Posts Tagged ‘farm’
Seeking Balance
I enjoyed a chance to sleep in this morning and awoke to a blustering spring wind. I hope it will help dry out the fresh mud created by last week’s inch and a half of rain. It is a frustrating thing to need moisture for the trees which have been weakened by drought, yet to desperately want the ground to not be so saturated that we can’t walk or drive vehicles without sinking and creating ruts. We need to have just the right balance.
Is there such a thing? Probably not a static state of balance, but everything is constantly flowing toward equilibrium. It is why there is so much wind this morning.
As Elysa and I were chatting to solve the world’s problems yesterday while breaking up manure piles remaining in the big hay-field, it was balance that we concluded was needed. I’ve been repeating something regularly since I learned of it, that horses demonstrate a brilliant ability to quickly get over conflict and “get back to grazing.” That gives rise to a natural flow toward balance.
We put the horse’s balance to test yesterday, by haltering just two at a time and taking them for a little stroll around the property. Each time, the remaining two demonstrated quite a bit of separation distress, working themselves into a frenzied anxiety, whinnying and running the fence line and occasionally slipping dangerously on the sloppy mud. Our herd has become so bonded that they over-react to being separated. We will need to increase the frequency of these little excursions to help them become more balanced when being apart.
I had my own opportunity last night to practice reclaiming balance after coming upon a frustrating problem while trying to assemble our precious new double glider swing we bought online. Previously unbeknownst to me, Cyndie has a strong connection to memories of a double swing her grandmother had. In the middle of our new storage room construction, Cyndie presented me with a set of plans she purchased for building a swing like she remembers, asking me to see if the guys working downstairs would be interested in making one for us. She hadn’t been able to find the right one for sale locally, so she figured we would have to build it ourselves, or find someone who could do it for us.
I did present the idea to them, but I also checked online myself, coming up with a variety of possibilities. Most enticing was one made from cedar logs, which would match the single swing we already have out by our outdoor fire pit. That is the one I am now trying to assemble, meeting with a variety of sadly typical problems I run into on all projects such as this.
First, it was getting a screw stuck before figuring out the best angle and method to get it to work as described in the instructions. Now progress has been halted by the manufacturer’s poor quality drilling. Three out of eight holes are off-center to the point I can’t align threads to start an eye-bolt. I’m going to have to try to elongate one of the holes (3 times) to get back to progress.
Let’s just say that I was finding myself a little out of balance when I finally had to give up and put away tools with my cold hands, putting things on hold for the night. It’s a chance to practice my own skills of “getting back to grazing.”
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Days Filled
Natural processes never pause. We had a very spring-like day yesterday, starting the morning with a classic thunder shower. By the end of the day, I couldn’t see any snow left on the ground as I walked the southern fence line to repair areas where Legacy practiced his penchant for dismantling things with his teeth. The frost hasn’t gone out of the ground yet, but already there are green sprouts emerging from the dirt.
A trek around the property is an overwhelming experience of discovering all the things that deserve attention. The trick is picking the best time for each task. The terrain is too wet for many activities, but the high ground is getting close to dry enough for equipment to drive over it without leaving giant ruts. Mornings can still offer frozen ground, which invites the possibility of driving over areas that will be too muddy later in the day. Any day could bring rain, or even snow, which will quickly cause a setback in the progress of drying out the land.
We need more gravel brought in, and will want to find fill dirt to bolster areas that were excavated last year and experienced some dramatic settling in the time since. With the ground as soft as it is, we cause more damage than we want if we ask for deliveries of sand, gravel, or dirt during this time of year. Instead, I’ve resorted to using some of the broken down winter manure and mud scraped up in the paddocks to fill one spot that settled. If it works out, there’s plenty more where that came from.
With nature forging ahead every minute without pause, it becomes imperative that we fill our days with activities to keep pace. There is no shortage of work to do to occupy our time. I find myself mentally battling dread that I am neglecting things here when I have a low energy day, finding myself short of motivation to take on the next task. It gets compounded when I consider that I also want to take personal time for getting miles on the bike and playing the guitar; two hobbies of several that I used to do when I had spare time for such exploits.
