Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Pond Day
We’ve put off tending to our little landscape pond this spring for longer than we probably should. Part of that is because it was still frozen solid just a couple of weekends ago. The reality is, we would have been a lot better off if we had given the pond more attention way back last fall.
I failed to take a picture of the pond before starting, and thus missed a wonderful opportunity for the classic “before/after” comparison, so you’ll just have to take my word for how neglected it looked. The primary plant already growing in the pond before we arrived here was variegated sweet flag.
It has shown itself to be very happy with our location, expanding its reach in the last few years to an amazing degree. The old shoots were a dreary mess, along with a thick carpet of dead leaves and pine needles.
We spent most of the afternoon yesterday pulling dead and decaying organic matter out of the pond, along with all the swampy odors that come with that.
Cyndie heroically wrestled to prune out the unrestrained expansion of the sweet flag in hopes of being able to see more water than grass this summer.
I gathered the pump and filter paraphernalia from the garage shelf and got it reassembled and reinstalled. We rearranged rocks, trimmed tree branches overhead, and by dinner time, achieved a much less neglected looking pond.
The serenade of falling water has returned to compliment the constant chirping of night frogs for our evening soundtracks.
It seemed like a lot of work for one little pond, but given that it was done in a day and now looks ready for the summer, we decided it was a reasonable effort to put forth.
In a few weeks, we should be able to see new sprigs of variegated sweet flag poking up out of the water from what remains of the big cut back yesterday. Based on our experience here, I’m pretty sure we won’t wait so long next time to prune back the prolific advance of these happy plants.
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Peaceful Presence
With a perfectly timed explosion of lightning and thunder, our peaceful World Labyrinth Day came to a spectacular close last night. Prior to that, we had plenty of sun and warmth to walk the circuitous path of our 70-foot diameter, 11 circuit Chartes labyrinth nestled on the edge of our woods beside a horse pasture.
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Even though the “Walk as One at 1” in a global wave of peace was the primary reason for yesterday’s open house at Wintervale, it ended up being the chickens who stole the show.
The kids present wanted to climb inside the fence and feed the growing chicks delectable treats of dried worms and cracked corn right from their hands.
Although the young birds were a bit skittish over all the human energy present on our first visit, Cyndie took the kids back a little later and the chicks were much more interested in exploring the offerings.
Shortly after the last of family and friends had departed for the day, Cyndie and I made the rounds to bring hammocks and chair cushions inside. The sky was growing dark gray on the horizon.
We made the short trek to Clyde’s Corner for cheese burgers to cap off the end of a successful day, while the thunderstorm loomed large. Luckily, we had decided to wrangle the chicks back into the coop before we left.
The drive home was a light-show of streaking lightning bolts, many appearing to be hitting closer to us as the storm moved away. That had Delilah barking up her own storm to bring our exciting day to an appropriate end.
It started peacefully, and ended with quite a bang.
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Finally Out
Yesterday was a big day for the chicks. After having spent a month in the brooder and two weeks confined to the coop, they finally set foot on mother earth.
Cyndie and I created a fenced courtyard that allows us to open the chicken door and let them test out their skills on the ground.
We also installed plastic awnings over the side windows for added protection against blowing rain. The warm days that have finally arrived necessitated removal of the plastic panels over the windows, to increase cross ventilation. All the windows and the entire ceiling are covered with 1/4″ metal hardware cloth for enhanced air flow.
The temperature in the coop soars when the sun is shining high and hot.
The chicks were typically tentative about venturing out. We slid open the chicken door while working our way around the fence perimeter, burying the bottom in the ground. Despite our verbal enticements to coax them out, the top of the ramp was the farthest any of them wanted to venture.
There would be five or six heads peeking out, and maybe one brave bird stepping on the stoop. Then there were none. The chicks would all move back inside to the safe familiarity of their last two weeks.
It was getting hot, I was getting tired and sunburned, and the hour for lunch had already passed. Without waiting to witness the chicks achieve touch down, I headed up to the house.
Not long after, Cyndie arrived to join me, announcing they had all suddenly conquered the ramp and made landfall. I missed it.
That’s okay. I also conveniently missed the other end of the milestone: the frenzied struggle to make them all go back inside again at dusk. That’s when you end up crawling around on hands and knees beneath the coop to snag birds and toss them back through the chicken door, trying not to let the ones already inside come back out again.
Thankfully, Cyndie took the first shift. I’ll have my turn soon enough.
Today is World Labyrinth Day! The weather is good, our land is mostly dry, the trees are budding and the grass is growing. If you are reading in the Twin Cities, it would be a great day to visit us and walk with the world for peace!
The coffee will be on and the fresh horse-shaped cookies are delicious. I’ve tested one or two. Cyndie says she made them with less sugar than the recipe specifies.
Peace!
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Come Walk
Tomorrow is World Labyrinth Day!
Here is how you can participate: Wake up nice and early to take full advantage of the day. Pick one thing on your long list of projects you want to accomplish on Saturday and tackle it with gusto, bright and early.
