Scenic View
Taking wise advice from a couple of other Wildwood members up here this week, yesterday we hopped in the car and drove through the multi-colored forest up to Cable, WI, to hike around Mt. Telemark Village. At the high spot where chair lifts and downhill ski runs used to be, they have transformed the top portion of the old lift into a lookout tower.
We haven’t reached peak colors up here yet, but the change is near.
Only one colorful leaf out of ten at this point, but we won’t be around for the best of the show in the days ahead. We are heading home today to resume horse care later this afternoon. Mowing grass on the first dry day will be high on the agenda.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming, so to speak, where our scenic views come at a little shorter distance than what we were able to enjoy today.
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Distinct Difference
What a difference a few hours and a little over a hundred miles made in our day yesterday. Asher and I started our day yesterday under a dramatic blanket of fog.
We could barely see Mia out in the field all by herself. When we came around the bend in the back pasture fence line, it looked like the other three horses were expecting us.
They quickly repositioned themselves as if to appear more nonchalant than they actually were. Having their sightlines reduced so significantly makes the horses a little more apprehensive about their situation. Showing up at the usual time to serve them nourishment went a long way toward easing their tension.
With the horses tended to, the only other assignment for the day was to drive up to the lake. Asher was all in for a long car ride. We were rewarded handsomely with lots of blue sky providing an ideal backdrop for the colorful trees glowing in the bright sunlight.
We arrived just a few minutes before John and Pam. Cyndie had prepared a lunch for us to enjoy before taking a walk to show them all of the Wildwood properties.
Asher seems pretty pleased to have all four of his favorite caretakers available for attention at the same time. That’s a big difference from the routine he is used to, where he only gets Pam and John when we have gone off and left him behind.
If today and tomorrow turn out gray and wet like the weather service has forecast, we will be even more grateful to have been blessed with the gorgeous day we were able to enjoy yesterday.
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Lake Bound
After a weekend of sports spectating, Asher and I are packing it in, and I’m driving us north this morning to join Cyndie at the lake. Our friends, Pam and John, will join us– a twist from the usual, since they are normally our animal sitters when we spend weekends at the lake. We wanted to share the lake experience with them for once and enjoy each other’s company over a leisurely few days.
Another friend, Michelle, will tend to the horses while we are away.
It was a heavy gray sky for much of the day yesterday. When the clouds broke open for a short time, the sunshine changed the energy dramatically. As much as I wanted to get out to enjoy it, I was in the middle of folding laundry while watching the end of the Vikings game. By the time the game ended, the cloud cover had thickened back up again.
It was just damp enough that I didn’t try to mow, but I wish I had anyway. The grass is still growing enough that it’s going to be longer than I like by the time we return home.
I’ll be mowing in October again. That shouldn’t be a surprise anymore, with the planet warming continuing unabated, but a lifetime of experience still lingers in my head. Our weather didn’t used to be like this.
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Sad Looking
Interestingly, two of our saddest-looking trees out in the open happen to be next to each other on either side of our driveway. We’ve been watching the first one die slowly for several years.
According to one of the arborists who has done work on our property, it is some hybrid version of a maple. I’ve long been suspicious of the looks of the tangle of roots at its base. It is possible that it is choking itself. There is a seam up the trunk where I believe it cracked open during one of our extreme cold snaps. A large portion in the middle that was all dead wood has been cut out.
Even though it’s not pretty to look at, I am in no hurry to cut it down. I’ll let the portions that are still living continue to show off their tenacity. I suppose it aligns with my idea of appreciating imperfection.
The other candidate for saddest-looking is the remaining 25% of the big, old willow tree.
At just a fraction of its old self, the gaping wounds on the trunk from the three large sections that collapsed really make the tree look like it is doomed. However, given my experience with the neighboring willow tree that should be long dead in the small paddock, I won’t count this one out.
Do you see where Asher is in that picture? He and I had a little extra excitement yesterday. On a walk along the path around the hay field fence, he ventured off the mowed trail to take care of some business where we don’t need to pick it up. He started to return to the path after he was finished, but something caught his attention, and he was soon rustling around in the very thick, tall grass in the middle of the drainage swale.
