Archive for June 2022
Very Summery
No complaints from us with the weather pattern we have been enjoying this week. Warm and sunny during the day and cool and comfortable overnight.
Here are some scenes reflecting the bliss:
A butterfly on our lilac bush and the four horses out grazing in the hay field as the sunlight was about to disappear below the horizon.
One summer trait the horses are not enjoying is the harassment by flies. We put out a fan to provide a minor assist in blowing the pests away.
Swings tends to claim that spot as her own and the others need to ingratiate themselves with her to earn an adjacent position that she will tolerate. I saw Light squeezed in there for a little while earlier in the day.
I claimed a few hours of the warm sunshine for a bike ride through our “Driftless” terrain, which means I sped down some fast descents and struggled to climb up the other side.
I made it out to Elmwood and back, but I wasn’t successful in my quest to ride the entire distance unsupported by battery assist. Honestly, I would have needed to call Cyndie to come pick me up if I didn’t have the motor to help me deal with the last ten miles. I’d lost track of how many river valleys remained and faced an unexpected steep climb that almost broke my spirit.
However, I survived and did so under some of the best weather at the best time of year our latitude has to offer. We live in a very beautiful topography that provides wonderful vistas of rolling farm fields peppered with wooded valleys and gorgeous trout streams where whitetail deer romp and fly fishermen cast their lines.
Very summery, indeed.
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Caught Up
For a day or two now, we are caught up with mowing all that is growing at the peak rate typical for June. Yesterday was a perfect day for cutting grass with the lawn tractor. It was dry with a nice breeze and the grass wasn’t overgrown. I was able to mow at high speed, there were no piles of clippings, and the finish looks top notch. I will enjoy it for the rarity it was because I regularly find myself facing one or multiple versions of cutting complications.
Cyndie raked the clippings in the labyrinth after giving them a day to dry out and it is looking its best, as well. Did I mention that, after a good night’s sleep, Cyndie was feeling back to her healthy old self?
I tried wearing my earbuds under the earmuff hearing protection I wear while mowing because I am caught up in a Kris Kristofferson song from 1976 that I just heard for the first time. I’m contemplating trying to memorize it so I can create my own version to play and sing.
“There ain’t nothing sweeter than naked emotions
So you show me yours hon and I’ll show you mine”
I heard Shannon McNally’s version first and then searched for the song origins and found both Kristofferson’s and Willie Nelson’s two versions. It amazes me that I haven’t come across this song sooner in the 46-years since it was written.
All credit goes to MPR’s “Radio Heartland” on the HD2 subchannel of KNOW’s 91.1 MHz. I rarely pursue music beyond my personal library collection anymore, so exposure to new music is mostly limited to what I hear on the radio when traveling in my car. My tastes have begun to age out of MPR’s “The Current” at 89.3 MHz FM so more and more I find myself migrating to the primarily acoustic, singer-songwriter, folk, and Americana offerings on “Heartland.”
“And I wish that I was the answer to all of your questions
Lord knows I know you wish you were the answer to mine”
I am enjoying that this song has finally caught up with me after all these years.
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Trimming Minutiae
There is no drama about our activities yesterday and little in the way of specific goals. The hours passed as the earth rotated and shadows moved while Cyndie and I toiled on a variety of rewarding tasks.
I made the dreaded trip to buy gas for all our small engines and the diesel tractor. Ouch. That’s a burden on the pocketbook.
One way I reframe the harsh rise of the cost of fuel is to remember the time we had been shopping for a while and Cyndie grabbed a 20 oz. bottle of Aquafina water at the checkout counter. It added the paltry amount of $1.68 to our over $500 bill at Lowe’s. It was a purchase of convenience, for sure.
That price for 20 ounces of water is equal to $10.75/gallon. Think about that.
With all gas cans full, I was able to resume using the power trimmer. I had completed all our fence lines over the weekend so the next crucial need was the labyrinth. It didn’t give in without a fight. The stones defining the pathway wreak havoc on the nylon line of the power trimmer.
One technique I attempt to employ to reduce the abrasion of the line against the rocks is reducing the speed of rotation. Maximum speed is not required to achieve an adequate cut. Still, the spinning will deplete line and require the bounce against the ground to advance more length. I can’t count how many times I would release more line and almost immediately the trimmer would catch an edge and torque right up to a rock and eat the new line I just bounced out. Aaarrrrgh.
Just when things are going smooth, the engine runs out of gas. At least I was wise enough to bring the can of gas along this time. I also had a spare spool of line with me, just in case. I needed to use both.
The challenge always seems to be coming out even in completing the intended cutting goal before running out of either line or fuel. When I finished the pathway of the labyrinth, I moved on to the firepit next to the labyrinth, as long as I still had both line and gas. After finishing that, I decided to hit the trail in the woods for as long as the trimmer would run.
