Posts Tagged ‘country living’
Shouldn’t Compare
We had a wonderful lunch opportunity yesterday. It was a first-time visit to the home of friends who live just a few miles north of our place. It’s not fair to compare our worlds, but it is hard not to, and it has given us a fresh perspective about everything that we have accomplished on our 20 acres.
It feels like they have achieved a dizzying amount more on their 40 acres, particularly in the realm of landscape plants and an incredible garden of vegetables and flowers. After lunch, we got a tour of their gorgeous log home –with an impressive finished basement that they did themselves– and then walked some of their property.
They hired a crew to burn one of their fields to replace it with a variety of healthy prairie plants. Many of the grasses and beneficial pollinator plants are as tall as me or taller. It is beautiful.
I am humbled by how many impressive improvements they have achieved on their land, even though they have lived there half as long as we have been at Wintervale.
I was particularly inspired to see the number of new plantings they’ve put in, including quite a few apple trees that are producing fruit for the first time this year. The produce in their garden, and the developing squash and pumpkins out beyond their modest stand of field corn, look bigger and better than anything I’ve seen in a grocery store.
When it came time for us to go, they loaded us up with pickles, green beans, carrots, purple cauliflower, basil, cucumbers, and two varieties of apples, plus an arrangement of flowers.
As soon as we got home, I went out and mowed some grass. Suddenly, that feels like much less of an accomplishment to me than it did the day before.
If it ever seems like we get a lot done around here in terms of upkeep, just know that it’s a drop in a bucket compared to what plenty of others around us out here in the country are doing.
The best takeaway for me from the revelations we saw yesterday is that I am not alone in tending to a little piece of this planet by nurturing nature. We are both helping desirable trees and plants succeed and controlling the spread of troublesome invasives.
It is great to have found such a close neighbor with a similar mindset. It will be good for me to keep in mind that it’s not a competition.
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Remarkably Still
It was so cold outside this morning, it almost felt like winter. The key ingredient that was missing was snow. I feel sorry for places in the world that historically experience this kind of cold but don’t get the months of snow cover that I was able to experience growing up. This environment of things being frozen solid but lacking the beauty and softness of a season-long blanket of wonderful snow is rather sucky.
Still, it was an absolutely beautiful morning despite the lack of temperature. We didn’t have any degrees. Zero Fahrenheit on the thermometer.
While I was outdoors, not a single vehicle traveled our road. When no one is moving about within earshot, it feels like Cyndie and I are the only ones in the world. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is noteworthy because of how rare an instance it is. The quiet was simply luscious. The air was still and the cold temperature seemed to lock everything in place.
The chilly air frosted whiskers but otherwise didn’t appear to bother the horses at all this morning. Compared to those warm days with fog limiting visibility, these cold, crisp days allow the horses easy viewing, which is much more calming on their nerves.
One other rewarding thing about cold weather in the winter is the clear skies that accompany it. When Cyndie pulled into the driveway last night, she stopped to capture the view.
The sun had dropped below the horizon, creating a golden glow at our horizon and lighting up the crescent moon and Saturn out in space.
It’s cold.
It’s still.
It’s beautiful.
It’s drearily lacking in snow.
There’s still time for that last one.
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Overnight Construction
Our morning walks to the barn, by way of the woods so that Asher can get his needs met, always reveal an impressive amount of activity that occurs while we sleep.
Burrowing critters have been creating shockingly large piles of freshly mined dirt lately. They probably need to make new homes because snakes have moved into all their previous caverns.
I used to stomp these piles down, partly thinking I might drive dirt back where it came from and convince the rodents to choose a different location, but that just created large, flat dirt spots where nothing would grow.
After a moment of inspiration, I realized that kicking the pile far and wide spread the dirt thinly over the grass blades and avoided creating a big dead spot. I have mostly given up on trying to coerce the pests to go somewhere else.
I often complain about walking into the hard-to-see strands of spider web that span our pathways but there are many more webs being built that don’t cross the trails.