There is consolation in the fact that I enjoy the projects we have underway, and receive deep satisfaction from the improvements we achieve. It may be a false impression, but I think there should be less demands on our time in the long run, after we accomplish all the projects of shaping the land, installing fencing, and constructing rooms and sheds. In fact, we have more behind us than remains in front of us, with regard to those issues.
We are close enough to reaching a point of only needing to manage day-to-day operations such that I’m feeling hope it is within reach. It may be another year or two, but that’s not all that long in the span of a lifetime. In addition, it’s not something that just happens in an instant, so the work that fills our days now will subtly transition over time, becoming more routine and efficient, and thus, less all-encompassing.
Or, so I can try to convince myself.
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No Foolin’
I think we just might have gotten past the messiest part of the spring snow melt season yesterday. At least, that’s what the optimist in me is hanging his hopes on. It is hard to shake the memory of that 18 inch snowfall that buried us last May and significantly prolonged the drying out of our property last year, but something is telling me that won’t be our plight this year.
A remarkable amount of ground made its first appearance of 2014 during yesterday’s dose of warmth and wind. We were blessed with two separate periods of relatively light rainfall which is always a big help in melting the snow pack. I was able to make my way along a good portion of our southern property line and was thrilled to find that the new culvert we installed, along with the preliminary improvements to open up the drainage ditch, are functioning brilliantly. It is easy to see where we should continue, and I have renewed inspiration and confidence about what I want to do next to maximize the benefits possible in helping our land drain in a controlled way.
The channel I made on Sunday is still in place at the edge of the southern ditch. Looking back up toward where all the water is coming from, you can see how much it wants to spread out now. One of my goals this summer will be to dig out a more defined creek bed across this field with our tractor, and then soften the edges to a gentle slope, and seed it with grass. Most of the year it will simply be a dry depression, only filling with water during the snow melt or a significant rainfall.
Our water-loving dog, Delilah, is mad about helping me get the water to flow. She runs up and down the channels and tries to bite the water wherever it ripples or gurgles. I like it when she helps down here because the ground isn’t muddy and the water is clean, so she just gets wet. The running back and forth does wonders to burn off her otherwise endless energy. When we came in, I toweled her off as she lay on her back, and then she curled up with the towel and took a nap.
On my way back to the house, I plodded past the labyrinth and discovered an interesting phenomenon. The melting snow is creating an inverse image as compared to the way it looked when I was shoveling the route in winter. It takes longer for packed snow to melt, so the path that I repeatedly trekked with snow shoes is now taller than the border areas of stones. They appear as depressions between the paths now.
It’s true. I’m not just saying that because it’s April 1st. Seriously.
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Harsh Realities
In the last few days, we have come across a surprising number of animal parts that Delilah has collected from her explorations around our property. I think the melting snow might be revealing some carcasses that were preserved beneath all the white stuff this winter. At least, we hope that explains the dramatic increase in our exposure to the harsh reality of animal mortality lately, as opposed to the possibility that she has become that proficient of a predator.
Cyndie buys a lot of chew toys for our dog, but none of those come close to thrilling Delilah as much as something biological. Oftentimes, we are unable to recognize what she has in her mouth, but it is easy to tell from her behavior and body language that it isn’t one of the toys.
If we are lucky, we are unable to identify what it is. Somehow that is easier to stomach. I felt a bit nauseous yesterday as she chomped away on the very obvious body of a mouse. Then she comes inside and tries to lick our faces with her bad breath while we towel her dry and remove her blaze-orange vest.
Earlier that morning, Cyndie stepped in the house from feeding the horses and said, “I have a blog post title for you…”
“Headless Rabbit.”
I decided not. Cyndie described the unlikely scenario of lifting one of the horse’s feed pans which had been flipped upside down in the paddock, and discovering the carcass of a headless rabbit beneath. We can’t imagine how it ended up there. Maybe one of the horses came across the body and purposely covered it out of respect.
We also have a pile of feathers that Delilah has been working on, which I’m guessing came from one of the many wild turkeys roaming our land. In addition to the deer leg that has been a recent prize, she also is quite fond of chewing on a fair-sized piece of hide; both hoof and hide being something that a pack of coyotes might leave behind.
