Archive for July 2020
New Project
A new opportunity has unfolded for Cyndie to practice her skills as a baker from our own kitchen. A nearby organic berry farm where she shops for strawberries that she cans as jam was looking to expand their offerings and sell baked goods to their customers. Cyndie volunteered to drop off some samples the next day.
Her almond-cherry scones were an overwhelming hit and led to requests for additional varieties, to which she gladly complied.
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Strawberry hand-pies and chocolate-raspberry cookies soon arrived along with her masterpiece of lemon-blueberry scones. They want ’em all.
She is packaging the treasures for individual sale.
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I’m confident there will be some very happy berry shoppers after their visit to the farm today.
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Grass ‘Splosion
I was looking at this explosion of natural tallgrass yesterday and it took on the appearance of a bursting firework finale to my eyes.
Do you see it?
Closer inspection of these blades reveals the hazardous serrated edges that can damage flesh. It even cuts itself!
Growth of greenery is at maximum acceleration now. The corn plants in the fields of the surrounding area are gaining about five inches a day. It’s shocking to see the difference a day makes in the height of the tightly spaced stalks that fill entire fields.
Meanwhile, the round bales on our land are starting to droop under their own weight. I don’t understand why these get left in the field so long. At this point, they are just crushing spots that could be growing more grass for baling the second cut.
Also, it just feels so wrong to leave hay out in the rain.
I understand the rain or snow water just runs off the outside layer, but I imagine the bottom portion that is in contact with the ground must get pretty rotten over time.
One of these days, I’ll get around to asking the guy who is renting our fields.
Till then, I’ll enjoy the added ambiance the bales add to the landscape. They can serve as a distraction from all the Queen Anne’s Lace weeds that are having their own little explosion of growth in the time since the fields were first cut this year.
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Garden Growth
I should never doubt Cyndie just because she does things differently than I would. Her all-encompassing dive into big-time produce gardening has been nothing short of incredible to witness. Where I would have considered planting just a few things to find out what works and what doesn’t, she planted more things than I can count.
Cyndie just counted them for me: 23.
Countable, maybe, but more than I can keep track of. I don’t know how she does it.
I have been eating fresh pea pods in meals for the last five days in a row.
Meanwhile, the wild black raspberry bushes finally sprouted fruit and Cyndie has been picking berries in addition to tending her gardens.
The growth of produce around here this year has been a wonder to behold. We’ve gone from zero to plenty!
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Just Love
Certainly, there could be worse things to keep coming back to, but my mind has begun to develop a healthy habit of naturally settling on thoughts about sending and receiving LOVE amid the swirl of good and bad circumstances that wash over us with unrelenting regularity.
We learned last night of an unexpected death among our extended family, all too close to the time of Cyndie’s dad’s passing that has everyone already raw with grief. The increasing infection rate of the coronavirus pandemic is pressing firmly against the frustrations of being locked down for months and disrupting dreams of resuming some previous activity.
Plans for the fall are far from settled as to whether schools will be able to open safely and entertainment venues will figure out a way to host events.
It is almost becoming a physically painful thing to not be able to hug people, on top of the ever-awkward absence of a genuine handshake.
Still, we are showered with ongoing blessings that become more precious with each pause for acknowledgment. The gestures of condolence that have arrived in the last two weeks have warmed our hearts.
Last Sunday, Cyndie and I worked on preparing the brooder for the anticipated arrival of 12 new day-old chicks this month. As hard as the loss of birds is on my tender wife, she couldn’t stop herself from ordering more. New life is coming to Wintervale again!
Summer is in full swing in all its glory around our land, regardless of the recent loss of some big trees. We’re preparing to host travelers we’ve not met before from my virtual community, Brainstorms, in the days ahead. We offered a free parking spot for their small RV on their trek home that is taking them right past our neighborhood on the interstate.
I keep imagining how pleasant it would be if the news media took several days off from mentioning anything a certain person says or does and simply focused on news that matters without any distractions or fabricated drama. I do struggle to muster enough love to offset the disturbance that rolls out of the nation’s capital like the irritation of a lingering dead skunk smell.
