Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Bath Day
We’ve had a really fine few days of summer weather this weekend. Cyndie decided it would be a good day to give the horses a bath. I showed up in time to find Legacy luxuriating in front of the fan to dry.
Looking out the door of the barn, I found Hunter in process.
When Cyndie made her way back to the house after tending to all 4 horses, she reported that Cayenne was the surprise of the four, being the one to immediately roll in the dust when let back into the paddock.
I would have put my money on Hunter.
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Don’t Know
I don’t know why we have such difficulty with landscape plants. It seems as though the majority of the gorgeous growth that graced the grounds around our house at the time we purchased it almost 4 years ago has declined to the extreme. One very visible example is currently on display at our front door.
At the same time, just a few feet away, another plant of the same type is growing so wildly it has taken over the smaller shrub and taller bird feeder around it.
Maybe they are just aging out. Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with our level of attention, or lack thereof. I have my doubts, though. I don’t know what we could do differently, but we will have a chance to try. Something new deserves a chance in this primary location at the entrance to our home.
I’m thinking a nice, low hosta. The other hostas growing around here appear to be doing just fine under our dubious care.
Sometimes you have to go with what works.
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Weeds Begone
It took twice as long as I expected to finish cutting down the 4 acres we call our hay-field yesterday, but I was trying to do a very thorough job of removing the primary invader, Queen Anne’s Lace from sight. The biennial crop is the most visible evidence that we aren’t growing high quality grass hay out there yet.
There is some grass there, and it has become obvious to us from the regular mowing we have done around the labyrinth and along the fence lines, that doing so will help the grasses and hurt the weeds.
Right now, we are thinking about just keeping this mowed short for a full year. We may have some additives applied to the soil, and add desireable grass seed over the top, before getting back to baling it again the year after.
The project was almost over before I had even completed the first pass along the fence line. For no apparent reason the shear bolt suddenly gave out and the blades stopped cutting.
We had waited the entire summer to have this field cut, and when it didn’t happen any other way, we decided to finally just chop it down ourselves. This interruption had me wondering if maybe we were making the wrong decision, but I had a replacement bolt and it was an easy fix, so I didn’t let that problem stop me for long.
When it became clear that it was going to take all afternoon to complete the task, Cyndie was kind enough to bring me lunch in the field. It felt just like farming!
When I got to the last little strip to be mowed, I wanted to include Cyndie in the moment of achievement. She was serving the horses their evening feed at the barn, so I whistled to get her attention as I was lining the tractor up for the final cut.
She heard the second of my shrill chirrups, and was looking to ascertain whether I was in need of her assistance while I was backing into position. I was intending to point out that it would be the last pass and I just wanted her to share in the joy of accomplishment, when the blades of the mower started clattering on a rock I hadn’t noticed.
The sound of mower blades hitting obstacles always tends to create a panic response. I stomped on the clutch and lifted the mower. My big moment of victory was dashed by a dose of humble pie. In a comical turn, now she did think something was wrong.
She hollered something to me, but I couldn’t hear her words over the rat-tat-tat of the diesel engine idling. After several fruitless tries, we walked toward each other until I heard she was asking if I had my camera with me so she could capture the moment.
We laughed over the fact I hadn’t hit a single thing all day, but just as I was hoping to get her attention, …clank. I had already mowed over that rock without incident in the other direction. Backing across it on the slope was a different story.
She took the pictures of my final successful pass.
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Did you see that bird she captured in the last shot? It looks as happy as me over having our field freshly cut.
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No Nap
A nap did not materialize yesterday because our rain storms came in waves of two and we decided to try getting a little work done between each. Somewhat randomly, I decided to get out the chainsaw (with its dull blade) and knock down a small dead pine in the back yard before heading down to clear stumps along the wooded portion of fence line on the south side of the back pasture.
When rain drove us back inside, I headed to the garage and pulled the mower deck from beneath the lawn tractor. I had figured out why I was having such a difficult time leveling things. Bent blades.
We decided to make a run to buy blades, and while we were in town on a rainy day, catch the “Jason Bourne” movie in Hudson. That series is always a guarantee for dizzying violent action, and didn’t disappoint.
Chatting up the knowledgeable source at the hardware store in River Falls, I learned what I need to do to get our old Craftsman mower to work as designed. I need to treat it better. He strongly recommended that any engine smaller than a car should exclusively be fed premium gasoline. He said I should avoid the risk of striking sticks, roots, stumps, rock, gravel, and protruding dirt mounds, by not driving over them.
Obvious, really. It’s funny though, because I had just the opposite perspective and was trying to find out if there was a different type of mower I should get that would allow me to mow the grass here and not worry about the sticks, roots, stumps… You know, everything around this property.
