Archive for October 2016
Four Years
I was reviewing the “Previous Somethings” archive for some posts that I published four years ago and came upon a picture that means so much to me. During our very first visit in 2012 to see this property with our realtor, I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I hardly took any pictures.
This is one of the few I had for remembering what we had seen, to help me describe the place to family and friends. We had walked a short loop of the trails and I dropped behind Cyndie and Patti while dizzily trying to comprehend what I was experiencing. The place was beyond my wildest imaginings for us.
I came to my senses for a moment and remembered my camera. I captured Cyndie and Patti walking in the distance on a mowed path through one of the fields.
They are walking in a spot that today is about where the entrance to the labyrinth garden is, on their left. The tall weeds on the right are now what we call the Back Pasture, surrounded by a fence.
These are some recent shots of how that spot looks now.
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I get a shiver thinking about that first impression and our visions of the possibilities, combined with the realization of all that has come to be in the four years since.
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Rainy Results
One day later, with the sun shining brightly, I surveyed the results of our crazy mid-summer type of thundershower in October. As I drove in the driveway after work, I could see right away from the car that the grass was laid flat below the culvert.
There was a clear impression of how wide the little runoff river rose after the deluge.
Our rain gauge collected over an inch from Monday night’s dramatic evening cloud burst, and that was on top of a previously accumulated inch that Cyndie had dumped out of the gauge after a drenching earlier that same day.
When we moved to this property, which happened exactly 4 years ago this week, we had no idea the warming climate was going to start dishing out the kind of gully-washing downpours that we have witnessed with increasing regularity each year since.
We have tried a variety of ways to manage the flow —or with regard to the sub-soil, the lack of flow— of water across our land. One trick to reduce the muddiness of our paddocks was the installation of drain tile to help dry out the soil in the springtime, but that didn’t do much to help with the immediate surface runoff of heavy downpours.
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Pouring rains rush down our slopes and carve a multitude of rills around the paddocks below the barn. Dezirea surveyed the sad scene with me yesterday and agreed it kinda sucks.
The geography of our property makes this a difficult thing to prevent, especially since both the frequency and intensity of rainfall have continued to increase since we arrived.
Water will always find a path downhill. The hilly features that we adore so much about this property are also the cause of our erosion problems. We want water to drain from our land, but we would like it to depart with a lot less energy, …preferably leaving all our precious lime screenings behind.
That’s hard to accomplish when the clouds repeatedly unleash inch amounts in spans as short as mere minutes.
Maybe we should look into terracing the paddocks and turning them into rice paddies. Do they make rubber boots that fit horses?
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Startling Storm
I had a ready-made excuse for not working on the chicken coop construction after work yesterday, because rain was falling from the sky. I drove through a couple of heavy downpours on my way home, but it wasn’t raining too hard when I pulled into our driveway.
I must have just missed it, though, because the drainage swale across our pastures was filled with rushing water. Cyndie reported we had received an inch in a very short span of time.
While having dinner with George and Anneliese, something caught my eye outside one of the high triangle windows beside our fireplace chimney. It appeared to be “snowing” leaves high in the sky. A combination of high wind and more rain was stripping the leaves en mass from our trees.
The sky grew dark and Cyndie said she thought it would hail.
“No, it’s not going to hail.” I said. “It’s just looks like this because it’s the middle of October and the sun is low.”
A minute or so after that, it started to hail.
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You’d think I would better know to heed her intuition by this point in our lives together.
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Taking Shape
We are getting close. This weekend we got wallboard nailed on the frame of the chicken coop. That closed it up except for the people-door (because we ran out of pieces long enough to use for that opening).
Elysa and Ande stopped by, surprising us with a visit yesterday. They provided some key assistance toward getting all the gaps filled. It was a bit of a Tetris game to match the boards and the spaces over the studs.
Just having additional hands to hold something in place or hand me another nail helped immensely to keep things humming along. My process involves a lot of pauses to plot several steps ahead and then measure, mark, and cut the pieces.
I had a limited number of large boards that I was trying to match with the best possible spaces. When we didn’t have a long enough piece available, the alternative was to use multiples of the shorter boards. There were a lot more of them from which we could choose.
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In one of our design-on-the-fly decisions, Cyndie and I decided to have two horizontal hinged openings on the wall of the nest boxes. The lower one will open downward and create a little shelf to place cartons while collecting eggs. I decided to use the space above the nests, where there will be a slanted board to keep the chickens from perching, as a small, angled storage area.
