Posts Tagged ‘composting manure’
Some Firsts
I searched my photo archives for an image I wanted to include in yesterday’s post, but didn’t find it until it was too late. It was a shot of the boulders in the center of the labyrinth after Cyndie’s cousins and brothers helped me place a rock on top back in the fall of 2017.
I was excited about having that smaller rock resting on the two boulders and ending up the tallest. It didn’t last in that position for very long. At one point, I ended up wrestling it sideways all by myself, to avoid having it tip over and roll off of both of them.
This is what it looks like now. It’s not nearly as interesting looking. I’ve added the little egg-shaped rock as an accent, but it never lasts very long there. I think birds land on it, then push off when they fly away, knocking it to the ground.
That’s the first picture of the center since the maple tree has been removed.
Yesterday morning, Cyndie and I experienced a first when she discovered she had a black eye for no known reason when she woke up. I asked her if she feels safe at home. She wakes up all night long at any sound or activity, so we have ruled out a possible stray elbow while we were sleeping.
I suggested she do a little research with Dr. Google. Of course, the list of possible causes included cancer, brain diseases, or impending death. Undaunted, she kept reading. Toward the bottom, it mentioned allergies, of which Cyndie has many. She recalled blowing her nose after working in the dusty barn and raking the winter accumulation of debris out of the labyrinth, and said the tissue was blackened. I pointed out that my weather app had alerted me to extremely high pollen levels, as well.
Those triggers, along with aging blood vessels, combine to logically explain how she might have developed a black eye overnight.
“That never happened before…”
In a first-time experiment of using pallets to frame my pile of composting manure, I peeled them off to turn the pile and add air.
I broke the composting manure apart and shoveled it back between the pallets for a second round of aerobic decomposition. This setup definitely allows me to work with larger amounts of manure in one pile. It’s inspired me to want to rig up a second set of pallets so I can start a fresh batch while this one continues to break down.
Other firsts of the season accomplished yesterday include hooking up garden hoses, pulling the leaf net off the landscape pond, and mowing grass with the push mower in four different spots where it has already gotten surprisingly tall.
It would be a more inspiring indication of our transition from winter to true spring if we hadn’t lived through so many April or even May unexpected snowstorms in our lifetimes. It’s awkward, trying to decide when to hang all our snow shovels in storage for the year.
Too soon feels like it would jinx things. It wouldn’t be a first.
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Real Reality
One of the precious things about spending a lot of time in the great outdoors is how it contrasts with present-day depictions of various versions of reality projected in the media and social feeds of our fabulous world wide web. Each day, it becomes harder and harder to sift through the enshitified world of the internet.
Cyndie and I spent a couple of hours following along with the return of the record-setting Artemis II moonfarers last night, mesmerized by the spectacle that brought back memories of the thrills we experienced watching the Apollo splashdowns when we were kids. This morning, I noticed a Redditor lamenting that all he could find in a search for information on his Instagram feed about the astronauts’ return was posts by flat-earthers (or scheming antagonists with some psycho agenda from a bizarre villain world-domination fantasy script) flaunting how dumb grown adults must be to believe the “theatrical performances” by NASA.
Oy. I can’t even…
What is absolutely real is standing on a large mound of the winter’s worth of horse manure to break it up, turn it over, and shape it down with a pitchfork and rake. In a slow process of years, I am endeavoring to develop a high spot in the large paddock that protects a drain tile line from the spigot in the barn that comes to the surface within the horses’ domain.
Why would I make up something like this?
While I worked the pitchfork yesterday, with Asher watching over the horses and me, I was enjoying the sounds of nature around us. At one point, as my inner narrator was marveling over the call of a pheasant across the road, my brain kicked in to clarify that I was hearing, “Gobble gobble gobble.”
That’s no pheasant. It’s a turkey! Some Tom was announcing something to the world. We’ve been noticing a remarkable presence of a larger-than-usual pheasant population this year. Maybe the wild turkeys are competing for territory.
The reality in the kitchen this morning is a full-on production of Cyndie’s popular scones being baked.
If the internet provided you with aromas, you would surely know how real this is. Go ahead and check the image to see if it is AI. No, I did not Photoshop those ingredients onto the counter. Some lucky volunteers for an organization Cyndie is involved with will be getting a treat today!
I will not be left out, since my role as taste tester gives me the privilege of finding out if they are good when still warm out of the oven. It’s a tough job, but that’s my reality.
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Creative Solutions
In more than a decade of living here with horses, I have never gotten around to making an effort toward improving my primitive methods of composting their manure. If I were truly serious about maximizing my operation, I could have put in a base material on top of the bare ground and installed a roof to avoid rainstorms from saturating the piles.
