pallets and relied on the third having minimal gaps between its boards. Grabbing some loose polypropylene twine lying nearby, I put everything on a wheelbarrow and headed to the compost area. Crudely tying the corners of the pallets together, I tossed the pile inside, easily making it much taller than previously possible.
Why it took me so long to do this is a testament to procrastination.
There is an area in the paddock where the clay soil at the surface is pottery-grade quality. When it gets wet, the weight of the horses sinks their feet down a dramatic depth. The soil around that spot has less clay, but is equally messy when wet. So it doesn’t make sense to me how the horses can create a dry path at an angle across the middle of this otherwise disastrous zone.
I don’t know how they do it, but I wish they would make paths like this in all the other messy areas of the paddocks for all of our sakes.
Creative solutions R us.
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High Hopes
Today, there is a spring election in Wisconsin with a state supreme court race at the top of the ballot. We will also be choosing local municipal and judicial candidates and responding to a school referendum question. It isn’t easy to get truly revealing information on local candidates. So many published statements are couched in terms that sound reasonable on the surface but lack any details that might expose obvious alignment with those who are destroying our country right now.
We have found it has become a case of hunting for any evidence that a candidate supports the current pedophile/criminal-in-chief and using that information to vote AGAINST that person or persons.
Yes, we want our roads maintained responsibly and our tax dollars managed judiciously, but not by anyone who is too bamboozled to object to the wanna-be-king’s every word or decision. Just imagine if the Republican politicians in Congress had enough good sense to “Just Say No” to all the kleptocratic idiocracy the demented leader has unleashed on the world.
Yesterday morning, I was the one bamboozled for a few seconds when I allowed myself to be moved to a tear of hope that the clickbait appearing in a Reddit feed might be real. Was writing “Praise be to Allah” going to be the last straw for all of the staff in the White House, as the headline teased?
No. That was a false hope, just like all the others that have occurred so many times that I can’t remember what it was like before the immature narcissist first dragged his slimy ways into national politics.
Over a year ago, I was so embarrassed to see how President Zelensky was treated in a meeting in the White House that I electronically signed a letter of apology from the American people. I had hoped that it would go viral and make a large impact in influencing members of Congress to save us from the incompetent leader. Yeah, it didn’t.
What did result from that simple moment of hope was that my email inbox became regularly swamped with teasing subject lines begging to be clicked so I could see requests for ongoing financial support from a variety of opposition organizations.
Apparently, I could have stopped this whole mess if I had just sent $5 a month to any one of these well-meaning outfits.
The word “eviscerated” tends to get used a lot in their subject lines. For a while, I was putting the emails in a folder that I named “ClickTHIS!” to see how many varieties of ways they could say the same thing without actually ever stating something real.
After recognizing that each of the messages from places that actually align with my views was repetitively seeking endless financial contributions from me, I stopped looking at them. Instead of unsubscribing from any of them, I use their arrival as a form of entertainment, sending them to the trash as quickly as they appear.
I have high hopes that a day will come when such solicitations are no longer a thing. In the meantime, we will vote every chance we are given.
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Relative Something 