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It may look like this hand tool hasn’t been used in a long time, but the steel scrubby was getting attached too and it was in use to clean the waterer just a day before.
I wonder if the nighttime builders are surprised when they come out at dusk and discover all the things Cyndie and I have done around the place during the day. Like, maybe, the burrowing critters find their den caved in and decide to move from the lawn areas to a field or the woods.
Honestly, the more effort we put toward clearing spider webs and gopher mounds the more it seems to inspire pests to become more invested in rebuilding and expanding their developments.
There may be some form of reverse psychology potential awaiting me in the coexistence with the creatures that appear to work at odds with our daily activity, but that is probably overthinking.
Still, choosing to simply ignore their activity has some appeal, even if it won’t lead to making them go away.
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Hunting Hounds
On a thickly gray Saturday morning, we stepped out of the house behind Delilah and quickly noticed a sharp sound in the distance. Swallowed by the crunch of our boots on the snowy path, the muffle of hats over ears, and the sound of our own voices as we chatted about some minutia, we had to stop in our tracks to identify what we were hearing.
There was a helicopter far in the distance, but that sound just faded. After a moment of no sounds, there was the bark of a dog. Then, several more. The hunting hounds were out early.
We resumed our trek down the trail, but not for long. The echoing bellows were only getting louder, so we reversed direction and headed back toward the house, through the back yard, and on to the barn. Delilah was delighted with the added excitement and romped her way along with us, reversing direction only several times to see if we couldn’t just check on the vocal hounds in the woods.
I wondered if we might suddenly see coyotes sprinting past us in a run for their lives.
With Delilah secured in the barn, Cyndie and I tended to the tasks of setting out food for the chickens and opening the coop. I could see the trucks of hunters slowing moving by on the road while we mingled with the chickens and I cleaned off the poop board. Rocky made a failed attempt to mount one of the Domestiques. We took solace in his acceptance of her objections.
Cyndie continues to offer feed from her bare hand in effort to condition the flock to always accept humans as safe and valuable companions. With respect to the New Hampshire pullet, Cyndie got nipped as the overzealous girl went after a mole on her thumb.
Can’t fault that as malicious, but geez. That hurt.
Returning to the barn, Delilah bursts forth with excitement at this moment because she knows the next phase of this daily routine is to take her up to the house where she will receive her morning meal. We exit the barn door and while I am closing the door behind us I notice Cyndie struggling with everything she’s got to hold the leash.
Delilah is trying to drag Cyndie up to the driveway to where a cute looking hunting beagle is standing all alone.
We decide to let Cyndie take Delilah back into the barn for a bit while I see if I can coax the beagle to get back on the job and find the rest of his pack or the scent of a coyote.
Knowing the hunters were driving nearby, I walked with the happy radio-collared beagle toward the road. A truck pulled up just as we arrived. The hunter said she was one of two that had gone astray.
Meanwhile, Cyndie took the opportunity to pop out of the barn and head up to the house with Delilah on a short leash. They quickly were surprised by the other stray. This time, Delilah was in reach to make contact, and luckily, with wagging tails the dogs met gently, nose to nose.
Cyndie said she offered Delilah the deal of continuing up to the house for her breakfast, and the two dogs trotted together for a bit and then parted without incident as they reached the door.
The hunter I spoke with at the road said our neighbor had alerted them to a sighting of coyotes early this morning, so they were hopefully tracking a fresh scent. By the time we were having our breakfast, nothing but quiet had settled in around us. I’m guessing the trail was lost.
Subsequent calm and quiet was a welcome outcome after the adventurous start to our Saturday.
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Kitty Homed
The result is in. Despite breaking Cyndie’s heart in handing off our little surprise visitor last week, the sweet kitty that peeked in our back door is now happily placed in a new home.
None of our neighbors reported missing a pet and our trusted pet-sitter, Anna, just happened to be looking for a kitty to fulfill the request of a friend. It was a match that fit seamlessly for all parties concerned.