For one thing, I need to stop trying to use the lawn tractor on the trail through the woods. That will need to be the trimmer, or, if we have neglected it too long, the brush cutter behind the diesel tractor.
When we got home in the afternoon, I put a new chain on the chainsaw while Cyndie gave Delilah some attention and then together they went down and did the same for the horses. I cut down the other most obvious dead pine tree that was along the trail around the pasture on the north side of the driveway.
When I returned from that project, I found Cyndie pulling weeds near the round pen, lamenting the myriad growth sprouting from the sand within. The tenacious unwanted growth of weeds and grasses seems to be the theme of our summer this year.
I loitered along the fence, talking with her for a long enough time that the horses finally joined us. For some unknown reason, they have been choosing to stay up in the dusty lime screenings by the barn for the majority of their days lately, even though we have been offering them more open access to green pastures.
That’s not all bad, because they are still overweight, but to me, it looks like a lot less pleasant existence.
Cyndie stopped pulling weeds and offered to groom some of the grime off Legacy. The horses had obviously rolled in the mud after the rain earlier in the day.
It was a moment that went a long way to counter-balance the angst of tending to all the challenges we face in taking care of this place.
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Stadium Inauguration
That was fun!
We had a blast last night at the opening event in the new U.S. Bank Stadium, an International Champions Cup match between A.C. Milan and Chelsea F. C.
It was exciting to be at a soccer match between two powerhouse professional teams. It was exciting to be inside the brand new home stadium of the Minnesota Vikings. It was made more electric by being among 64,101 other equally giddy spectators.
I’m sure it was also enhanced for me because I was with my peeps. I was with my family, and we were among a number of other special friends, whom we discovered by surprise. It even turned out that one of the match referees was a neighbor who grew up with our kids back in Eden Prairie.
We figured out a logistical improvement on the way to pick up Elysa, deciding to leave our car at her house and take the light rail train to the stadium. Julian would walk to meet us from his downtown apartment. This kept our parked car on the east side of the cities for what we hoped would be an easier departure away from the main congestion.
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The light rail trip over was a breeze. We met and visited with a nice guy who made it even more pleasant. The evening was hot and muggy, but both the train and the stadium offered air conditioning, so it was surprisingly comfortable. Disembarking the train put us smack into our first of multiple moments of crowd-herding.
Quite a few stadium staff had the ignoble responsibility of standing with tall signs commanding the direction they wanted the crowd to travel. Of course, many of us often had designs on getting somewhere other than where they wanted us.
The first up-close view of the building is impressive. Using phones to share our locations, Cyndie and Julian worked to bring him and the three of us together, but with a bit of lag time complicating the data, we found ourselves circling until we stopped at a specific gate and he came to us.
In the mean time, we had walked against instructions, around barriers, and away from the crowds until we were all alone on what must be the back side of the venue.
The mood was very festive inside. We were plenty early, but already there were long lines forming for craft beers and some of the specialty food items. We opted for regular old stadium brats, pizza, cheese curds and fries, because the line was shorter.
That doesn’t mean the wait was shorter, though. They were barely able to make and serve the food fast enough to meet demand. As the evening wore on, I heard reports that some offerings had run out. I suppose that can happen when you sell out a venue of this magnitude on its opening event.
We ran into one complication while trying to locate our seats. There were no indications of our section. An usher informed me we were up a level and directed us to an escalator. I asked again at the top and was pointed in another direction. With still no signage indication sections, we came to what appeared to be a dead end with an entrance to a club.
I asked where I would find section C10 and an agent informed me that she didn’t know but was working on it. We paused our advance, armed with drinks and food, but no free hands to eat it. Back and forth the harried staff with ear pieces moved, trying to serve their guests. Finally, they figured out our seats, and sections starting with “C” were indeed inside that “club.”
Brilliant.
I suppose it might have helped if I had known what tickets we had purchased.
The game was excellently satisfying, with a variety of soccer action and goals. The main event passed by too fast and suddenly it was time to go home. With no clue on an escape plan, we followed the crowd to the first obvious exit door. That offered a second option down, so we took it. That choice merged with an equal sized mass of people coming up from beneath, quickly doubling the size of the mass.
The exit we were all funneling toward turned out to be a single-wide door into the main concourse. Bad option.
Next came the wait for a train. We went with the flow, mostly. Missing one important gate, we found ourselves on the wrong side from where we wanted to be and needed to walk back against the flow to get into the queue for trains going east. It took several trains and many minutes of waiting.
Julian texted us to report he was safe and sound after his walk home, while we were still in wait to reach the platform. Eventually, we got our turn and squeezed our way onto an already pretty full train.
Made it home well past our normal bedtime, after midnight, but happy as could be.
It’s a great stadium, it was a great soccer match, and it was a blast experiencing it with my wife and kids.
Now it is raining here, and I’m feeling like I could use a nap…
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It’s Tonight!
