Archive for the ‘Wintervale Ranch’ Category
Special First
Yesterday was one of those days when I found myself saying, “I did not picture myself sitting here when I woke up this morning!” My day felt so full that I can’t believe I was able to fit it all in. We entertained new friends visiting for the first time, discovered The Roost, (check it out!) where we ate pizza cooked in a wood-fired oven, and then I went for my first bike ride of the year. But the highlight for me was time I spent with the horses in the morning before all the rest of that started. Let me tell you about it. It’s what I do.
After amazing myself with completing both a blog post and getting the horses fed, I was trying to clean up manure in the paddocks. Legacy had other priorities. He really wanted a chance to get out and have a taste of that sweet green grass growing up everywhere surrounding his fence line. Up to now, I had yet to even place a halter on one of our horses, but with Cyndie laid up, my time had come.
Legacy was so persuasive, with his calm and subtle closing of any distance I attempted to create between my nose and his. Finally, he stepped forward to stand on the pile I was working to create, and I realized that the task I was on would be impossible to complete.
While pondering whether I would be able to pull off what I was now considering, I stepped inside the barn and picked up a halter. After several tries to decipher which end was up, it fell into place and became exceedingly obvious. I looked up and found Legacy had been watching my progress and was positioned as close to me as he could possibly get, at the door. How could I deny him?
I climbed the fence to enter the paddock and showed him the halter, even though it was clear that wasn’t necessary. He was all in. He helped me get it on him and off we went, to my next and probably biggest challenge. I needed to manage his position, the opening of the gate, and the continued containment of the other horses, all at the same time. I’ve seen Cyndie do it, so I just followed that image in my mind. It helps that the horses all know the drill, as well. They behaved perfectly, and suddenly I had Legacy out on some grass, and he was almost as happy with that as I was for successfully getting him there.
In succeeding turns, I got each horse out on their own for some time grazing fresh grass, and then a short walk. While I was out with the last horse, Cyndie arrived on her crutches, clinging to a bag of carrot treats. She was able to see me survive Cayenne having a little panic attack, spinning around on me, toward the end of her walk on a trail.
This time with the horses was a significant milestone for me, a very special first time of managing that level of care. I am very lucky and extremely grateful to have this wonderful herd serve as my teachers in this adventure we are on here. Something tells me they feel the same way about having Cyndie and me.
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Nature’s Course
If you live on a river, or have ever paid attention to flood stages, you are probably aware of the time it can take for a river to crest. That phenomena is playing out in our paddocks now, as the first day of sunshine after the dreadful week of soaking rains produced wetness and mud that is the worst we have seen. There will be a time-lag before we get the drying for which we so dearly yearn.
The horses are beginning to show some impatience with not only the enduring mud, but probably more so, the wait to get on the fresh green grass they can see all around their corral. I began work on installing temporary fencing to allow them limited access to some grazing just outside their paddock, and was able to push the posts in most of the way by hand because the ground is so saturated. Even if I get the fence up, we can’t put them out there until it firms up enough to support their weight without them churning it into a mud bath like the sacrifice area of their paddocks.
After the rain finally stopped, and the temperature rose out of the 40s, I took the blankets off the horses. They really wanted to be brushed after that, even though a couple of them played hard to get and made us wait out a few dance moves of avoidance before settling down so we could go to work. Yesterday, I got a hint that we didn’t give them as much brushing as they wanted. Cayenne and Hunter took it upon themselves to cooperatively work on removing each other’s shedding coats.
When I first spotted them, I was amazed at the vigor with which each horse worked. It was so obviously a joint operation of sheer pleasure that I found myself mesmerized and wondering if I should maybe be embarrassed about peeping at their moment of shared passion. Hunter’s mouth was open, teeth bared, and he was grinding back and forth on Cayenne’s flank, bringing up vast tufts of hair that easily rivaled what our brushing produces. She was working with equal intensity on his back.
It was as vivid a presentation of “you scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours” as I have ever seen. It was such a classic scene that I figured I should take a picture, but I hesitated, figuring it would be over by the time I pulled out my phone. After staring at them with increasing fascination for a couple of minutes, it occurred to me that I could have long ago had my phone out for pictures. I snapped a few, but of course, none of them really do the scene adequate justice.