Suddenly, there was an eruption of angry small-animal screeching as Asher and some critter got into a battle. Not being able to see anything through the thick growth, I hollered commands at him to leave it and come to me, but there was enough noise coming from the fracas that my shouts proved fruitless. It took me a few seconds to ramp up the level of his shock collar to where I got a response, but it worked to perfection.
He let me know with a yelp and an instant sprint from the scene to beside me on the trail. He struggled mightily with a pressing urge to return to the scene, requiring constant verbal redirects from me until we got back to the house. Even then, I was highly suspicious of him taking off to check it out again if I failed to pay close attention.
I’ve found reasons to choose alternate routes on our walks for the time being. It’s a good thing we have plenty of squirrels up around the house to hold his attention. Yes, squirrels in the trees, moles tunneling in the ground, and mice hiding in stumps are his usual targets. I’m inclined to guess it was a raccoon he found in the grass, and I’d rather he not tangle with critters that can put up a fight like those masked bandits do.
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Appreciating Imperfection
With autumn comes that classic transition from a range of greens to rainbows of yellow/orange/red/purple hues. It’s beautiful and a joy to watch day by day as it happens.
There is still a green path in the woods beyond the portion already being covered with fallen leaves.
Our romantic mental image of spectacular fall colors is an amalgamation of all the greatest scenes we’ve enjoyed in person or through photographs over a lifetime. It’s a legitimate picture even though reality can be less idyllic.
It’s still a little early in the season, but the version of fall colors that we are currently seeing at Wintervale is lacking in the splendor that truly inspires wonder and awe.
For now, our treasured autumn vistas are best experienced from a distance.
That’s not to say there aren’t still some dazzling colors to be found across our landscape. This hollyhock is displaying one last gasp of vibrancy.
I’m working on my appreciation for imperfection in the changing leaves that are unlikely to make the cover of fall publications this year.
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Running Hot
With the cooler mornings lately, I don’t need to use a temperature probe; I’m getting visible evidence that the manure is actively composting.
It looks like there is a fire burning in there. By using the pallets to hold the piles into a cube shape, it’s pretty easy to get the manure to reach or even exceed the optimal composting temperature. When it starts getting too hot, I stir it up to bring the middle of the pile up to the top, and that calms things down a bit.
At this accelerated rate of composting, I need to move the pallets to a new spot after just a few days and toss the entire pile back in again because it gets too dense and dry, which interrupts the process. The outer six inches don’t compost, so stirring it up again adds air and mixes the edges back into the active middle.
The mares do a great job of making sure we never run out of raw ingredients for our compost operation.
In the afternoon, while I was waiting for the horses to finish all the feed in their buckets, I took Asher into the woods where I wanted to cut up a small tree that had fallen across one of our trails. He didn’t show up by the time I had finished, so I had to backtrack to find what was occupying him.
I’ve seen this drill many times before. He could smell critters inside a hollow, dead stump. With no need to interrupt his fun, I stood back and watched him work. He’d already been at it the whole time I was cutting up the fallen tree. To help him, I pushed the stump over, giving him full access to both ends.
Then, as he was busy on the top end, a big mouse zipped out the bottom and scampered up the trunk of the tree visible in the picture at Asher’s hip. He completely missed it. Unfortunately, the lack of a mouse didn’t end Asher’s passion for trying to get inside that stump. When my patience ran out, I called him off the stump to join me in returning to the barn to bring in the empty feed buckets.
It’s just Asher and me for the weekend, as Cyndie is up at the lake with friends. This means John will be having the sound on for weekend sports broadcasts without irritating anyone else in the household! Yee-haw!
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Manure Rake
Tractor Supply calls it a rake, but I tend to refer to it as a scoop, although fork could also work if you stretch your thinking. It is the tool I use every day to clean up after the horses under the overhang and within the two paddocks. It quickly earned its place as my favorite tool for the job. Unfortunately, it has a flaw in its design that results in a 100% failure rate over time, where the plastic breaks at three key stress points.
Once that happens, the tool’s days are numbered.
Before it even reaches this level of failure, I will have needed to bear down at least one time on the screw holding the handle to the fork basket to stop it from wobbling, but that’s an easy fix.
They aren’t cheap, but I am so attached to using this tool over all others I’ve tried that we keep buying replacements. Since I am not very good at throwing things away, I have a backlog of broken baskets and saved handles stashed around the property for other potential uses and occasional “aha moments” where I figure out a new idea for repairing them for use again.