I’ve been waiting a long time for this…
Back in March, I let my family know that this event was on my birthday wish list. They arranged tickets for the 4 of us, and so now we will be checking out the new Vikings stadium in Minneapolis tonight, before the NFL team even has a chance to play a game in it.
This will also be my first time attending an international football match between top level professional clubs. Double bonus!
Our early plan is to park near Julian’s apartment and walk the city streets to the stadium. We decided to test out the food vendors for our dinner as a way to better immerse ourselves in all that the new venue will have to offer.
There is every possibility that this could be the only time I will be in the stadium. NFL ticket prices long ago surpassed my level of worth for the product offered.
I plan to provide a full report tomorrow on the details of our adventure, although it may be published a little later than usual, as I am expecting to be out well past my usual bed time tonight. Hopefully, Delilah won’t mind if we get home long after it has grown dark to bring her in from her back yard kennel.
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Tractor Timber
Despite the inherent risks in dealing with trees that have blown over, but remain hung up in the branches of other trees beside them, I chose to see if I could push them over using the loader on our tractor.
Whether or not it made any sense to try, I forged ahead on the idea that it just might work.
First, I needed to attach the loader bucket that I’ve recently taken to storing at one end of the hay shed.
The following is pretty much how the previous week unfolded for me, in terms of frustrations.
As I approached the hay shed on the tractor, I realized the trailer on the back of the truck was parked directly in front of the spot I needed to reach. Keys to the truck were up at the house.
I caught sight of Cyndie just crossing the yard and shouted to ask if she could grab the keys.
She turned the key and the starter stuttered the staccato clatter of “not enough battery.”
“Not again! Not now!”
For some unidentified reason, this happens at very unpredictable odd intervals. The truck needed to have its battery charged again. It was parked far enough away that it would require an extension cord, and then I realized the nearest outlet was dead because I had borrowed the circuit breaker last fall to use for the waterer over the winter.
I swapped out the breaker, got the battery charging, and decided to do some lawn mowing. All that served to do was intensify my frustration over the odd problem of the middle blade not cutting and the outside blades cutting low. Something more than just a broken bracket must have gone wrong when it failed last week.
I did the bare minimum of ugly mowing and then put it away to start the truck.
All that frustration before I could get to the task I intended.
Compared to those hassles, the rest of my project went swimmingly. I pulled up to the trees, lifted the bucket to test the weight, and after an initial slip, successfully pushed the trees over with a resounding crash.
Yikes. It was both scary and satisfying.
Most of all, it wasn’t frustrating.
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Rewarding Progress
We started the day with some group exercise, walking the horses, in pairs, uphill and down, but the main event of the day yesterday was a divide and conquer effort on the ranch. I’d say we conquered. On top of that, we did so under a time constraint, because we had Cyndie’s 40th high school class reunion to attend for dinner back in our old stomping’ grounds an hour’s drive away.
My main goal was to tend to the manure composting area, which was getting overfull and in dire need of rotation. With time limited, we decided to just transfer a large portion of the old piles to a secondary storage location and dump them in one big pile for distribution later.
That plan led to selecting and preparing a new spot for a pile of (mostly) composted manure. The place we settled on, near Cyndie’s wild flower garden on the north side of our driveway, was all tall grass and weeds. We are a little sensitive about weeds right now, and I did intend to eventually knock down the growth in the pasture area over there, so my focus suddenly shifted to using the diesel tractor and the brush cutter to mow the entire area.
That’s a big project, and more than I planned to bother with at that time.
Cyndie volunteered to take on relocating the piles of manure on her own while I mowed —no small task— and we were off. That area on the north side of the driveway has a lot of pine trees that create quite an obstacle course for the big tractor. It turns the project into a busy process of maneuvering, offering very little physical or mental rest in the tractor seat.
I only picked off one T-post along the fence line, and hit one large hidden rock, but the number of pine branches abused was too high to count. To her credit, Cyndie hit a grand slam of progress in moving ALL of the oldest piles from our composting area.
Delilah got the short end of things for the day, as we had little time to smother her with attention before serving her dinner in her kennel and hitting the road to visit our past. The reunion dinner was located a stone’s throw from our old Eden Prairie home, at the Bent Creek golf club.
I graduated a year after Cyndie, so I was attending as a spouse, but high school lasts 4 years with multiple grade classes, so I knew many of these people as well as I know my classmates. Some were neighbors from when I grew up, others were siblings of people in my class, so it was just as fun for me to visit and catch up with folks as it was for Cyndie.
I had an additional agenda to collect information from the planners and check the number of attendees to use as reference in planning the reunion for my own graduating class, next year at this time. The first meeting for our planning committee has just been scheduled to occur a couple weeks into August.