Yesterday, as I was turning over the lone pile that has been cooking for a while, I was dealing with the inevitable tendency of the drying material to resist holding a cubic shape. It naturally slides off to become much more of a pyramid. Since the outer 6 inches won’t be actively composting, the narrowing top portion of the pile is much less efficient than a cubed shape.
Having contemplated a lazy man’s method of a walled fixture to square up the sides, I finally took steps to test my theory.
With my mindset of wanting to reuse materials, I headed down to the hay shed and scrounged for three pallet possibilities. Right in front, I found a scrap roll of 1/4-inch hardware cloth covered in pigeon droppings. How appropriate, I thought.
I stapled the hardware cloth to two of the pallets and relied on the third having minimal gaps between its boards. Grabbing some loose polypropylene twine lying nearby, I put everything on a wheelbarrow and headed to the compost area. Crudely tying the corners of the pallets together, I tossed the pile inside, easily making it much taller than previously possible.
Why it took me so long to do this is a testament to procrastination.
There is an area in the paddock where the clay soil at the surface is pottery-grade quality. When it gets wet, the weight of the horses sinks their feet down a dramatic depth. The soil around that spot has less clay, but is equally messy when wet. So it doesn’t make sense to me how the horses can create a dry path at an angle across the middle of this otherwise disastrous zone.
I don’t know how they do it, but I wish they would make paths like this in all the other messy areas of the paddocks for all of our sakes.
Creative solutions R us.
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Still Vibrating
After a day away at the rally on Saturday, life returned to normal yesterday on the ranch. Well, almost normal. Something is wrong with our furnace. I noticed the house temperature wasn’t holding on Saturday night, so I reset the power in hopes of achieving a quick resolution.
In the middle of the night, I saw the display was showing the house back up to 68° and imagined the reset had solved the problem. Unfortunately, when we looked at it first thing in the morning, it had dropped to 65° again. It being Sunday, we opted not to seek service until today, a regular business day.
I built a fire in the fireplace to take the edge off the morning chill and waited for the temperature outside to climb into the 60s.
It’s a little frustrating that we just had our annual furnace inspection a couple of weeks ago, and it was found to be in good working order. What odd timing, and during such relatively mild conditions for a problem to occur now.
There is one place where I am having just the opposite problem: too much heat.
The first compost pile of the season is cooking a little too hot already. The fertile garden soil factory is back in business.
As I was toiling in all things compost, I found my mind was still resonating with the energy and the impassioned faces that surrounded us on the Capitol Mall Saturday.
There were friends and some extended family in attendance, many of whom we weren’t able to connect with before leaving. Communication via text was made unreliable due to the sheer number of people all trying to utilize the same cell tower(s) simultaneously. Paul and Beth were near the stage. Pam and John were there somewhere. I got a text from Liz and Nick that they were there, but I only achieved a one-word reply in acknowledgement.
Cyndie was exchanging photos with friends in an attempt to establish each other’s location. Bob had a bike and never made it into the crowd near us. I was grateful we had gotten there early enough to easily find Rich and Jill, so we were able to share the experience with them. Julian and Allison took up a position more to their liking toward the edge of the main crush of people.
Between the overhead drone cameras and the State Patrol helicopter hovering, I hope they can come up with a reasonable estimate that all parties accept for the number of people in attendance. A more valuable measurement would be the level of combined invisible heart energy radiating throughout the crowd.
It was strong enough that it is vibrating with me still.
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Helping Trees
With the intense growth of summer beginning to wane just a little, we can better see into the woods to spot vines that are climbing our trees and uproot them. This week, we have been noticing them while walking Asher in the morning and pausing only briefly to tend to one or two near the trail. It tells me that the chore deserves a more focused trek through the woods to address any less obvious others away from the trail.
I’ve also been thinking about the young volunteer trees we discovered growing in our north loop field, and wanting to check on them. I did a little research on ways to best help young trees and found that nurturing root growth with water and mulch was a frequent suggestion. This gave me a fresh use for the composted manure stockpile I’ve been wanting to distribute.
After a recent turning of an old pile, I was thrilled to see the temperature had climbed back to over 150°F in the middle, indicating the microbial breakdown activity was far from complete.
The piles that are no longer cooking need to be distributed to make space for the daily new loads cleaned out of the paddocks. I decided to haul some up to use around the base of the young trees in the north loop field.
The first thing I discovered is that the poison ivy in that field is spreading farther and farther away from the spot where it was originally established. The second thing I found was that there are little oak trees showing up all over the place.