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Two Incidents
With Cyndie laid up in recovery for a while, I have sole responsibility for tending to the horses. After only one day, I already have two incidents to report. The common denominator for both situations happens to be our lovely dog, Delilah. If I didn’t keep letting her tag along when I head down to feed the horses, things would probably have come off without a hitch, but she needs to get out just as bad as I need to go feed the horses.
Most of the time, Delilah is getting along well with the horses. It’s similar to the way she is with our cat, Pequenita, in that there are still too many moments out of the blue when she works herself into a tizzy and begins barking and baring her teeth at them. Our cat is small enough that it appears that Delilah just wants to play when she gets all riled up and pouncy. The significant size of the horses appears to be more intimidating, and Delilah comes across as trying to establish some control and to prove her skills at herding. She is a shepherd, after all.
After I got Cyndie home from the procedure on her hip, I discovered that the straps that run under the belly of Hunter’s blanket weren’t connected properly, and it was flipped up over his back. He seemed calm enough to allow me to monkey with it, so I tried to quickly unhook and then re-hook the two straps. Off they both came, and then the first one clicked right into place, at which point Delilah went nuts and did some ferocious barking at Hunter. The horse lurched back and I lost hold of him and that second strap, which was now dangling precariously under his belly as he maneuvered in response to the canine troublemaker.
Our muddy troublemaker
I definitely have not succeeded in teaching Delilah what “No!” means. Apparently, she thinks it means she should keep doing whatever it is that she was doing when I suddenly burst forth with the word, repeating it in ever-increasing intensity.
Eventually, I fooled Delilah into approaching me close enough to allow me to grab her collar, after which she was dragged unceremoniously into the barn and tied up. It took a little patience, but after a short wait, Hunter allowed me back in position to reach under him and pull the strap through to hook it up properly.
Yesterday, I had finished filling the hay feeders at their dinner time, when I noticed that Hunter seemed to be following me wherever I went in the paddock. I allowed myself to linger longer than I really wanted to, finally choosing to just stand in his space when he repeatedly closed any gap that I created by my movements.
When I spotted Delilah beginning to bare her teeth and revving up to bark at him, I decided to intervene swiftly to alter her focus. I tried kneeling down and holding her next to me, soothing her anxiety as Hunter nosed around, taking in big whiffs of her scent. I was hoping to nurture a calm, close-contact interaction between them in hopes it might set a precedent for them developing a more congenial companionship.
Without warning, Hunter suddenly lunged forward and tried to bite Delilah as I held her. I felt awful that I had put Delilah in that dangerous proximity, despite her anxiety of the risk. In fairness to Hunter, he was only returning the treatment he has been receiving from her for far too long. Delilah wrenched out of my grip quickly enough to dodge any real harm, and we both decided it was time to hustle out of the paddock and out of Hunter’s reach.
Hunter went back to grazing.
I have added a couple of notches to my belt of experience managing our dog while in close proximity with our horses. I’m looking forward to my coach soon being able to use her crutches to come down and supervise my lessons, hopefully before any more risky incidents play out.
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Choosing Hardship
Things are not going very easy for us on the ranch right now, but despite the difficulties we face, we are still basking in the richness and fullness of this life we have chosen. The primary frustration is the current weather pattern we have been under for a week. It has been chilly and rainy every day. Too rainy, for many of them. The wind has calmed a bit in the last couple of days, so we do have the benefit of that misery being removed from the rest of the miserable onslaught we have had to endure.
In direct correlation to the troublesome weather is our plight in caring for the horses in the manner we aspire to maintain. We just can’t alleviate their predicament of too much mud. We anticipated a certain amount of hassle, but this week of rain is just over the top. Not just the rain, but the cold, cold temperatures, too. We have tried to provide some relief, by allowing them time in the barn, but that is a temporary solution for a problem that has far exceeded being of temporary duration.
The amount of work required to manage our property is significant, but adding the universal difficulty of non-stop wetness compounds the burden dramatically. Every building is leaking, including my wood shed! The grounds are a mess. That makes the house a mess, and clothes a mess. It’s hard!
But it’s good. It’s a good hard. There are easier life styles a person can choose. Mankind spends a fair amount of energy devising ways to make life easier. I make jokes about the situation where life gets so easy a person has to join a fitness club and pay money to engage in sessions of doing hard work. People will workout in a gym, running in place or moving weighted levers up and down to get sweaty, develop strength and muscle tone. But, dig in the dirt? Carry heavy objects long distances? Walk the hills of 20 acres? Why would someone choose to do that?
