Archive for July 2018
Wondering If
While trimming the remaining grass around all the pine trees over the weekend, three things triggered a new hypothesis about our ongoing loss of red pines. I’m wondering if it might have something to do with girdling from the trees being root bound.
I did some searching to see if being root bound might contribute to the way so many of our red pines are coming out of the ground at about a 45° angle before eventually turning to grow straight up, but didn’t find any hint of that connection.
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Then, while writing to describe my latest discoveries to our regional DNR Forester, it struck me that the eighteen inches of heavy, wet snow that fell in May of 2013 tipped many of our trees, but not all of them. In fact, mainly the red pines leaned over. If they were planted without proper attention to the roots, well, a root bound tree would have a hard time standing straight under that kind of load in the wet ground.
While laboring to walk through the cut growth with the power trimmer on my shoulder, I stumbled over an old stump of a long-dead tree. I was curious about an obvious circular root growth, but just tossed it to the side.
Later, while trimming beneath pine branches, I caught a brief glimpse of a girdling root on one tree which triggered a memory of long ago, when we lost a tree in Eden Prairie to root girdling. It led me to go back and reclaim that old stump for a picture, finally thinking I might be on to something.
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It occurred to me that I should also take a picture of the girdling root I had just spotted on that live tree. I retraced my path to find it again, but to no avail.
I was hot, tired, sweaty, and covered with weeds and grass shrapnel. I didn’t have the energy or mental acuity to execute an intelligent search. I am confident it is out there somewhere, unless maybe it was just an optical illusion that my mind used to help guide me further along this theory I was concocting. I’ll allow for a possibility it was all in my head.
If I receive a response from our Forester that lends credence to my thinking, I’ll undertake a more organized research expedition through that grove of pines again.
I realized, in afterthought, that my tired searching was mainly focused on looking at the leaning red pines, in support of my hypothesis. Maybe the root I noticed had yet to cause a problem, and was on one of the trees that still looked just fine.
It all definitely has me wondering. Did these red pines have already compromised root systems when they were all planted? There are several stumps still in the back yard from trees I cut off at ground level after they died. I could always exhume those remains to collect a little more evidence.
Put that on the “someday” list. For now, I’m going to wait to see if our DNR Forester thinks my latest findings could possibly explain our red pines slowly dying, year after year.
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Quickly Fixed
The chickens finally did in the ramp of woven sticks leading up to their door into the coop. In trying to mend it, the outer braces let loose and I pretty much ended up rebuilding the whole thing.
Unfortunately, many of the old twigs had lost the necessary flexibility. They snapped before I could bend them into position. Cyndie showed up and helped scout some greener specimens among the random growth nearby.
Then she grabbed my camera and documented the process.
Luckily, there is no sound with the images, so my verbal frustration over the breaking sticks was not captured.
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Just like that, it is complete again. I asked the chickens to leave it alone this time.
I’ll let you know how well that works out.
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Another Cut
I’ve written about our frustration over waiting for our hay-field to get cut before the weeds had a chance to go to seed. Now that those fields have been cropped clean, my attention turned to knocking down the weeds and troublesome invasive plants growing rampant on the other side of our driveway.
When I finished mowing, I took a picture.
A day later, Cyndie showed me a photo album our friend Melissa shared with pictures from her visit, days earlier. I couldn’t resist grabbing Mel’s gorgeous image from a similar vantage point, taken before I had mowed.
It causes me a little regret, because the visual of the before/after doesn’t necessarily look like an improvement. There are a few butterflies that aren’t very happy with me, as well. I’m hoping they will find their way over to Cyndie’s other gardens where she has offerings that are desirable to both us and them.
As much as we love the natural look of our uncut field on the north side of our driveway, it contains problem plants that we don’t want migrating across to the hay-field we have been working to improve for years.
One future possibility we are considering is doing a prairie restoration. That process starts with a prescribed burn, which makes it a production that we can’t accomplish all on our own and will need a fair amount of planning and follow through to bring to fruition.
It doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but it is involved enough that it won’t just occur on a whim.
Until then, we will continue to periodically cut down the growth as a way of controlling the weeds from completely taking over.
Sorry, butterflies.