Your early start will afford you plenty of time to finish and clean up so you can take the afternoon off. The drive to Wintervale Ranch from most of the Twin Cities area is around an hour. If you leave about 11:00, you can arrive in plenty of time for the 1 p.m. peace walk in our beautiful Rowcliffe Forest Garden labyrinth on a day that could reach 80°(F).
In honor of the “Walk as One at 1,” we are holding an open house from Noon to 3 p.m., offering light refreshments, full tours of our trails through the woods, and especially, visits with our horses and chickens.
We hope you will fit this awesome opportunity into your Saturday goals to be accomplished this weekend.
Just contact Cyndie (cyndie@wintervaleranch.com) to let us know you are coming and she can offer direction details if you need. It will help us to plan accordingly.
Where else can you find so much excitement and peace all at the same time?
Wear your hiking shoes.
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Green Gray
Are you as impressed as me over my deft avoidance yesterday of whining over how we could possibly be in the month of May already? It could be a new me!
Naaaaaah.
I have a tendency to be way too authentic with my online presence. The majority of people’s social media personalities has evolved to look like life is all rainbows and puppies, feet up with a glass of a favored beverage, overflowing with noble opportunities to do good in our worlds.
Who can blame us? No one automatically wants to paint their public portraits showing what they really look like in the moment of walking from the bed upon waking in the morning and seeing the first glimpse of ourselves in the mirror. Aaahhh!
That’s not how we want ourselves to look, so that’s not how we want others to see us. We want to be freshly groomed and all made up before venturing out.
Then why am I so quick to write about many of my stumbles and embarrassments? Maybe I’m too lazy to stop and comb my hair before stepping on the stage. It’s easiest to simply tell it like it is.
Life is filled with a mixture of good and bad. It just feels more worthwhile to share it all. All interesting stories have a conflict to be resolved. It gets darkest just before dawn. If all I wrote about were my triumphs, this blog would develop into a false, hollow representation, and I think that would be boring.
Well, more boring than my creative whining about how fast time flies and how extreme the weather is.
In the last two days, our grass has greened dramatically. Yesterday, we saw the arrival of some gray clouds that added a distinct contrast.
It occurred to me that, in many ways, it was more interesting than a clear sunny day.
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Idle Distraction
Some days I would like to ignore everything that I really should be doing and focus unlimited hours of idle attention on a familiar jigsaw puzzle, regardless how gorgeous the weather outside might be, how many home projects are screaming for attention, or all the work responsibilities to which I am duly committed.
I am a master of idle distraction, however, I rarely allow myself to revel in idle passions to a fraction of a degree worthy of being considered mastery. Maybe I should instead state it as being a dreamer of idle distraction.
It would be fair to say that a Monday morning in front of my desk at the day-job, with multiple issues simultaneously calling for immediate attention, happens to be a time when my urge for idleness can be greatest.
In a similar vein to Lewis Carroll’s “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get,” I am more inclined toward “The more I have to do, the less I get done.”
I don’t know whether it would surprise you to read how often this plays out when I would like to compose a daily blog post. The greater my yearning to have a post written and proofed, the more idle my brain seems to get.
One good thing about distraction of an empty brain, it allows plenty of room for imagining creative somethings from nothing. Except, sometimes, nothing is all that comes. It’s distracting.
Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.
Well, that’s not true. You can make it up, but what good would that do?
I suppose it could serve, in a circular sort of way, as something of an idle distraction, no?
Don’t mind me. I’m just distracted by having too much on my mind that should be getting my constructive attention all at once. And doing nothing.
Maybe I missed my calling as a congressman or senator.
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Trail Inspirations
After a second visit on Saturday for pure maple syrup and pancakes, Cyndie enlisted the artistic energies of visiting Williams girls, Ella and Sarah, to decorate some of the new blocks before we placed them on the trail.
It’s a bit of a shame that their designs will all too quickly be subject to the abuses of plodding muddy boots and paws, but that won’t stop the creative exclamations from still offering glimpses of inspiration to passersby.
The 60 new blocks paved another 8.5 feet of sloppy trail, but we’re still going to need a lot more pallets if we want to cover the length of perpetually wet ground down there.
The picture I used yesterday to show the blocks on the trail was from October of 2016. Yesterday, Cyndie took a picture with the newest blocks in the foreground, which is actually viewing in the opposite direction from the first image.
It’s not an exact comparison, but I like seeing one next to the other.
Can you see how far in the distance the old blocks run in the picture on the right?
2016
2018
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Reminds me a little of the yellow brick road. Oh my!
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Pallet Reuse
You may recall that I built our chicken coop using wood predominantly gathered from pallets I salvaged at my workplace. Even though our coop is complete, the pallets keep coming. At the day-job, equipment arrives mounted to brand new pallets that the manufacturer doesn’t want returned.
I hate to imagine the wood pallets getting discarded after just one short shipping journey, so I continue to look for ways we can use them on the ranch.
One immediate need is in improving the footing on our trails where the surface is frequently such a muddy mess that you could lose a shoe if not careful.
The pallets I bring home from work have four blocks nailed on top which make it difficult to stack things on them, like bales of hay. Since that is a primary use for the pallets, my first project in reuse involves removing the blocks.