There are so many that I gave up trying to put mulch around all of them. Some trees will just have to fend for themselves. We get a fair amount of pressure from deer in that field, and I’ve known that young trees are all at risk of getting munched on, but since there are so many things growing there, I’m willing to sacrifice a few for occasional deer treats.
Among all the grasses and weeds growing around and over the volunteer oak trees popping up, there are also a few pine trees, many poplars, and two specific known cedar trees. I trudged back and forth many times in search of the smaller of the two cedars, using a huge pine tree as a reference.
It was hiding well, but when I finally came upon it, I was standing right where I thought it would be.
It doesn’t look much taller than it was last year when we first found it. It remains at risk of getting chomped. That might be enough to inspire me to offer it a little protection, since I’m fond of the added species variety it brings us.
Gotta protect the top as much as the roots down below!
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Gifted Art
What can we say about friends who agree to house-sit and care for our animals, and then leave us gifts of spectacular art pieces to find in unsuspecting places? My friend, Pam (whom I met on the Himalayan trek in Nepal with Jim Klobuchar’s Adventures), and her husband, John, take wonderful care of Asher and the horses when Cyndie and I travel. They both also have a keen eye for creative endeavors.
This wall hanging of pressed flowers and pieces of the never-ending collection of emptied bags that the grains of feed for the horses come in is a wonder to behold.
I was completely oblivious to this beautiful creation hanging in the barn when I showed up to do the “housekeeping” in the paddocks and only learned about it later, back at the house, when Cyndie showed me this picture she had taken.
We will be devising a more robust method of hanging it in the short term, while waiting for a frame with glass to arrive in order to preserve it long term.
While the humidity teetered between 75 and 100 percent yesterday, I sweated my way through an attempt to catch up with the manure composting details that get a little neglected when we are away. We don’t expect others to do things the way we do. Instead, we ask that they simply clean up manure from under the overhang when it’s time to feed the horses.
That means there is always a little catching up to be done when I return to take over equine fecal relocation duties. While tending the composting piles in the sweltering tropical conditions, I noticed how much I wished I wasn’t in the middle of doing it. The non-stop sweat on my face and in my eyes was driving me crazy.
No, I do not particularly like tending to the piles of composting manure. What I truly like is the times when the piles have been fully tended. I don’t necessarily enjoy doing it, but I thoroughly enjoy it when it’s done.
The compost piles almost look like works of art. It’s a gift that I give to myself.
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Final Details
We are at that point in the story where the main characters are working multiple lists simultaneously in preparation for their adventure vacation as tourists visiting Iceland. Test packing happened Monday night. All systems are a go.
Now I am in the second-guessing mode. I packed once, but now I’ve been into the bag a few times to get toiletries or grab something out of my carry-on bag. I also thought of a couple of things to add. Will I remember to put everything back? Will I remember where I packed everything? No. No, I won’t. Based on past experience, I have a terrible time recalling what nifty little pocket I’ve stashed certain things, thinking it’s such a clever location.
Meanwhile, I’m ticking away at the property work I want to finish before we go.
One valuable task that is less visible than others is the management of manure composting. It has been so wet this year, I’ve had a tough time keeping the piles active. As a result, I can’t move them out as often as I’d like to make room to create a new pile for the never-ending supply of fresh manure. Since we are going to be gone for almost two weeks, I wanted to provide ample space for our horse sitters to dump the manure they will be cleaning up every day.
Yesterday, I crossed that goal off my list. New space is achieved.
That was much more rewarding than my fruitless attempt to dig again in search of the buried power cable. That project will be waiting for me when we return.
I did successfully complete the trimming of grass beneath the back pasture fence line with enough gas left over to also clean up a portion of our trails. Then I mowed the front and backyard around the house.
This morning, I need to drive to Hudson for a windshield replacement before returning home to finish off the last of the grass cutting. If there is something unfinished after that, it will need to wait until we return stateside.
For the record, last night Cyndie was very busy finding new things to bring and rethinking what was going into her suitcase. It served to heighten my second-guessing about what I “test packed” the other night.
In my opinion, managing the manure composting area is a lot easier than packing for a trip to visit Iceland.
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Imagine That
Yesterday, I gave myself a day off from conditioning my body for long-distance cycling with a plan of riding this morning. Although it would be good practice for the upcoming Tour of Minnesota, during which we ride rain or shine, I did not have it in me to go out and get cold and wet while subjecting my bike to the abuse of rain riding.
I’ll wait for another (dryer) opportunity.
At least I finished mowing all but the wettest areas of grass yesterday afternoon before this latest dose of saturating precipitation.
It was rewarding to find the horses equitably sharing space under the overhang this morning as rain poured down. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise to me but they were even positioned properly for their feed stations. That is not a common occurrence.
