Archive for May 2017
Chicken Catching
We are getting close to opening up the netting and giving our chicks a chance to do some exploring. They are currently confined to a small courtyard at the foot of the ramp out their door, as well as the space beneath the elevated coop.
Cyndie tossed a little food as I was preparing to take some pictures while they were out and about. That resulted in most of the heads being down and the butts up.
I didn’t make it out to see the show when Cyndie moved them back into the coop for the night, but she said it was quite a spectacle. She had read one suggestion about training them to come in for the night by regularly using a unique call and shaking a little container of food for enticement.
I asked her what her call was going to be. She didn’t have anything specific worked out yet. I think it might be, “Here chicks.”
Sounds like they were unimpressed with her offerings.
At first none of them wanted to go in. Then one headed inside on its own accord, but when it realized it was alone in there, it came back out.
After Cyndie got a couple of them inside, one chose to lay down right in front of the door, obstructing the opening.
With the food offering failing to impress them and Cyndie’s call not inspiring action, it was time to resort to the long hooked stick to pull them in by their feet.
All this was accompanied by Delilah’s unwelcome barking, which did not contribute one bit to Cyndie’s calm demeanor.
In fact, from the house, it sounded like there was some cursing going on down there. At least, from what I could sense between the barking.
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Trying Hard
Our wonderfully sweet and incredibly carnivorous Belgian Tervuren Shepherd, Delilah, was trying so hard to be a good cooperator yesterday for Cyndie. There is currently nothing more enticing to her than the scent of chicken manure and she has quickly figured out there is a really good supply of it around the chicken coop.
I suppose the presence of flittery feathered figures darting about enhances the allure quite a bit, but honestly, she seems almost more interested in the scent they leave behind. (I wish.)
In attempt to train her to better control her urges, Cyndie restrained Delilah a short distance from the coop while the chickens were romping in their courtyard and Cyndie was cleaning the coop. Delilah’s job was to practice staying calm while observing the action.
I think maybe she was closing her eyes in attempt to overcome the powerful drive revving inside her.
Sounds like it went well for a little while, but over time the urge would become unbearable. Delilah would get all wound up and let out a yelp. Next would come the nervous yawn.
After a little calm assurance from Cyndie, the exercise would resume for another round.
We are hoping to keep up a regular dose of exposure to the chickens for Delilah, while closely supervising her state of increasing excitement. In time, if we last long enough, she should become bored with the situation. When that happens, we ratchet up the exercise to bring her another step closer to the chickens while working to help her maintain a state of calm submission.
I am inclined to think we will get bored before she will, but I think the only alternative involves risks to the chickens that we don’t want to take.
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Springing Forth
The multitude of flora on our property is springing forth at a variety of rates this year. To our surprise, some of our trillium are flowering earlier than we’ve seen before. That’s particularly thrilling for us because most of the bloomers are transplants we brought from Cyndie’s family vacation home up north.
We’ve had a good run of consecutive dry days, followed by a perfect evening rainstorm Monday night and it is making growing things very happy.
Getting the water right is key to a lot of things. I went for a scouting bike ride on Sunday to investigate a route that didn’t involve gravel roads. I was successful in that, but in so doing, I out-rode my water supply. The last spot I was planning to get a refill hadn’t yet opened for the season.
I decided to push for the finish on limited rations.
It’s not that hard. I limped home safe and sound, but I was unsurprisingly under-hydrated. What intrigues me is how long the evidence has lingered. Two days later, despite consciously increasing my usual daily intake in hopes of catching up, my primary barometer (urine color) revealed I was still behind.
Working on a long game toward optimal health involves an unending series of small daily efforts. It involves making corrections along the way for intermittent deviations.
As I prepared my breakfast and lunch last night for today’s shift in the mine, measuring the amount of cereal to meet my goals for grams of sugar, it hit me again how different my diet is from just a couple of years ago. I don’t expect I’ve yet reached a point of undoing what decades of a high sugar intake produced in me.