The pallets almost always arrive in sets of three, and my knack for procrastination plays out in a tendency to wait to remove the top blocks until some later time. Yesterday, being warm and sunny, turned out to be one of those later times.
Turns out our collection of pallets had grown to 15. That just so happens to mean 60 blocks, all power-nailed to the planks on the pallets. My right arm got a decent workout swinging the 3-pound hammer against the pry bar.
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Today we hope to extend the “paved” portion of muddy trail with the newly harvested blocks.
After that, the plan is to put up the temporary protective fenced courtyard around the chicken coop in preparation for the chicks first ventures out on real earth.
I wonder if a certain fox will be spying on us while we work…
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Syrup Again
Since moving to the country and discovering some of the local treasures around us, Cyndie has purchased pure maple syrup only once a year. It’s that time again! Just a few miles south of Ellsworth, the Stockwell family taps 35 acres of maple trees and collects enough gallons of sap to supply folks with a full year’s worth of syrup, if you have containers to hold it.
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We’ve figured out the routine and bring two 2-quart Mason jars to be placed under the spigot of the large tank and filled with the dark amber bliss every April during the S & S Sugar Bush open house pancake breakfast weekend.
It’s hard to find an event pancake breakfast that isn’t pretty darn good, be it firefighters, boy scouts, legions, or service clubs, but I gotta say the fresh, hot blueberry cakes, sausage, and pure maple syrup combination we enjoyed yesterday morning tasted about as good as I can recall ever experiencing.
Our friends Mike and Barb Wilkus accompanied us, having also joined us for the live Climate Cast at MPR Thursday night and then sleeping over to be available for the Sugar Bush open house. After the scrumptious breakfast, we took a stroll through the woods to witness the number of tapped trees that were supplying the sweet maple sap.
It is impressive to consider the hundreds of gallons of sap running up through the roots of these trees when the spring temperatures are just right —warm during the day and below freezing at night. One of the Stockwell sons described how the percent of sweetness drops in time, but his grandpa would collect the later sap for a vinegar.
The syrup open house has become so precious to us, Cyndie invited more friends to stop by today so she could go again and share the event with them, too. I reckon the delicious pancakes might have something to do with her zeal, as well.
There is another precious annual event that will be happening next week for us. For the second year in a row, Wintervale Ranch will be holding our own open house as a host site for The Labyrinth Society’s World Labyrinth Day Peace Walk. Walk as one at 1.
Around the world, at each location, people will walk and visualize peace at 1:00 p.m. in their time zones, creating a wave of peaceful energy flowing around the globe.
Cyndie has been working to spruce up our labyrinth, despite the lack of growth from the barely thawed landscape. I noticed when Barb and Mike were here and we did a moonlight walk Thursday night that the overnight freezing and daytime warm sunshine was still conspiring to tip over plenty of my rock arrangements.
It sounds like we can expect some rain showers this coming week, so maybe new growth will be exploding in spectacular glory for visitors on Saturday. If the day dawns nearly as spectacular as today, World Labyrinth Day will be a wonderful opportunity to experience the best of Wintervale Ranch.
If you are reading in the Twin Cities area, I hope you will consider joining us!
Saturday, May 5, 2018 between 12:00-3:00 p.m. Please email cyndie@wintervaleranch.com to register and receive directions.
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Climate Forum
Last night we attended a fascinating climate discussion at the MPR building in St. Paul, hosted by Chief Meteorologist, Paul Huttner.
I fully expected to be left in a downtrodden mood, but they actually did a fair job of offering some hope and encouragement about things that individuals can do, as well as sharing some accomplishments of young people who are getting involved to influence municipalities to take some timely action. It’s the kid’s future at stake, after all.
It has me wanting to put more effort into figuring out how we might make further progress toward utilizing renewable energy like wind and solar, in addition to the geothermal furnace we installed when we moved here. I’m also wondering about the possibility of getting a fully electric car. For the long commuting I am doing to get to work four days a week, that would feel like a most tangible change, to no longer burn gasoline and spew the exhaust.
We almost didn’t get a chance to burn fuel on the way home after the event. Upon arriving downtown, we had pulled into the first parking ramp we found near our destination. Signs indicated it was open until 10:00 on weekdays, so we felt satisfied. Unfortunately, when we returned to the building shortly before nine, it was all locked up!
After walking the full circumference in search of an unlocked door, we happened upon a back door with a security intercom. It seemed like the solution, but communication with the person was not entirely clear, and we found ourselves standing and waiting for someone who never came.
We were saved by the coincidental arrival of two police officers who were able to open the door and direct us to the elevator that led to the parking levels below ground. There were no humans around at that hour, but a machine at the exit swallowed our five dollar bill and gates automatically opened.
We gladly hustled the car onto the city streets and headed for the freeway back to Wisconsin, dumping our carbon emissions all the way home.
The data is pretty obvious folks. The climate is changing and the effects on our weather are underway.
It only makes sense to take this into account and make decisions accordingly. Not just for the immediate future, but for the lifetimes of those who will be dealing with it for the next 50-100 years and beyond.
From the “Eat local, think global” catch phrase, try this morph: Act today, with a plan for tomorrow.
And turn off the lights on your way out.
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