One reply we received from a neighbor gave us pause. She texted, “Is this the first pet you’ve had abandoned on your property?”
We’ve been here eight years now, and this was a first. Her question implies it is something that happens with some regularity in the country. We are happy to have been spared this harsh reality of human behavior thus far.
Our attention is back on fifteen chickens who are busy learning how to deal with the increasingly wintery weather, as well as their own pecking order. We feel lucky to have avoided any real violence from the aggressors, but they do assert their dominance as anticipated. Happily, the young ones are not looking defeated by it in the least. They continue to ever so slowly expand their comfort zone of free-ranging our land.
In this time of the exploding COVID-19 cases, take advantage of the healthy excuse to stay home and hug your pets.
Except for free-ranging chickens. They aren’t so fond of that hugging thing.
Just throw them some scratch or mealworms and they’ll feel truly loved.
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File Transfered
Without further delay, I now present the first recorded audio of one of Rocky’s early crowing practices:
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Cyndie reported that this was his third of three calls he made on Tuesday morning.
You gotta agree, that sounds pretty cute, eh?
It’s going to be interesting getting used to having a rooster for the first time. Seems like not a day goes by that we don’t learn something new living in the country.
Yesterday, Cyndie reported that she hand-delivered our completed ballots for the November election to our town clerk at her home. We have successfully voted! Glad to have that civic duty completed early. In so doing, Cyndie met our town clerk for the first time. It’s only been 8-years since we moved here.
I guess it could be seen in a good light that we haven’t had much need to be interacting with local officials for any reasons.
With the pandemic looming large throughout the entire summer, we have seen very little of any nearby neighbors.
Wintervale Ranch may not be receiving a lot of visitors lately but soon the neighbors will be hearing a lot of crowing coming from our little patch of paradise.
I look forward to learning what winter has in store for us. I suspect many hours will be spent sheltering in place.
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Magnificent Days
We are enjoying magnificent weather this week for the month of September, although in the back of my mind the very summery temperatures echo too well some of the anticipated ramifications of the warming planet.
No floods or fires in our region at the moment. Just high heat (80°F!) and evolving colors in the tree leaves.
Wandering down the backyard hill toward the opening to the labyrinth, the leaves are still primarily green. Beyond that, there are brilliant splashes of gold, orange, and red showing up with surprising speed.
Our growing season seems to be ever-lengthening, but the end of this summer’s agricultural period is undoubtedly near. The declining hours of daylight aren’t being altered by the changing climate and plants don’t grow so well in the dark.
On the bright side, I think my lawn mowing might be done for the year.
Yesterday morning at work I received a sweet text from Cyndie letting me know that she heard “Rocky the Roo'” making progress on learning how to crow. She said his call had a definite sing-song inflection that was recognizable as the vague hint toward the ultimate “cock-a-doodle-doo.”
I wonder if the magnificent weather days will be just as mesmerizing with non-stop echos of rooster crowing reverberating across our valley. We didn’t check with any of our neighbors about how they might feel about the prospect. At the same time, none of them have ever asked us if their gunshots, barking dogs, hollering for missing cats, or high RPM farm machinery soundtracks have been any problem for us.
I think it a feature, not a bug, of living in the country.
Where pretty much every day is magnificent, no matter what the sounds.
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Weak Link
There are many days when the Wintervale connection to the world via the internet is annoyingly flakey. The problem is mysterious and invisible, frequently interrupting progress in the middle…
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Hi, I’m back. That’s the way this works. After a seemingly interminable pause, activity resumes as if nothing is amiss. You wouldn’t notice a thing, unless you were attempting to visit with others via Zoom.
“Your internet connection is unstable.”
As soon as that message appears, even as I rush to write a chat message to everyone to explain that I could hear them all even though my image may have frozen to them, my fate is doomed to closing and then immediately reconnecting, minus all the text I had just entered in the chat window.