It lasted a lot longer than I expected. I cleared a large section of the perimeter trail where the grass had gotten very tall. A bonus accomplishment I didn’t anticipate achieving.
After too many days in a row of trimming for hours, my throttle hand was letting me know it had had enough. That’s a good reason to stop using that tool for a while. Today my hands will be on the lawn tractor steering wheel.
We are in the month of never ending mowing, which is putting the job of never ending sawing and wood chipping on temporary hold.
Somewhere between those two, I keep intending to add never ending bike rides, but that keeps failing to happen.
Could someone slow down the earth’s rotation a little bit, please?
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Feeling Crummy
Imagine you have been out of town, traveling on a commercial airline, attending graduation events with throngs of others who have traveled from far and wide and you arrive home feeling less than your best in the third year of a pandemic.
Out of an excess of caution, Cyndie chose to wear a mask when she got home until she verifies by test whether she was feeling crummy because of the dreaded virus or simply some other easily possible reason. Allergies? Travel fatigue?
A nap was enough to get her out walking the dog and pulling some dreaded invasive garlic mustard plants while I was trimming and hauling away more branches from the lower portion of evergreen trees along the driveway.
I can never tell when she is truly ill because she tends to maintain her activities regardless.
After catching up with some news headlines, I was feeling kind of crummy until I happened upon the tidbit about the small trial for cancer treatment that resulted in an unheard-of complete remission in all patients.
Imagine hoping your treatment protocol might help some patients and then learning it made tumors vanish in all 18 participants.
I believe that would be the opposite of feeling crummy.
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That Close
I knew I might not finish trimming the grass along the fence line before the gas ran out but the closer I got, the more I hoped I might make it. My decision to leave the plastic gas can behind probably doomed my chances of not needing it.
There were one and a half lengths between posts left to cut out of the entire distance of our fencing when the motor sputtered out on me. Nothing to do but walk back to the shop garage and bring the gas can back with me.
We haven’t always been proactive about trimming the grass along the fence before it gets problematically tall, especially during the time when there were no horses on the property and we didn’t need the electricity activated. When the fence is electrified, contact with the growth around it puts a load on the circuit that pulls down the voltage.
The first time I used the power trimmer along the fence line, there were several areas where woodier stems of some plants would break the plastic cutting line. This time, around the entire length of our fences, I did not run into anything that the plastic line couldn’t cut. It was very rewarding to discover that we’ve been cutting it enough times now that there is no longer anything robust trying to grow under there.
It fits with what I was writing yesterday in that the job of keeping the growth off the fence is getting easier to manage over time. It would be just fine with me if eventually, nothing tried to grow beneath the fences and I didn’t need to cut it anymore.
I could intentionally neglect it. 🙂
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Intentional Neglect
After my recent effort mowing the back pasture to control weeds and improve grazing for the horses, walking past the grass field in the area we call our north loop has me wondering what to do there. We don’t graze the horses there but it has been cut for hay the last few years.
It’s possible the person I’ve offered the main hay field this year will also be interested in baling the north loop again, but not a certainty. Whether he wants it this time or not, I’ve been wondering about a longer-term plan for that area.
My first preference would be to allow it to become an untended natural field of native growth, something I tend to think of as intentionally neglected growth. The challenge for me is becoming well enough informed about what is desirable native growth and what is invasive and problematic. That foils the part about neglect.
Honestly, I wish we didn’t need to intervene in any natural growth on our land. It would be a lot less work. My dream is to manage our fields and forest in the present so that they get healthier and require less effort in the future. Admittedly, neglect isn’t the correct term for my intentions, but it’s more dramatic than saying “do less work.”
I like having some treeless fields to complement our wooded acres but planting trees comes more naturally to me than nurturing a meadow. At the same time, it is fun to pop out of the woods on a walk with Delilah and cruise down the path mowed in the tall grass.
Since my neighbor to the south is one to mow a larger and larger majority of his land, having some natural grassland on our acres for the benefit of the wildlife it supports feels like it holds added merit.
I intend to neglect taking any immediate action, mainly because I can. I’ll keep thinking about the fields’ future while walking along the grass path and enjoying it as it is today.
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Her Birthday
Send love to Cyndie for her birthday today! She is out of town at the moment, so I am celebrating with pictures of us together while she is away. I actually posted these two years ago for her birthday and so this is kind of a not-so-random “wayback” post. I believe they all work just fine a second time around…
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Happy Birthday, Cyndie!
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Flash Gorgeous
Why “Flash Gorgeous?” I saw a portion of a program on climate change last night, talking about the increasing incidents of flash flooding erupting out of our periodic thunderstorms. Yesterday’s weather was the opposite of a flash flood so I thought of flipping convention and describing the incredibly gorgeous day using a term we usually associate with the blast of a weather disaster.