It was probably in the late 1980s that I attended a lecture that touted a mantra of eating like a king for breakfast, a queen for lunch, and a pauper for dinner. I embraced that part about breakfast with gusto, figuring my high activity sports habit was more than enough justification to eat whatever I wanted.
Portion sizes swelled, guilt-free. Meanwhile, my body tended to swell, too –despite the constant exercise of soccer and cycling. I miss eating too much cereal for breakfast whenever I felt like it, but I don’t miss how it made me look and feel.
Pondering the difference helps to reinvigorate my inspiration for staying on course for the long haul.
I’m feeling renewed energy to spring forth into another year of living well. Maybe it will bring me into full bloom sooner than I expect.
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Mood
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maybe it’s this mood I’m in
that has me feeling this way
falling head over heels
for another character
Anna Kendrick played
in a movie
and getting floored
by every song
on a John Hiatt album
from deep in the stack
when did we get this old
that we look like our parents
or some of us
like our grandparents
slogging away
at the day to day
letting time sail past
unaware how it pulls
us along on the crest
flying through moods
as they materialize
conjured from unlikely sources
a dream
a picture
a thought I once had
a dog I just remembered
from a long time ago
it’s all Jello
in different colors
before photo manipulation was all the rage
but it can’t be retrieved
no matter how long we wait
so we wrestle with the trick
of figuring out how it’s still connected
with this particular minute
and I wonder what it has to do
with this mood I still find myself in
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Additional Steps
You might think the title of today’s post refers to walking, after all the promotion we have done recently for our World Labyrinth Day event, but that’s just me being cute. The added steps to which I’m referring are in the realm of expanding the promotion of Wintervale Ranch and Retreat Center. We are slowly updating the pages of our Wintervale Ranch web site, and we have now launched into today’s world of social media.
If you are on Facebook, you can now follow Wintervale Ranch there, because we have our own page. That is where we will regularly share news on upcoming events and workshops.
Those of you willing and able could help us out in our quest to grow our online presence by “Liking” our page and sharing it with your Facebook world.
I’m told, this is how it works. We solicit others to like our page. Honestly, it feels a little contrived to me, but my sources have assured me this will be a familiar and accepted request to regular Facebook users. So, if it makes sense to you, we would love to grow a wide pool of followers from near and far.
“Relative Something” fans, do your thing…
And thanks, from Cyndie, me, and all of our animal family at Wintervale!
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Peacefully Walking
Wintervale Ranch and Retreat Center hosted a World Labyrinth Day event yesterday and participated in the Walk as One at 1:00, a global wave of taking steps for peace.
Family, friends, friends of friends, neighbors, and previous property owners arrived throughout the afternoon on a beautiful May day to trek the roundabout path and ponder.
One participant mentioned she had spent 35 minutes striding to the center and back out again, adding that stopping to touch things may have lengthened the duration of her journey.
It was a delightful departure from my norm to see the labyrinth energized with so many souls walking together. I spend a lot of solo time in that garden.
Cyndie worked her magic in the kitchen to fill the counter with a wide variety of fresh-baked caramel rolls to provide both energy and incentive for walking. I was careful to avoid eating a great big serving, but by sampling bite-size nibbles from the plain, frosted, with raisins, and finally, a pecan covered version throughout the entire day, I’m sure I successfully obliterated the balance of my healthy food pyramid for the week.
After the labyrinth, the chickens and their coop became a prominent attraction for visitors, followed by a stop to see how the horses were doing.
It was an invigorating day. As always, our belief was confirmed. As fabulous a place to live as this is, it is never in full spectacular bloom until guest arrive to launch the ultimate greatness.
Thank you to all of you who found your way here yesterday. It made for a wonderful mix of energized peacefulness.
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Herd Reunited
I am very happy to be able to report that Dezirea has made enough progress toward good health that Cyndie decided to allow her back with our other horses. In fact, to celebrate the milestone, Cyndie let all 4 of them step out onto the green grass for their first brief taste of the spring.