Another harsh reality we are facing this weekend, with temperatures soaring well-above freezing, is the mud and manure mess we have been anticipating in the paddocks. When the ground here is saturated, it becomes so soft that you sink to the point of losing a boot in many places. That means we don’t dare try driving the tractor into the paddocks now to remove the abundant accumulation of manure. It would sink past the axles. This will be a nasty problem to endure while waiting for the soil to dry out.
It is our first spring with the horses, and this worst-case scenario has us biding our time until we can engineer a remedy, which will likely be a combination of altering landscape to improve drainage, and adding some sand/gravel to a few key areas to improve their footing.
All this “reality” certainly does help to accentuate how far we have come in our move from the refined environment of our previous life in the suburbs.
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Nature’s Course
There is no getting around the fact that we are at that time of year when the weather can flip from enticingly spring-like to “as winter as ever” in a single day. It can be a tough blow at the end of a harsh winter to be walloped by storms that give the impression the weather is headed in the wrong direction. Today is expected to be one of those tough blows, but it is not clear what the precise position of the storm will be. We are on the edge of a suspected path which could swing either to freezing rain or heavy, wet snow.
For the time being, I’m going to enjoy this image of our paddock from Saturday, when the snow had been cleared off the ground and the clouds were gone from the sky. We’ll have more of this type of enjoyment in the days ahead. We just need to tolerate a small setback to a winter storm for a few days.
That’s Dezirea munching hay, with Legacy standing by, on watch.
A couple of days later and it looked like this (although, in fairness, this one was taken with my phone looking through a dirty window from inside our sunroom):
At Delilah’s desperate urging, I let her outside to chase a squirrel, or squirrels, which had been tugging mercilessly at her predator instincts while she was trapped indoors. I followed her with my eyes as she sprinted deep into the neighbor’s woods to our north, much farther than she normally explores. The unconscious chase left her in new territory, and I would have been surprised if she just turned around and came back into our yard.
She disappeared for quite a while. When Delilah finally reappeared outside our windows, it wasn’t a squirrel she had as a prize, but the bottom portion of a deer leg. It is most likely that she happened upon a carcass that was left by some other predator(s), but she looked so much like a wolf out there, gnawing on that limb in the heavy falling snow, I felt a renewed appreciation for why our cats appear so wary of her.
She’s just doing what comes natural, but it can be almost scary seeing how incredibly proficient she is about it.
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Building Bonds
With the paddocks recently freshened up —can’t refer to them as clean, since the horses have already followed up Saturday’s major effort with a hefty new distribution of piles— we invited Cyndie’s niece and nephews to come inside the fence to brush the horses. It was a good chance to allow the 1000 pound animals to bond with the kids and receive the nurturing care being offered.
Hunter, in the foreground of the image at left, and Cayenne, far in the distance, were wonderfully cooperative. Legacy, hidden from view, was less so. He wasn’t on his best behavior.
I’m told that horses don’t hold a grudge, but I saw how frustrated he was with us Saturday when we locked the horses out of the paddock while we worked to clean it. I wouldn’t blame him if he was still miffed. While I was scraping manure with the New Holland, he was at the gate, huffing and snorting, scratching away at the ground with his hoof, and shaking his head to and fro. He definitely wanted back in. Cyndie said that when I was putting away the tractor and she opened the gate to let them back in, they didn’t rush in with glee, but casually sauntered in as if it was no big deal. I returned from the garage to report that we had worked an hour-and-a-half past their usual afternoon feeding time. Maybe that was what Legacy had gotten all worked up about. It was past the appointed hour for dinner and we were showing no signs of doing anything about it.
Yesterday’s temperatures had plummeted down to a solid freeze again, so when I stepped out in the morning to get a picture of the new manure pile we had created in the paddock, I was able to walk on top of the crust of snow without breaking through. I decided to hike out and up the hill into the big field, where the snow cover has receded enough to reveal areas of exposed ground. I was curious as to whether this would attract the horses or not. They have barely stepped in the big field ever since the last big snow accumulation. It had gotten too deep to make it worth the effort for them. I expect the horses would feel an increased vulnerability in deep snow.