The high heat and excessively oppressive tropical dewpoint temperatures are hanging around lately even longer than skunk odors, which is definitely exacerbating the angst of those who lack artificial cooling in their homes.
There is good and bad roiling around in a weird mix. What can we do to cope effectively but love?
Just love.
It sure can’t hurt to try.
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— special love goes out to Carlos today for his sorrow and loss —
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Aerial History
With much appreciation to my son, Julian, for his pointer to a precious University of Minnesota online historical aerial photograph resource he stumbled onto yesterday, I dedicate today’s post to my siblings and cousins who will most likely enjoy this more than anyone else.
I immediately searched for images from my old Eden Prairie homes. I started looking at our house on Cedar Ridge Road, but the big fun was exploring views of Intervale Ranch on old County Road 18.
Check out the place in 1960:
I have cropped this to include Fullerton’s and McCartney’s houses for reference, and the gravel pit across from the driveway of our house.
You can clearly see the center circle of our driveway, the tennis court, the barns, and the house on the hill that was the Superintendent’s quarters where the family first lived while our grandparents were in the main house.
Just seven years later, it looked like this:
Look how much bigger the gravel pit is. You can see the divided highway that formed the barrier between us and Braemar Park. I’m pretty certain that the final excavation of the surroundings was already underway, based on the pathway cleared between the outer barn and the highway.
Here is a closer zoom focusing on Intervale:
Can you find the chestnut tree?
And finally, here is a wider pan to show more of the surroundings:
This gives the added reference of 494 in the bottom of the frame, much of the golf course, and –with the stark white roof– the Braemar hockey rink.
You can also see the rest of the expanded gravel pit.
Remember how hilly it was around there? From the satellite view, it is really hard to get a sense of those dramatic features. I believe we have photos of the construction of the north/south divided highway that was County 18 at the time that are dated 1962. I find it interesting to consider the changes that happened in the seven years between these images.
Cyndie and I have been at Wintervale for seven years now. In October it will reach eight. Luckily, I’ve already been collecting the overhead satellite views of this property.
Hopefully, there won’t be any divided highway installations coming into the pictures in our lifetimes.
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Trees Down
It’s certainly not the first time that I have written about fallen trees on our land and it definitely won’t be the last. The most recent two incidents were both completely unexpected and surprisingly large. They both came down after the stormy weather that dowsed us with over seven inches of rain in a very short time. I finally got around to dealing with them on Friday and upon close inspection of the job at hand discovered just how big they really were.
It was hard to cut them into pieces small enough to lift because they were so hefty. In fact, the initial effort didn’t result in removing any of the wood and branches, we just rearranged it into more compact piles.
The tree that was closer to the house and thankfully fell away from the structure now lies in the woods of my neighbor’s land. When I first noticed it, there was no evidence from the surrounding trees that anything had happened. There is a wall of leafy growth on the edge of forests that form a sort of walled barrier to the cathedral within, where the canopy of shade protects a spacious natural auditorium.
When I stepped through that outer shell to see how big that tree was, I was even more impressed with our luck that it didn’t lean toward our house, instead.
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At least this tree didn’t mess up any of the others around it.
The big oak, on the other hand, was merciless to many of the smaller trees in its path. It is heartbreaking to discover how many of the surrounding tree limbs have been snapped or bent over severely by the pressure of the falling beast.
When a big tree falls, you often lose more than just that one tree.
We are at no shortage of lumber to be turned into woodchips for our landscaping needs.
I’m hoping we might enjoy a break for a long while now before the next big tree makes its way back down to earth.
It’s not my favorite event in the natural world.
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Interesting Perch
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Does anything stand out to you in this rocky photo of our pond that I captured yesterday?
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Yes, that’s our permanent resident metal frog on one of the rocks with an intrepid visiting frog perched on its back.
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Perfect.
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Nature’s Fireworks
Our lillies are popping open like Independence Day fireworks, …except without all the noise pollution.
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So Little
There are days when I want nothing more than to be standing again in the high Himalayas gazing at surrounding peaks and the valleys between.
These days I find plenty of solace in the wide-open spaces of our rural paradise where the variety of skies provides endless fascination.
It serves to remind me that we are so little and the universe so vast.
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Relative Something 