Maybe we choose to live like this precisely because it is hard. A life of hard work offers special rewards that more than justify the effort. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself whenever our hard life starts getting really hard. Of course, I’ve got the benefit of being in proximity of Cyndie’s positive outlook, which she graciously shares, encouraging me to check my focus and recognize our many blessings.
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Uninvited Situations
As April draws to a close, we would like to be preparing our minds for the transition that May should offer toward connecting us to summer. Instead, we are feeling shriveled and wrinkly from 6 inches of rain in 6 days. The events and situations of the last few days are beginning to take a toll. I think one of my unconscious responses is to clench my jaw more than usual. I have been trying to practice better awareness of that habit. Each time I catch myself clenching, I am startled at the discovery. How is it that I so easily start pressing without realizing it? I can’t help but wonder about how often I do it and fail to notice.
Our house feels uncomfortably out of whack, because I haphazardly pulled furniture out of the far end of the sunroom and stashed it anywhere and everywhere to get things out from under the leaks.
One of our garage doors is so water-logged, the electric opener can’t lift it. When I pulled the release handle, a pin popped out and now the bracket hangs loose, and swings menacingly.
Cyndie reported that she discovered one of the boards of the wall separating Legacy and Cayenne’s stalls in the barn was wrenched loose and lying in Legacy’s stall yesterday morning. She thought Legacy had done it, but I am suspicious of Cayenne, as she appeared to be working on the next board down while I was in there feeding them and freshening their water buckets. I’m gonna need longer screws.
After throwing one of Delilah’s toys for a series of “fetch” exercises before dinner, she walked past me on one ‘retrieve’ and stepped into the wading pool where we often wash her before letting her in the house. Pretty smart way to let me know she is ready to go in. After we got inside, I toweled her off and noticed she started to favor her left front foot, sometimes drastically avoiding putting any weight on it. She went from walking fine, to limping obviously, in an instant.
I have developed my first poison ivy rash of the season, on the inside of both arms, very consistent with the most likely source being contact with Delilah’s fur.
When I got home from work yesterday, I noticed something on the floor in front of the kitchen sink. There were six small ball bearings in one spot. I deduced that they must be from the pull-out waste basket under the sink, but I have no idea why or how.
These kinds of little uninvited situations start to have a cumulative effect, but they are probably small potatoes compared to what is really weighing on my mind. Today I will be driving Cyndie to an appointment to have an arthroscopic procedure done to clean up her hip-joint. She will be confined to crutches for an uncertain amount of time.
It sure would do us wonders to have the rain end and get a little warm sunshine beaming down on us soon. It would at least be one less reason to grit my teeth.
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Nastiness Unleashed
I’ve been referring to the weather of the previous few days as looking grumpy, but yesterday it turned downright angry. That wind and rain was coming with an attitude! It felt like there was some message being sent in the intensity of extreme gusting wind. The driving rain just kept coming, round after round, hours on end.
It proved to be too much for the shell of our home. Mid-morning yesterday the sunroom started dripping. At the start, it was leaking over a bay of windows at the end of the room. I called the gutter company that recently replaced our soffits and gutters in that area. Before our gutter guy arrived to check on things, the dripping was showing up other places, so I knew it wasn’t anything they did to cause it.
I called the man who built our storage room for advice about the possible source of my problem. It is likely that the flashing where the sunroom joins the main house is not doing the job. Somewhere, water is finding a route beneath shingles, and once under there, it has a variety of directions to travel. Unfortunately, there is nothing to be done until the weather breaks and he can get up on the roof to verify the problem and plot a fix.
It was an unpleasant way to start a day, but it alerted me that I should check our other buildings for possible problems. Sure enough, the roof over the shop is leaky, which is not surprising because I have seen previous evidence of that. I found that I had left the side windows open in that garage, resulting in a bit of mess.
We have received another 2 inches of rain, which brings us to about 5 inches on the ground since last Thursday. With the extreme winds blowing, the poor trees are going to have a hard time staying up. While I was walking toward the barn I heard a tree falling over on the neighbor’s property. Before I got in from my inspection tour, I heard another one go down on the neighbor’s land on the other side of us. Holding hope for the trees on our property, that they will all somehow endure and remain standing.