The upper opening will be hinged at the top and swing upwards to provide full access to the cubby space.
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When we excitedly got one of the boards mounted on the backside, I realized I’d forgotten about cutting the slot opening for the access door to the poop-board. Now I’ll be doing that after the fact.
That’s the kind of thing that happens when you are making things up as you go along.
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Octember Feeling
Our weather this weekend is feeling more like September than October, with temperatures warming near 70° (F) for the highs. The morning-scape today was beautiful, as the sun just started igniting the colors in the distance.
Delilah and I trekked the full circumference of our property before stopping to serve up morning feed for the horses. The air was alive with the traffic of bird sounds and the occasional distant dog.
Our sweet puppy was in a more subdued mood and refrained from answering any of the calls, which I greatly appreciated.
It was a precious autumn morning of the kind that soothes whatever ails you.
The kind you wish would never end…
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I am pretty sure chances for more of these kinds of mornings are waning, regardless the ongoing warming-ization of our planet. As early as tonight, the forecast includes the words “showers” and “thunderstorms,” and then by the end of the week, the predicted high temperatures drop significantly.
Of course, the impending transition to cold weather is what makes mornings like today’s so incredibly precious.
And it is why we soak them up with such thorough all-encompassing exuberance.
We know Octember is not going to linger much longer.
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Internal Detailing
When choosing to make it up as you go along, assembly projects can gobble up a lot of time. I had visions of putting up the walls on the new chicken coop yesterday, but never quite got that far. We did make good progress on visualizing the steps we would take to get the internal details finished, despite not actually making the final cuts and screwing the last few things into place.
We started the day by completing the all-important “poop board” assembly that is located underneath the roost branches. We have designed it for a plan of daily sliding the board out for a quick cleaning, scraping off the droppings so they can be composted for fertilizer.
While I was sawing and nailing the bits and pieces associated with that feature, Cyndie worked on making an entrance ramp for the chickens, using branches for the outer frame and then weaving grape vines around them.
Slowly but surely, I devised a plan for how we will secure the edges of hardware cloth with trim boards that I have scrounged from a store of lumber in the garage that has probably been around since the day the house was built.
That means it has been here through two owners before us.
We cut pieces of hardware cloth to cover the window openings on three walls and got those stapled in place. Then I did some work on enclosing the ceiling below the roof structure.
Cyndie cut openings in the plastic bins we are using for the nest boxes and I measured and marked the dividers for those.
It was about that point in the day where things stalled a bit, because I had forgotten twice earlier to take my spare battery to the shop to get it charging.
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Note to self: When working on the last internal details, don’t neglect the other important details of taking care of the equipment that allows you to finish the task at hand.
Eventually, the second battery ran out of power and I was forced to take them both up to be charged. That left me unable to cut anything on which I had marked dimensions.
With luck, that will allow me to make some good progress this morning, quickly cutting the prepared pieces to finish the nesting boxes and securing the last of the hardware cloth beneath the roof.
Then it’ll be time to close the walls, baby.
Oh oh. That means I’ll next need to figure out how I’m going to do the doors. One more thing I’ve never done before in my life.
I’m pretty sure we’re gonna need some hinges…
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Night Off
I got home from work yesterday and all I wanted to do was not work on the chicken coop. So that’s what I did, with Cyndie’s blessing. When I walked in the door, I found a fire burning in the fireplace and it was enough to squelch any lingering motivation to rush out into the chilly grayness of the fading day to pick up where I’d left off on the design-on-the-fly construction project.
I delved into some acoustic guitar music in my iTunes library and created a playlist to serve as soundtrack for luxuriating on the couch in front of the warm glow of burning logs with friends, while Cyndie made magic in the kitchen. It was divine.
Life is good.
If you don’t stop and take that in every once in a while, you might miss it.
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Horses Down
One really great thing about the proximity of our chicken coop to the pastures is that we are able to observe the herd while we work. The middle of the day has been a time when it is not surprising to look out and find them settled in for a group nap.
That is always such a captivating sight, having them all lay down for a rest at the same time.
I would assume that they feel much more comfortable conking out to that level of unconscious when they have enough light to safely survey the surroundings.
The funny thing for me is, the way they look here mirrors the way I tend to feel around those same hours while at the day-job lately. Trying to simultaneously design and build a chicken coop has me burning my candle at both ends. A long night’s sleep has been one of the things I’ve sacrificed.
Oh how I’d love to join the horses for a mid-morning power nap.
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Relative Something 