There was one little trail the horses had trampled into the field, and that single route was what they now confined themselves to on the few occasions they did wander out. While I was taking some pictures from up on that hill, with the sun behind me, Hunter ventured up that trail, stopping where the path began to arc away to his right. Wondering if he was interested in coming further, I approached him with an invitation to join me.
Tentatively, he stepped onto the crusty snow beyond the packed path. Hunter isn’t light enough to stay on top like me, but he found it was no longer too deep, and carefully proceeded in my direction. In the distance, Legacy was keeping a keen eye on the scene.
While Hunter wandered around on the hill with me, checking the spots where the snow had melted away, Legacy and the other horses moved out to just beyond the paddock, but no further. I think they didn’t want to deal with the crunchy terrain, yet they were obviously interested in what Hunter was up to.
He was with me, and we were alone —make that, alone with Delilah— up on the hill. It was pretty special. Unfortunately, since I wasn’t grazing, my interest quickly waned, and I was soon ready to head back down. It didn’t feel right to just walk away and leave Hunter alone, so I tried to let him know my intention to go, slowly stepping down toward the paddock. In seconds, Hunter was following. In fact, he started to increase his gate and I needed to hustle along to avoid getting run over. I wasn’t sure if his rush was to make it easier for him to navigate the crusty snow, or if he was just that eager to get back with the herd, but his sudden haste took nothing away from the sweet experience we had shared in his choosing to join me up there.
It seems as though Hunter and I are building a special bond of our own.
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Drippy Day
Sunshine had the snow melting off our rooftops in dramatic fashion yesterday. I started a project to assemble a new trailer for our ATV outside of the shop garage, but partway through, I noticed that the snow overhanging the roof had gotten so large it looked scary.
I moved further away from the overhang, out of harms way. At the time, the whole front section of the driveway was dry, but about midway through the assembly instructions my work space was becoming a series of draining water paths.
There weren’t as many collapses from overhead as I expected, but the afternoon was peppered with just enough dislodged masses of melting snow to keep me on edge.
In a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Delilah and the horses, I can report that Cyndie came in after feeding them in the morning, shortly after I had hit the “Publish” button, and she told me that somehow one of the horses sent the dog tumbling a couple of rolls through the snow.
She said Delilah got up with just a hint of a limp and carried on, leaving a bit more space between herself and the horses.
The horses were wary in the afternoon about coming up to feed under the overhang, so I suspect they have been enduring their own share of startling crashes of snow melt.
Everybody is a little out of whack around here. The cats are acting strange, but in a good way, making many more demands for attention than usual. I think they are starting to shed, and just want us to give them a good brushing. I was petting Pequenita and ended up with my hand and shirt covered in statically clinging cat hair.
I noticed the wee cat smelling Delilah’s paws just after the dog walked in the door from outside. Our cats don’t get to go outside, and I think she was curious about the scent from the great beyond.
Right now, that scent probably just smells like wet feet, but if the melt keeps up like this for long, very soon those paws will be smelling like spring mud.
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Visualizing Success
While our landscape is still locked beneath a thick blanket of snow and the daytime temperatures rise above the freezing point, I reacted upon an urge to give the lawn tractor some long-neglected maintenance attention. The poor thing was caked with dirty, dusty grime and grass clippings.
Opening up the email inbox this morning revealed the timely message from my Stihl dealer detailing how to get those power tools ready for the first use of spring. It’s definitely that time of year. My cycling season can’t be far off!
I opened up the double door between the shop and garage and pushed the old Craftsman tractor, on one mostly flat tire, into the warmer workspace to begin the operation. I’m finally getting around to utilizing that space for the purposes it is so smartly designed to facilitate. The seller of our property kindly provided his stock of spare parts for the machine when we purchased it, so I am set with new air and oil filters, and belts if needed. Too bad that leaves me short a fuel filter, a spark plug, and a replacement bulb for the headlight that has been blown since we bought it.
We may even look into replacing the cracked vinyl seat that was once nicely patched with what looks like electrical tape, because said tape has long since given up its adhesive. Don’t tell anyone, but I will also finally defeat the interlock on the seat so the engine will be able to keep running without interruption when Cyndie bounces up off it when trying to rock the tractor every time it gets stuck.