We enjoyed a day-long flash of spectacular weather for working on projects outdoors. I cranked up the power trimmer and focused on cutting tall grass growing on both sides of the fence segments of the round pen and along the border of the back pasture that I mowed on Wednesday.
The air was as fresh and comfortable as ever and allowed for sweat-free exertion which is a rarity for the type of work I was doing under the high-angled sun.
Speaking of fresh, Delilah came home from a grooming appointment smelling so sweet and clean I almost didn’t want to let her outside again, where she tends to seek out the nastiest smells and then rolls in them.
The views during our treks through the woods are quickly growing shorter and shorter because of all the leaves that have burst forth in the last ten days. It really changes our woods dramatically during the peak of transitioning between the extremes of summer and winter.
One disadvantage of Cyndie and me getting away from home over our extended Memorial Day weekend is that transplanted trees didn’t get regular watering and they all looked really sad as a result. Time will tell if better attention now can prevent the loss of the mix of oak and maples we moved to a line just outside the paddock fences.
It makes me even more pleased to have also found a few saplings we could nurture right where they sprouted and not deal with the risks of transplanting. They haven’t suffered a bit since we last checked on them.
Maybe we will end up with a “flash-Forest” one of these days. I prefer looking for flashes of brilliant positives instead of the typical flash-flood of extreme weather disasters being visited upon us with ever-increasing intensities.
Give somebody a dose of “flash-friendliness” if you find an opportunity today. Happy Friday!
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Concrete Lifted
I successfully avoided titling this post, “Apron Lifted” but that is what happened yesterday in front of our garage. We have a plan of fixing our driveway this summer and in preparation for that, the first thing that needed to be completed was to solve the sunken concrete apron in front of our garage.
On my side of the garage, the apron has fallen almost three inches. We were warned by the company doing the work to be careful moving our cars back into the garage because the old habit of revving the accelerator to get over the bump will no longer be necessary.
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The company we chose uses polymeric sand to seal the gap between the apron and the main garage slab. This was my first exposure to the material and leaves me intrigued to consider using it in other applications in the future.
The rest of the day for us was almost as productive as it was for the rapid and efficient concrete lifting crew. (They were in and out within about one hour.) I got some power trimming done down by the road at our driveway entrance, we received a visit from the farrier to trim the horses’ hooves, and I pulled out the diesel tractor to mow the back pasture.
It took me longer than one hour but I’m focused on how smoothly the whole mowing project went, all the way from getting the tractor out for the first time in months, finding the ground wasn’t too wet and soft for the weight of the big machine, and finally, finishing all the cutting without incident.
I’m always nervous about operating the heavy equipment around our fences. It will be much easier to wield the power trimmer to clean up the last remains of tall grass that is growing underneath the fence, especially after I remember to turn off the electric jolt pulsing down the wires.
I don’t know why it is so hard for me to remember to shut that off in advance.
When I was all done mowing the back pasture I discovered a bumper crop of dandelion seeds had piled up on the brush cutter behind me.
Better they landed there, I guess than out on the ground. Not that there wasn’t an equal amount blowing around every which way around me as I mowed.
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Long Grass
Five days away from home this time of year resulted in some really long grass waiting for us upon our return. Before I could start with mowing, we needed to plant some trillium that I had dug up in the woods of our lake place before we left.
After pulling out wildflowers and native growth from the pathway of our little labyrinth in the woods at the lake, I switched to digging batches of trillium for transplanting to home. We decided to plant them next to two existing groups of trillium that are looking very healthy after previous transplantations.
After that, it was time to mow. The job was made more complicated by the tall height of the grass and basically required an additional half pass for each full width of cut. Despite the extra work, I was able to complete the job by dinner time and made it look like someone lives here again.
The horses had been separated into groups of two while we were gone, making the job of feeding them a little simpler for our sitter. It was her first time staying in our house alone and caring for all the animals and she did a fabulous job during our extended weekend of over five days! We are very grateful to have found her.
While I mowed, Cyndie opened up all the gates so the four horses could romp together and wander anywhere they wanted to go. I enjoyed watching them move around together whenever I looked up from the ground in front of me. They moved around a lot and looked like they enjoyed the return to shared wide-open access to all the fields.
Everywhere they walked there was long grass surrounding them. In fact, the back pasture is in need of mowing because there is some thistle sprouting that we plan to eradicate by cutting. The really tall grass of the pasture will not be a problem for the diesel tractor pulling the big brush mower behind it.
At the same time, the grass along the fence lines also needs to be cut using the power trimmer.
It is definitely the long grass time of year.
Happy June 1st!
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Relative Something 