When I got down to the barn, it was no surprise to find the paddock surface a complete disaster of wet mud. Cyndie had let the horses out in the morning, with blankets on, and they were now just doing their horse-best of enduring the insult of cold and wet. They were again greatly relieved to be able to come in for the night and get a break from the nastiness being unleashed on the land.
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Precious Gifts
We endured one heck of a nasty day of weather yesterday. It produced another inch-and-a-half in the rain gauge, which may not be entirely accurate, because much of the rain was moving horizontally due to significant wind. There were way too many scarily powerful gusts. It was a good excuse to have a fire in the fireplace, watch a rented documentary movie up in our loft, and putter around with indoor tasks. We finally hung some pictures that have accumulated over time.
The inspiration to hang pictures came from having brought home a precious gift-upon-gift after visiting our friends’ house yesterday. Mike Wilkus had already gifted us with a watercolor portrait of a horse in motion which he painted, and that we absolutely love. When I explained that I had some old barn wood that I hoped to use for a frame, but no experience or tools to cut a mat and build a frame, he accepted the challenge without hesitation.
We gave him back the picture, handed over the barn wood, and he created a superb, professional quality framed work of custom art. The result is the epitome of priceless to us. It is all that I hoped for, and so much more.
We moved a couple of things around to make room for this picture on our wall, and once on a roll, were able to get another precious portrait hung that Cyndie recently put in a frame. Marco Morales gave us a pencil drawing portrait of Delilah that he did during his visit this winter.
We made a spot for it right beneath another priceless creation that our friend Nancy Olmsted made and presented to us. She created a picture using sewn fabric that depicts an image of our house and incorporates the labyrinth and cardinals, symbols from a weekend visit here with Cyndie and a group of friends.
Our house continues to evolve to become more and more our home. Being blessed with so many precious, personally created gifts of art is deeply enriching for us. These are all gifts that really do keep on giving, over and over, every time we see them.
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Sticky Sweet
Our three chestnuts had their heads out when I visited the barn on Thursday. Legacy was turned around with his butt to the door. We are so grateful to have this barn with stalls. It is obvious to us that they are, too. We have never once had any of them make a fuss over being confined inside.
Yesterday, everyone was back outside in the sunshine, after the fog burned off. Cyndie surprised me with a last-minute suggestion that we go out for breakfast before she went to work. It was the first day of a local syrup farm’s open house event, and they were serving pancakes with fresh blueberries!
They also provide free maple-syrup sundaes, so I had ice cream for dessert first thing in the morning, too. It was pure sticky, sweet goodness.
We learned last year that you can bring your own containers and purchase syrup at a discount. We bought a gallon in two Ball jars, brought from home. It’s that good, and it’s easy to keep. Since it wasn’t sealed in these containers, we’ll refrigerate it.
We are still “new” folks here, meaning we weren’t born and raised in the area, and that shows when you attend an event like this where everyone else knows each other well. Since it was a weekday, the primary crowd we encountered were retirees and their parents. I’m sure we appeared out of place, but we were doted on just the same.
After pancakes, Cyndie dashed off to work, leaving me to chat about the syrup season (it was average), and the art and science of knowing when to start tapping trees. If you try too early, while time passes until the sap runs, the tree will have been busy healing the spot where the tap was inserted. If you start too late, you miss some of the sweetest, best sap for syrup.
I killed a little time in the morning, working indoors while waiting for things to dry out as much as possible, then headed out to see if I could mow more of the fields. It was borderline, as some spots still have standing water.
I forged ahead regardless and ended up cutting what I could, working around the wettest spots. Based on the forecast, it could be my last chance to mow for quite a while…
Just as predicted, the rain has brought out the greenest of greens in the lawn and portion of the back grazing field where I did the first cutting last week. It makes it look like the areas cut yesterday don’t match, but I’m confident they will come around soon enough. I was concerned that these remaining areas all had thicker grass already, and that is causing more piles of cuttings that get left behind. This should become less obvious before long, though.
I’m all about the aesthetic impression aligning with my goal of better grass. I believe this will improve the forage in our fields, but at the very least, I would like it to look like improved forage. If nothing more, I would enjoy having that justification for spending all this time out there trying to mow farm acres with a lawn tractor.