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Extreme Pruning
I understand that there is a significant road right-of-way distance that the township is responsible for managing, but I didn’t think our low-traffic rural road warranted clearance as wide as a county road. Had I known they were going to do such extreme pruning to our road this summer, I wouldn’t have wasted a good part of a day doing a quaint version of the job myself this spring.
Back sometime in May I suppose it was, I had taken the pole-saw to the trees after a close call on my bike. When rolling down our driveway, I couldn’t see if there was anyone coming from up the hill until just as I reached the road. It didn’t allow time for a calm stop, if you know what I mean.
On Thursday afternoon, I started mowing the grass and came upon a very strange item obstructing my progress along our driveway. As I was picking it up, I saw Jackie driving in and I held up the shredded shrapnel of a leg-sized tree for her to see and gave a quizzical expression of “What the heck?”
She rolled down her window and told me there had been some serious work done along the road because there were pieces of trees all over our trail.
It surprised me a little, because they had already come by relatively recently to cut the weeds down like they do every year.
This time was different. For the first time since we’ve lived here, they came by with some monster machine that eats trees and spits the pieces out hundreds of feet away.
I would have loved to have been around to see the spectacle, except I don’t think there is a safe distance from which you could view it, based on the size of scary chunks of tree pieces that are now strewn surprisingly long distances away from the scene of the carnage.
They left the cottonwood trees, though. For now, anyway.
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I wouldn’t be surprised to discover they left them only because the size of those trees would require different equipment.
I’m a little sad that the “efficiency” of using a machine that chews up anything it touches ends up leaving so many shredded half-trees and tangles of branches. The front of our property looks like an advertisement for disarray and neglect.
I want to go cut this poor remnant to the ground.
Or, I suppose I could make a flat cut at the top and balance a stone on it, for accent.
It looks like they left rabbit ears on it. Maybe I should carve a bunny face.
If I could reach as high as their machine, I’d cut off the 18-inch shredded limb stumps on the side of the cottonwoods, the way a proper branch pruning is supposed to be done for a healthy tree.
Maybe their not doing so is a clue about the future of those cottonwoods.
Time will tell.
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On Schedule
The first egg appeared yesterday!
Right on schedule, per our calculations. Melissa and Sarah were visiting and Cyndie took them down to check the coop, just in case. The fact that they were present to witness the occasion was fitting, in that last year they were all up at the lake together when I reported the appearance of our first egg from that flock.
The Williams girls are our good luck charms.
The chickens were being very social while the ladies played a few rounds of ladder golf on the driveway. Instead of being intimidated by the flying obstacles, the birds took great interest in the colorful orbs.
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Maybe they thought the golf balls looked like eggs.
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More Bales
With all those fat windrows laying in our fields, there was more than enough for us to take a wagon load of bales for ourselves. It took a little creative arranging to fit them in the shed, with our recently purchased bales already stacked to the ceiling, but we found a way to make them fit.
Jody successfully completed baling the last of the windrows, leaving our fields with the clean look of being freshly cut.
Cyndie climbed the mountain of bales in the wagon and heaved them out for me to stack.
We won’t need to go to a gym to get a workout, that’s for sure.
There’s nothing like putting in a full day of work and then following that up with an intense effort of throwing more than a hundred bales in the July heat.
Since we wanted to keep bales from our back pasture, I had some time to kill while Jody finished filling one wagon with bales from the hay-field. I took advantage of the time to turn and rearrange our composting manure piles.
While I was nearing completion of that task, Cyndie called me to meet a neighbor who volunteered to take our miscellaneous metal scrap that was slowly accumulating. That was a wonderful happenstance, allowing me to clean out a pile of ugly metal trash that we’d piled up over the five years we’ve been here.
It was a rewarding three-for-one night of accomplishments that left little time for much else.
Dinner didn’t happen until 8:30 p.m., and bedtime was a little later than usual, but we were buoyed by the satisfying accomplishments we’d achieved.
Once again, we are feeling happy to be done with stacking bales for a while. This time, that joy should last for a much longer span of weeks.
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Ample Windrows
Making the first cut of our fields for hay this late in the summer provides a benefit of windrows looking very robust. When we got home from the lake on Sunday, both our hay-field and the back pasture were cut. Yesterday, Jody raked the cuttings into rather buxom windrows.
The result was a gorgeous scene to behold.
This afternoon he will bale. We are going to store a wagon load in our almost filled hay shed and he will take the rest.