In all fairness to Cyndie, I have experienced that situation myself a couple of times, as well as wanting to get up off the seat to ride the fender in attempt to better balance the tractor on the one steep part of the ditch by the township road.
Here’s hoping I’ll have the machine running sweetly in advance of actually needing it, without introducing any problems that didn’t exist before I dismantled so many of the vital components. This is a great situation for me to practice the art of visualizing success!
Very early in my life, while hanging around as an extra hand for my dad while he was engaged in any number of similar mechanical repair projects, I came to recognize one common aspect that troubled me. Every job seemed to include, as if by obligation, a moment where some problem arose that would completely impede further progress. One common example was the situation of a nut not coming off a bolt due to corrosion or thread problems.
Such moments are either a wonderful opportunity to rise to the occasion –finding the right tool for a solution, gliding through the uninvited obstacle with minimal disruption– or a disaster of careening down a path of increasing destruction and frustration. Success can be a function of having the right experience and/or keen instincts, and a good inventory of the right tool for the job with the intelligence of knowing how to use them.
I’m pretty sure I developed an aversion to these anticipated obstacles, which leads to the catch-22 of my avoiding them, which creates a deficit of learning how to successfully respond. Since I am now faced with increasing opportunities to delve into mechanical projects that offer potential for just these kinds of lessons, I hope to bring the wisdom I have gained in developing healthy mental perspectives and my ever-expanding awareness of things unseen –recognizing, listening to, and trusting my heart and my gut– as tools to assist me in my learning.
One of the first tools I intend to wield is, visualizing success.
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Is It?
Yesterday at work, I was describing the effort that was required over the weekend to clear snow from the entirety of our driveways, walk ways, and deck at Wintervale.
“Is it worth it?” the employee asked.
It didn’t take any time at all for me to switch from whining about all the work our enterprise demands of us, to the immediate acknowledgement, “Yes, it is absolutely worth it.”
Don’t get me wrong, I definitely have moments of wondering how we got ourselves into this situation. More often than not, we are in over our heads with issues that exceed our knowledge and abilities. But hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained. If we would have waited until we knew how to do everything we have accomplished thus far, we’d still be sitting in the suburbs, staring out the window at the side of our neighbor’s garage wall.
On Sunday, Cyndie took this picture of me enjoying one of the views we have earned from our move to the country.
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Clean Steps
The snow just kept falling and falling. It also was blowing. I left for work as early as possible yesterday to get ahead of the expected slow commute. It looked like there was hardly any snow on our deck, and they predicted the accumulations would increase toward the east, so I headed west, hoping for the best.
The first thing I discovered was that our deck was a bad reference point. The wind must have been blowing it clean. There was over two times as much snow on the roads in our area as I anticipated. It took me twice as long as usual to get to work. By noon, Cyndie had called to alert me that it was deep at our place and drifting even deeper. I needed to get home to plow so she could get out for an evening commitment.
It was almost too much snow for the Grizzly. As I tried to push snow beyond the full width of the driveway, a fair percentage would roll back down. Just like I did with the diesel tractor last year, I got the ATV stuck at the end of the driveway. Luckily, our neighbor spotted the Griz tilted over the edge and came down to rescue me, but not before I hoofed it back up to the garage to start the New Holland and begin putting the chains on its wheels.
I couldn’t find one of the mating links for the chains, so I was wandering around in a search when I spotted the neighbor uphill from us headed down on his tractor. He would be able to save me work, so I hustled down to meet him, only to find he was headed back up to his place already. I was able to catch his attention with a wave, and we eventually were able to make short work of it. 
All that was left for me to do at that point was plowing in front of the shop/garage, plowing around the barn and the hay shed, retrieving the mailbox from the ditch, re-mounting the mailbox again, shoveling to clean up the areas I can’t navigate with the Grizzly, and then shoveling out the front steps.
It was a nice dry snow, so I was able to get the front steps pretty clean again. Unfortunately, high winds are forecast, so I may be doing this all one more time in the near future to clear out drifts that pile up. I took a picture of the drifts on the roof over the front door because I thought they looked interesting.
Maybe the reason I think they look interesting is because I don’t have to shovel them. I wonder if the gutter company that wanted to start installing on our house yesterday is glad I asked them to wait until later.
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Relative Something 