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Significant Soaking
For all those many days of last July through October that left our land under stress from drought, I wish I could capture the current thorough soaking and redistribute it later this summer. This is what spring is all about though, and all the growing things will be happily slurping this up, soon to burst forth with explosive growth.
I captured a shot of the rain gauge showing that we came just a fraction short of a full inch-and-a-half over about a 24-hour period. It was the perfect ongoing precipitation, able to soak through the top layer and saturate everything very completely. In fact, it seems wetter now than at any previous point during the recent melt of the full winter’s-worth of snow.
Another difference from then and now is that there are worms coming up out of the ground all over the place. If that doesn’t feel like spring…
We took a chance of leaving the horses out in the overnight rain on Wednesday evening, and it turned out to be the wrong choice. Cyndie went out into the soaking rain early yesterday morning to feed them, and found them all shivering drastically and begging to be let inside. They were crowding so tight at the gate that she couldn’t manage getting Legacy through alone, although he was the only one she had a rope around. All four horses came in at the same time, and with no hesitation or funny business, they each walked directly into their appointed stalls.
Message received.
I checked on them several times during the day yesterday, and they seemed as happy as could possibly be. I topped off their water and when the rain stopped late in the afternoon around their dinner time, I opened all the outside doors for them while I delivered feed and fresh hay. Not one of them gave a hint of being anxious to get out of the barn. It’s a good thing, because even though the rain had stopped falling, the runoff was still flowing and every last hoof print in the paddock was filled with water. There was not a dry place to stand anywhere outside.
I spent the rest of my day trying to be productive in the office of our house, organizing files and putting documents away in places where we just might stand a chance of finding them again should we need them. Delilah alternated between lounging around, napping, and demanding to go outside and get soaking wet in order to come right back in and get dried off so she could beg to be let back outside to get soaking wet so she could come right back in to get toweled off again. I started to wonder if she didn’t just want to be rubbed with a towel over and over.
Today should be a different day altogether. We expect to get some sunshine and reach reasonably warm temperatures. Will it dry up enough to mow? I doubt it, but there are other outdoor chores available. If nothing else, I can always get another kind of soaking, bathing in the warm solar rays while watching buds appear on tree branches. This is spring!
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Grass Management
There is an ebb and flow to managing a 20-acre property and animals in a rural setting that on the surface is significantly different from my old life in the suburbs. From my perspective, it’s not as dissimilar as one might think, beyond the obvious increase in scale.
I was thinking about how it feels like I pay more attention to the weather now than I ever had before, but that’s not really the case. I’ve always been fascinated by the weather. I fretted about the dilemma of either too much, or not enough precipitation impacting the growing things on our suburban lot, just not on the same scale as I do now. Back then, it didn’t get the same degree of attention from me, I suppose because there was less at stake.
I’m sure I had the neighbors chuckling over my activities yesterday, as I rode my little lawn tractor to mow part of the big hay-field beside our driveway, racing to beat the rain. The back field looked so darn nice that I overcame my hesitation to look foolish, and cut as much as I could before time ran out. Just like we had done two days before, I started by pulling a rake behind the Grizzly ATV to scar the surface to be seeded, switched to the lawn tractor to pull the seed spreader, then set about mowing as much of the rest of the field as I could.
Most of what I was doing was in sight of the horses, and they seemed to take great interest. This is the field where we let them roam for most of the time since they arrived last fall. I expect they are feeling a bit frustrated to not be given access now that the snow has melted. Our plan is to graze them on other fields and to grow this space for hay.
I only cut about half of the field before the precipitation started. I think it will be a challenge to get the rest done, because what’s left is thicker grass to start with, it will be wetter, and the new moisture will help trigger a growth spurt. I had wanted to get the field cut before spring growth started, which is the reason I was using the lawn tractor in the first place. It is light enough that it can work before the ground is dry and not leave wheel ruts.
If I’m not able to get that second half mowed, it could provide comparison to show the difference mowing made.
Whether our plan to improve the grass in that field works instantly, or not, it sure looks better right away. It is likely the improvement toward getting good quality hay will be incremental over a few years. I’m okay with that. I spent a lot of years slowly transitioning our suburban lot from a lawn to a natural, leaf-carpeted forest floor.
By the way, word has gotten back to us that the folks who bought our old place are changing it back into a lawn.
Such is the ebb and flow of grass management.
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Relative Something 