If we could rely on him being able to cut our fields every year, we could probably get away with not buying any hay from our other sources.
I don’t know if he would be as motivated to help us if he wasn’t getting some bales out of the deal, so it’s not a guaranteed plan, but it’s an enticing dream to ponder.
Walking our property last night was an immersion in a quintessential country summer evening. The air was thick with a potpourri of aromas from wild plants and cultivated crops approaching their peak. Songbirds, frogs, and crickets provided a steady humming soundtrack for the hours on both sides of the sunset.
With the air calm, there was little else moving to muddy the sound.
The temperature was warm and perfectly humid, well short of feeling uncomfortable. It was the kind of day to burn into our deepest memories, hoping to make it available again for the depths of the cruelest days that winters regularly dish out.
Locally grown sweet corn is starting to show up and the watermelon is once again flavorful. County fairs are in full swing.
With a seeming emphasis, yet an inviting ease, it smells, tastes, and sounds like we are smack dab in the thickest part of summer.
Might as well throw some more bales of hay.
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Photo Review
There were so many highlights of our weekend at the lake over the last three days that I am simply going to fill today’s post with some of the images depicting different moments from our adventures.
We were out visiting artistic retail shops in quaint Cable, WI, on Friday and decided to make the short drive further on to see the abandoned resort, Telemark Lodge.
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Peeking in the windows, we noticed head-height smudges on the glass that showed we weren’t the first ones to do this exploring.The facility had been through multiple bankruptcies and left abandoned for years. It looked like someone chained the doors and just walked away, leaving everything as it was.
It was intriguing to see the level of incidental decay of portions of the roof and fascia, the hazardous looking green of residual water in the pool, and the weeds growing through every crack in the concrete walkways.
We got out onto the lake, where the view back toward the empty beach looked like a resort with beach chairs prepared for the day ahead. A walk down the driveway provided a chance to glimpse the juvenile bald eagles perching on branches beyond their nest.
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Flight can’t be far off for these two.
On Saturday afternoon, we got out on the lake for a short happy-hour cruise.
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It was a fine weekend for boating. Back on land at dinner time, the Wilkuses provided pork chops for the grilling.
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Feasting is a regular opportunity with Cyndie’s family. Barb and Mike fit right in.
After dinner we gathered with company around the fire to enjoy the sounds of a wedding reception a few properties down the shoreline from us.
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Unfortunately, the sound didn’t travel our direction, and we barely heard a note.
Not to worry. We put on our own music and lingered long around the mesmerizing visual of burning wood.
It was a picture-postcard perfect summer weekend at the lake with friends and family that I’m hoping will linger in my mind for many days, despite returning to the responsibilities of day-job and home chores.
Home life is what makes going to the lake that much more special!
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Final Donation
Some people are uncomfortable focusing on death before that grim reality is unavoidably forced upon them. I don’t have that problem, although I will admit to a passing curiosity over the risk of “thinking” something so fatal into occurring.
The end of life subject has come up for me enough times recently that I have now chosen to take action to put in place a plan for my body when I die. Thanks to my sister, Judy, I learned that donating my body to science provides a no cost option for cremation.
I interpret that as a bonus to the even more valuable service of contributing to the advancement of medicine by donating my body for science after I am no longer living in it.
Making a whole body donation is one of the most compassionate funeral alternatives available. When you donate your body to science, Science Care can eliminate and cover all of the costs. With the rising costs of living and final arrangements, whole body donation can be a real blessing not only for medical researchers but for family members.
http://www.sciencecare.com/free-cremation-benefitting-the-community/
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After a quick internet search for information, I chose to register with Science Care. Having already opted to be an organ donor when getting my driver’s license renewed, it was nice to see that Science Care is prepared to work together with other organizations to fulfill both possibilities.
It all happens in a sequence.
The last step in the registration for donation is to inform my family so that they will be aware of my wishes and know who to contact at the time of my death. What better way than right here in this space. So, Cyndie, kids, and my siblings, take note.
When I say I want to donate my body to science, it’s not just idle talk. I mean it.
And, I have taken the steps to facilitate that process, just in case I don’t live long enough that science will have finally perfected that suspended animation thing where our bodies are kept alive until some future generation has mastered a way to stay healthy forever.
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Relative Something 