It’s life in the country. For all the advantages we enjoy living out among farm fields and forests, it comes at the expense of having a reliable internet connection. The industry can’t balance the economics of running fiberoptic cable to handfuls of houses scattered across many wide miles.
We don’t stream. We rent DVDs through the mail.
If we want to accomplish something without interruption, it takes a lucky combination of atmospheric conditions and an absence of too much competition for the limited bandwidth. Oh, and we can’t have already exceeded our cap of monthly allotted usage.
In all of the Zoom meetings I have participated in over the last month, I was the weakest link.
It’s too bad because I love the possibility of connecting with my multiple remote communities, but I love living where we do even more.
Cyndie pointed out that our new openings around the two big oak trees beside the driveway allow for excellent viewing of the rising moon.
Since our internet browsers weren’t having much success loading pages, we were more available to get out and enjoy the lunar view.
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Gettin’ Out
It is very easy to be out and about on 20 acres while maintaining appropriate social distance from other people, especially when our property is surrounded by fields and forest. Yesterday afternoon when the sun warmed things up a bit, I took a crack at a few chores in the great outdoors.
My first order of business was to do something about the increasingly dilapidated ramp to the chicken door. I don’t know whether the main culprit is the hens or some other critter, but somebody doesn’t like my weaving of willow branches.
I tried monitoring the ramp with the trail cam, but there is so much chicken activity that I get a couple of hundred photos during the day while capturing nothing after dark. I haven’t had the patience to keep trying long enough to see what animals are nosing around during the nighttime.
I think part of me doesn’t want to know and part of me doesn’t really care. My fix will be the same, regardless of whoever is messing with it.
I had collected a bag full of downed branches beneath the willow tree with a plan to redo the bad parts of the ramp but ended up having a change of heart. I decided to try cutting some finger-sized trees from our forest to weave bigger green wood through the existing frame.
A lot of the willow branches I originally used were dead, so they just dried out more and got brittle, making them easy to break. I think the thicker and greener sticks will stand up much better to abuse.
Around the shop garage, I chopped down the dried shoots of tall ornamental grass, pulled out the failed sheet of plastic water barrier that was supposed to redirect drainage, and then detangled the broken cedar post and bird feeder from the cage of vines that covered it.
It felt a lot like warm weather yard work, which was strange just a day and a half after the blast of snow we had received. At the same time, it was a glorious distraction from the mindset of sheltering in place and the unending gloom and doom news that is the other hard to avoid attention-getter of the moment.
My health is still good, my hands are washed, and I’m physically isolated all weekend at home. Today, I return to the day-job and will strive to avoid infectious invisible droplets.
I hope you all find an opportunity to get out wherever you are to spend some time beneath the open sky. It’s good medicine for long-term in-place sheltering.
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Afternoon Survey
After work yesterday, I took Delilah for a walk to survey the grounds for the first time since Wednesday morning’s snowfall. There is a combination of areas where the snow has melted in the sun and spots where most of the accumulation remains.
There is evidence the chickens are moving around in the woods but when I found them they were clustered beneath the coop, most of them perched on only one foot. There were two eggs in a nest box that were probably on the verge of freezing.
The back of the barn looks like we’ve hung fake icicles as decoration, but these are all real.
In the woods, we didn’t find any new evidence of buck activity, but there is still a big scrape on the ground along one of our trails that hint of a decent-sized set of antlers. Last week, Cyndie found a hoof print that was almost half the size of her boot, so maybe both came from the same big fellow.
There is enough snow remaining on the trail to make it easy to spot fresh tracks if we get any more activity. Someone has been parking across the road from us and bowhunting in our neighbor’s woods. It is highly likely that any deer moving across our property will also travel through those woods.
The gun season doesn’t start until the 23rd in Wisconsin this year, so we’ve got a couple of weeks before we start seeing blaze orange-clad hunters traipsing around the neighboring properties.
At that point, I intend to refrain from doing a lot of surveying of the far reaches of our property for a while.
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Relative Something 