Holy cow, August starts tomorrow! My class reunion is just a blink away.
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Inspiration Fades
It happens. Inspiration will wax and wane. My enthusiasm for this adventure we embarked on at Wintervale is ebbing away.
It has been a tough week for me. Where we once seemed to be enjoying a charmed life here, with progress advancing in surprisingly magical ways and solutions flowing with unexplainable ease, our situation of late has become a lot less mystical.
Have we gone off track somewhere? I don’t know. It’s life. Sometimes there are more problems than solutions for a while.
I’m sure there are a lot of reasons for businesses to fail. Ours is simply failing to get started.
Full disclosure, I am writing from a state of overworked exhaustion. Why? Hay. Again. And the thought of facing today’s task of manure management, again.
I threw 100 bales, 200 times yesterday, loading the borrowed trailer and unloading it. Carrying bales up and up to stack them in our shed. It is an endurance exercise where the climb gets higher as the fatigue grows ever more debilitating. At first, the bales seem light, but at the end, they feel a lot heavier.
Today, I need to move the compost piles to make room for more. Since I returned to the day-job, I haven’t been tending the piles in the daily manner I did when I was home all day. Once, every other weekend, is not cutting it.
It’s a buzz-kill.
Meanwhile, there are dangerous trees that broke off and are hung up in surrounding branches over our trail that I need to get after. And siding that needs to be scraped and stained before winter. On Monday, it will be August. Projects that should happen before winter arrives are beginning to loom large.
And we have yet to get our hay-field cut even one time this summer. It has become a field of weeds that are gleefully sowing their seeds for further domination. That is probably the biggest discouragement. It is why we have needed to trailer in more hay than before and it is the exact opposite direction from growing desirable hay ourselves.
It will go a long way to improving my outlook when that field finally gets cut and the weedy debris removed. We have decided to take a full year from hay production and plan to cut it continuously to stop the cycle of weeds growing to their seeding phase. We may also add some recommended soil enhancers and then plant a custom mix of grass seeds in hopes of achieving our goal of getting good quality hay to grow right at home.
That gives me a year of something to look forward to. More mowing. You know how much I love mowing.
Oh, by the way, our lawn tractor is not holding up to the abuse I put it through. I need to shop for something else. Maybe if I do it right, I’ll end up with a machine that I like so much it will change how I feel about cutting grass.
That’s what it is all about here: grass hay and lawn grass. Who knew I would find myself so fixated on a task to which I held such disdain in my previous years?
No wonder my inspiration has a tendency to fade every so often.
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A Portrait
The author, in a rare moment of leisure.
Cyndie took the picture of me reading while keeping an eye on the fire last night. See, I was still working. I was tending the fire so it would be hot enough to cook burgers when company arrived. Oh, were those burgers good! Probably made even more so by the homemade buns that Cyndie freshly baked moments before.
Earlier in the day, Cyndie had hosted guests who had some lawn games out and it inspired me to improve the croquet setup. I made my own little “sport court” out of grass. It is set up for croquet, but could just as easily double as a bocce ball space.
Now all I have to do is figure out how to find time for that much leisure.
I need to move composting manure to make room for piling the fresh collections. Production never slows, despite my running out of space to cook it.
Before I can get to that project, we need to head out with the trailer for another load of hay to be purchased. We will be silently chanting, “No rain, no rain, no rain” the whole way there and back.
With our lawn growing faster than I can tend it, it’s a shame I can’t bale it up and save those clippings for feeding the horses in the dead of winter.
Our experience with trying to acquire good quality grass hay for horses this year, hoping to improve on the several years of less than desired content we’ve previously had, has been enlightening. We initially dove into the task of getting hay with such naiveté.
We have discovered that what constitutes “good,” when it comes to baled hay, can be a very individualized opinion. On top of that, what nature provides and farmer skills harvest, in terms of moisture content, involves a very narrow target range. Too dry and the nutrition value to animals drops considerably. Too wet and it will mold and/or spontaneously combust in a conflagration that destroys storage buildings and turns planned food stores to ash.
Different livestock have varying needs from baled fodder. One version of hay does not work for all cattle, sheep, goats, and horses. Some of the local farmers are growing hay for their cows and are kind enough to offer to sell some of it to us if we want to feed it to our horses.
It can work, but it’s a bit of a guessing game. We ended up with a batch that had too much foxtail grass which caused mouth sores in our horses. We’ve had some with an annoying amount of sour dock weed and woody stems that the horses labor to work around when grazing. It creates a mess and interferes with them getting what they want. Both horse and human get irritated.
This year we found a batch that looked like ideal grass bales. They turned out to be too wet. Then we found an even better batch, and got caught in a downpour bringing it home.
We are hoping the third time’s the charm this morning. Then maybe I’ll sneak some time to finish that book later this afternoon.
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