We have now arrived at the difficult period when we meter out their minutes of grazing on the lush spring growth. In years past, the strict constraints on the time we allowed them were merely applied to ease their digestive systems into the change. Then we came to realize that they don’t work hard enough to justify the rich diet full-time.
We have to limit their grazing most of the year in order to keep them from becoming overweight.
Cyndie has purchased some muzzles in hope of giving the horses a chance to roam the pasture without over-eating. They can eat through the muzzle, but it takes a bit more time and effort. It will slow down their intake.
Since they are not out on the pasture full-time, they’ve been eating hay longer into the warm months. Last night we visited a new local source of small bales that Cyndie found through an ad. We filled the back of the pickup with as much as it would hold and hustled back to the ranch, quickly serving up a few test bites to the horses.
They loved it! That was a relief.
Hauling hay at the end of the day was a lot of work, because we were already fatigued from continued sprucing of the labyrinth, mowing the lawn, re-hanging the vines across the path out of the back yard, spending time with chickens out of the coop, and turning the composting manure piles.
Today will be a much more leisurely day. It’s World Labyrinth Day! We are expecting visitors around noon, so after a few small chores of preparation in the morning, we will be lounging, snacking, visiting, and walking for peace throughout the afternoon.
I’m looking forward to having the afternoon off.
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Almost Ready
This is our fifth spring of reworking our Rowcliffe Forest Garden Labyrinth after the abuses that winter throws at it. It’s got me questioning our decision to make it as large as we did. Aesthetically, it is just the way I envisioned, so that’s very rewarding. The downside however, is that maintenance ends up being a VERY large chore.
Here’s something I don’t get: The freeze/thaw cycles tend to push rocks up in the farmer’s cultivated fields, where they are totally unwanted. The rocks we positioned to define the circling labyrinth path are all moving down and getting swallowed by the earth around them.
I spent time re-balancing the double-stacked rocks at the U-turns last night. There were areas of the paths where I could barely find the rocks because they had settled so deep in the soft turf. My long-term goal was to keep adding rocks every year, to form little rock wall barriers defining the trail.
At this point, it is more like starting from scratch every spring, trying to define the pathway from almost nothing.
I’m probably exaggerating a little bit, because after a reasonable effort last night, we’ve gotten close to feeling completely ready for tomorrow’s big event.
World Labyrinth Day is Saturday and we have opened up our 11-circuit Chartes style labyrinth to host visitors in the “Walk as One at 1:00” event. There is going to be a global wave of peace flowing tomorrow afternoon.
If you don’t make it out to Wintervale to join us, pause wherever you are during the one o’clock hour and send some peace out in the world.
Then take a moment to absorb the wave flowing along.
Namaste.
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Not Quite
First of all, I have good news and bad news to report on Dezirea’s progress. The good news is that she is showing interest in eating and behaving much less depressed. The bad news is that she is showing very little, if any progress toward returning to normal manure production. She remains under close supervision, but we have decided on a path of minimal intervention for now.
I caught several frames of activity on the trail cam a couple of nights ago, but the best way I can describe what appeared in the series of images is, the camera captured Predator in invisible stealth mode. It was actually kinda creepy.
It doesn’t show up in a single image, but when a series of multiple images is toggled, the blur of translucent motion is detectable. One possibility is that a deer was moving too fast for the camera speed. I suspect deer because a minute later, the view picked up an extreme closeup of a fraction of the rear flank of what can only have been a deer passing directly in front of the camera.
There aren’t any other animals that size, except for maybe the Predator.
It’s not quite warm enough for the chickens to be given full access to their little courtyard, but in the days ahead, the forecast looks promising. The birds are showing great interest. Cyndie snapped a shot of two of them enjoying the view out their picture window.
Delilah seems even more anxious for them to come out than they are. Lately, there is nothing about her behavior that assures me she understands their protected status in the hierarchy of our domestic animals.
I’m pretty sure she is not quite there.
Just like Dezirea is not quite back to normal health.
We are standing by expectantly, sending love to all our critters for good health and mutual respect.
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Relative Something 