A previous attempt to epoxy the plastic in the three places where it breaks gave out after the first use. That triggered an experiment I tried yesterday using a torch to melt the plastic. Wary of the possibility that the areas of the breaks might simply open wider from the heat, I took a trick from welding and used a single plastic tine from a different broken basket to melt into the cracks.
The plastic appeared to singe and burn as much as it melted, which wasn’t ideal, but there was enough melting that I think the idea has merit. This first attempt seemed solid, but when I used it, there was a noise that sounded like it might have cracked again, so the method may need to be improved. A wood-burning tool might be a better heat source than the open flame of a torch, but I’m not sure how I would keep the plastic from sticking to the tip.
I never learned how to weld metals, but I may end up teaching myself how to do the equivalent with melting plastic. It will be an art worth perfecting because these plastic scoops really are my favorite tool for the job, and I’ve got plenty of them lying around that are deserving of repair and to be put back into service for which they were designed. (They work pretty well for scooping up grass clippings that pile up when one has waited too long between mowings.)
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Within Inches
Had a close call with the zero-turn mower when one of the rear wheels started sliding over the edge of a sharp drop near a culvert, and I couldn’t get it to climb back out. Every time I tried to maneuver it back onto flat ground, it felt like I was getting closer to disaster. This happened in a corner of our property near the road that was about as far away as I could get from the shop where I could get the help of the ATV and winch cable to pull the mower back up over that lip.
One thing I try to practice religiously is to stop before I make a problem worse than it already is. I immediately shut off the mower blades and lifted the deck to its highest setting. Getting out of the seat to look at the drop the wheel was caught on, I didn’t think it looked insurmountable. My next move involved muscling the front wheels into alignment to give the mower a straight shot out of the predicament.
One of the front wheels was up in the air, and it felt rather precarious to try sitting back on the seat with the mower tilted on the brink of no return. As soon as my butt landed, I goosed the drive wheels and rolled up onto solid ground again.
It was a real “Phew!” moment.
I was getting to the end of a long day of not just mowing, but multiple other good accomplishments as well. When I took Asher to retrieve the empty feed buckets after breakfast, he wanted to extend it into an adventure walk in our woods. I took advantage of that time to pull many vines off of tree trunks. The ground in the woods beyond the labyrinth is covered with a web of vines that take advantage of almost every tree they encounter.
There are so many vines; it seems like a fruitless attempt to defeat them all, except I noticed it wasn’t as bad as a year ago, so I think we are making progress. Knowing I would have some time between mowing sessions while batteries charged, I pulled the ATV trailer from the hay shed and filled it with composted manure to be spread on the hay field.
The rain of the previous two days kept me from mowing the yards around the house, so I started there first. The grass had definitely responded to the available ground moisture with added inches. While batteries charged after that effort, I started up the Grizzly and hauled two trailer loads of composted manure.
Then it was back to mowing and my close encounter with the drop-off near the culvert. I finished mowing just in time to help Cyndie with afternoon horse chores and found the horses in their calmest and most satisfied state. I gotta say, that’s one of the best ways to end a day filled with non-stop (sometimes anxiety-producing) activities on our land.
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Cyndie’s Eye
I let the Minnesota Vikings take up the middle of my day yesterday and didn’t really accomplish much before or after the game worth writing about. However, Cyndie has been taking some interesting pictures that she has graciously allowed me to feature this Monday.
The sky at sunrise yesterday included a rather precise edge of cloudiness.
Was it clearing up or about to become overcast? The clouds were moving in. We saw a few peaks of sun, but much of the day was overcast.
These next two are glimpses she captured of me that feel a little self-aggrandizing to include, but since they each feature animals as well, I’m using them.
When you’ve been married for 45 years, and your wife is still taking stealthy photos of you, I think that is a good sign. She’s got a good eye for capturing scenes depicting daily activity at Wintervale.
We walk the dog, feed the horses, I mow some grass, we gather wild plums, and Cyndie makes jam out of them. She takes our things to a yard sale, and I stay home and watch football. (Sadly, she probably spent more money on the trips to Minneapolis than she made selling things due to the excruciatingly high cost of gas these days.)
And both of us try to capture photos that depict the beautiful surroundings of our everyday. We are richly blessed to live where we do.
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