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A volunteer from This Old Horse asked if she could feed the horses yesterday afternoon. I was not completely astonished this morning to find where she dumped the manure in my compost area and had to double-check with Cyndie about who dumped it.
I tease Cyndie about her penchant for choosing the most inappropriate pile, which is what our volunteer did yesterday. The thing that I don’t understand about the choice, whenever there are no obvious piles for freshly dumped manure, is how they decide to pick the oldest, most composted, most ready to be removed for other uses pile from the five or six options.
The last thing I want is to have fresh manure mixed into it.
My response each time this happens: “Imagine that.”
I guess I have become more educated than I’d like to admit about what the differing stages of composting manure look like. Newer piles that are very actively “cooking” may be hard to tell apart but it seems to me the oldest pile that looks like the closest thing to dirt should be the last of the choices.
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Just Thursday
There wasn’t anything unusual about yesterday compared to any other Thursday. I got Wordle in 4. We did the morning horse chores after I walked Asher. Cyndie heated servings of an egg bake from the freezer for breakfast. Even though I was listening for the arrival of a truck to pick up the tractor, I never heard a thing.
When I stepped outside with Asher after breakfast, the tractor was gone. I think our house is soundproof.
Instead of getting one particular project started and finished, my methods of late tend to lean towards picking away a little bit at many tasks simultaneously. While walking Asher, I grabbed the hedge trimmer to cut down last year’s stalks of our tall Japanese Silver Grass at various locations around the property.
Later, I spent some time turning and reshaping old compost piles in hopes of reactivating the process that fell dormant over winter.
In a spontaneous decision, we suddenly decided to cut down an entire section of the lilac tree in our front yard.
The bark was peeling off the trunk. We tried wrapping it but that didn’t lead to the tree healing the wound. When the wrapping started falling off, we noticed a mushroom growing out of the side. Even though there were signs of new buds on the branches, we decided to cut the whole section off to avoid the tree wasting energy on the doomed portion.
That tree was there when we bought the place over 11 years ago and has continued to get taller and taller every year. I don’t know what to expect from it next. We’ll see what removing one of the five “trunks” does for the remaining portions.
While I had the chainsaw out, we headed into the woods to remove the latest tree that had fallen across one of our trails. I also brought down a medium-sized tree leaning against others at a 45-degree angle. We keep adding to the dead wood lying on the ground in our forest because trees fall more often than we can consume the wood.
One good outcome of the recent winds was that a previously snagged limb finally fell to the ground. It had been up there for years. It was just beyond the reach of my pole saw. I was able to cut down the rest of the tree, but this one section was hung up in the collar of another tree and we couldn’t shake it loose. Given enough time, it eventually came down without our help.
Toward the latter part of the afternoon, we gave the horses the next increment of time on the fresh pasture grass. Before our time limit was reached, Swings and Mix had come in of their own accord. I was doing some equine fecal relocation work in the paddock and Light came in to check on me. Mia stayed out gobbling grass.
When Cyndie presented their buckets of feed, I had to walk out and talk Mia into coming in.
It’s a special treat when a horse follows your lead without requiring a lot of coercion. My charm can be irresistible.
Just another Thursday in our little paradise.
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Still Cooking
Since the little green caterpillar is still crawling around, I shouldn’t be surprised that the organisms that breakdown manure into dirt continue to do their thing. This time of year my compost piles are usually dormant but I’ve currently got one that is steaming away, active as ever.
We received a little bit of rain overnight Friday into Saturday and that, combined with the above-freezing temperatures, has created sloppy footing in the paddocks. The significant weight of horses provides a pretty good indicator of how thawed the ground gets. Instead of the ground being packed down by their hooves, it becomes dotted with hoof-sized potholes.
Just for the record, when the weather turns back to freezing, the pockmarked surface becomes rock-hard and that wreaks havoc on my attempts to scoop manure. At that point, I just hope for snow to cover the ground for the season so I can just let it all lay until spring.
It’s weird how easy it is to get used to not having snow on the ground. It will require a mental adjustment when winter weather finally arrives and I have to shift into shoveling and plowing mode. I fear I’m being lulled into a nonchalance that will demand more than a little effort to overcome.
Alas, that is a bridge to be crossed at another time. This is the moment I should be focused on.
Yesterday I puttered around with a curiosity about locating the spot where digging for the power cable to the barn needs to happen. The warm weather has me wanting to deal with it sooner than next spring. I tried poking a wire for a while and then got the bright idea I should just call the “Call Before You Dig!” number and have a skilled professional mark the entire route between the shop and the barn.
Of course, you know what will happen as soon as it gets marked. Yes, we’ll finally get that snow cover I’ve been waiting for.
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Relative Something 