Posts Tagged ‘fence’
Fighting Frustration
I know that I can just give in and stop trying to make progress when barriers repeatedly frustrate my attempts to advance toward a goal, but I seem to have an ingrained attachment to that angst of repeatedly banging my head against the problems that arise. Eventually, I will go back to grazing, but for now…
Yesterday was a day to give up and go back to bed, but I forged ahead regardless, and bashed headlong into the fruitless exercise of trying to get something done anyway. It probably wasn’t as bad as I’m making it seem, but the final straw was trying to write this post live online when our internet connection was doing an endless dance loop of resetting, creating a repeating pattern of pages hanging mid-load, and slamming the brakes on any attempts to actually achieve something productive.
Talk about frustrating! We were trying to research costs for materials for our next phase of pasture fencing, to compare with the quote we have received from our fence contractor. We also got stopped in the middle of trying to do online research for information on improving the surface of our paddocks.
The reason we were indoors doing research is because it is raining outside again. Speaking of frustration, the rain gauge revealed 2 more inches fell overnight Sunday to Monday morning. The wetness around here is crazy-making!
Since I couldn’t work on anything else, I walked right down to the wettest area of our planned grazing pasture —probably out of spite— where two dead trees had toppled over in the storm that destroyed my woodshed (I think the woodshed failure is frustrating me more than I am admitting to myself), and I started cutting them up and creating a new brush pile. Man, will it feel good to ignite that bonfire. Too bad it will have to wait for months because the pile is currently located on an area of standing water.
I let my focus wander to the drainage ditch that forms the southern border of our property, where the water of the last few storms is still flowing along in an irritatingly pleasant manner. Standing in water up to my ankles, I began the work of cutting out the 1-to-2 inch volunteer trees that were allowed to grow unchecked to clutter the ditch, making a perfect snow-stop that creates dams and backs up flow during the spring melt.
The plan is to clear the ditch, and the junk trees that have been sprouting in the area just above it, because above is where we will run the southern leg of our new grazing pasture fence.
While I was down there working, our delightful dog, Delilah, was happily exploring to and fro, prancing in the running water, and generally being a sweet companion… until she wasn’t. She disappeared on me while I was engrossed in aggravating the tendonitis in both elbows, working our ratcheting pruner to cut down the forest of unwelcome growth.
After Delilah’s performance on Sunday —moments after I had received a subtle comment from our neighbor about her frequent visits to his place— where she ran away from me to interrupt that very family’s Mother’s Day picnic on their front lawn, she has me so frustrated that I have decreed that she must be on-leash now when outside and not being directly watched.
It’s all got me plenty frustrated, I tell you, but the regression to need to leash Delilah again is at the top of the heap.
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Desperation Move
On Saturday we took steps to provide our horses access to some dry ground by stringing temporary electric fence around a section of the gravel drive between the barn and the hay shed. As you can see in the image, they were most enthralled by the small area of green grass that was available in one small corner.
Eventually, they spread themselves out and each nibbled on hay we distributed in 4 spots, hoping to entice them to stay long enough to dry out their poor muddy feet.
It’s not a very big space, but it is better than nothing and they seem to appreciate our effort. With rain storms continuing to roll through, the mud situation just gets worse every day. We had to come up with some option to give them a break. The areas around the feeders where they previously found refuge, standing atop the buildup of spilled hay, has started to fail them and their hooves are beginning to push through. There was nowhere else for them to go.
That area of the driveway is solid, and they can stand there to give their hooves a chance to dry out. It is a bit of a desperate move, but it is a means to an end that buys us time while we await a change of conditions that doesn’t look to be arriving any time soon.
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Field Work
Even though it rained a bit yesterday morning, the rest of the day turned out sunny, warm, and breezy. I think we even made some small additional progress toward the ground drying out. I may be rushing things a bit, but we are driven to try to get the earliest start possible on preparing and improving our fields for hay and grazing, so I worked tenaciously to get out and do some cutting while the weather was good. We want to cut off weeds right away and give the grasses a head start toward dominating.
That meant I needed to finally complete the project I started months ago, of cleaning the bottom of the mower deck. I pulled it out into the sunshine, where I was unfortunately better able to see how much had been missed of the portions I already scraped. I sprayed it all down with a potion to inhibit grass from sticking and then mounted it beneath the lawn tractor. I was ready to mow.
The growth in this field was just a bit more than suits this mower, but it performed heroically. The two fields we want to use for grazing this summer have been left to grow wild for some time. When we got here they were 3 or 4 feet high with grasses, weeds and volunteer trees. For the past two years, I have knocked them down in the fall using the brush cutter pulled behind the diesel tractor, but I was hesitant to make a real close cut. Part of the reason is the sticks and branches that lie tangled and hidden in the grass, and part is because the terrain is pretty rough in spots.
I settled on using the lawn tractor because the ground is still too soft to drive the big tractor on without the tires cutting deep ruts. It seemed dry enough to support the lawn tractor without the wheels causing damage, and we’ve tried to pick the obvious sticks out, so it was time to see if the lawn tractor could navigate the bumps and heavy growth.
After a tentative start worked okay, we went all in and cut a pretty big section. That area also included a bald spot where we had burned a couple of brush piles, so while Cyndie finished the mowing, I got the Grizzly out and dragged a rake over the dirt/mud. Then we hooked up a seed spreader to the lawn tractor and laid down some pasture grass seed.
I looks mighty fine out there after just a few hours of work, but one thing leads to another, and now it’s time to figure out how to fence that area to contain the grazing horses we are working so hard to accommodate.
It is pretty clear from their behavior, they would like that to happen very soon.
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Opportunity Aplenty
Here are some of the issues that are crowding my realm of possibilities this morning:
Our male cat, Mozyr, has fallen into the behavior of peeing on our bed. I’ve been told that once that gets started, it is unlikely to change. We must deal with this immediately. I hate that stench.
We are getting more than enough urine smell from our manure pile. I had no idea what was involved with manure management, and I’m thinking now that the spot we selected seems undersized. I still feel like the location we selected is good, even though the smell sometimes wafts up toward the house, but I fear we may need to take out a few additional trees to expand the square footage.
Speaking of taking out trees, I now have all the equipment to do some serious lumberjacking and there is a dead tree on a corner of our property by the road. It is a chore that is overdue to have been started. Every day that goes by, the task feels more delinquent.
We spent time yesterday testing out the Grizzly ATV for assisting with cleaning up manure in the paddocks, with mixed results. The manure is frozen in multiple layers and much of it covered in snow. We tried both dragging the rake and pushing with the blade. Each seemed to make improvements, but manure that gets collected still needs to be scooped up and moved. That remains and laborious and lengthy endeavor.
I’m supposed to be clearing out our storage corner in the basement. In my search for a solution to the fractured triangular window beside the fireplace, I have connected with a local builder who stopped by to measure for the replacement. Over the phone I mentioned that we also were interested in having a storage room built in our basement. That seemed to go a long way toward enticing him to take on the window replacement. Now I need to get that space ready for the basement work to commence.
It is now nearing the middle of January and I never got around to preparing engines for winter storage. I understand that the primary reason engines fail to run well, or to even start, is leaving old gas in them over the off-season. I am my own worst enemy there. I have a hard time keeping my engines running properly, because I have a hard time getting myself to prepare them for the months of storage.
I took the mower deck off the little Craftsman garden tractor last fall, then flipped it over to be cleaned and to remove the blades for sharpening. It remains where I placed it, untouched.
I’ve got a half-built fence awaiting my attention down the hill from the house. The first snow of the season put that project on hold, but when it’s not bitterly cold, there is progress that could still be made there. I’m afraid the fence has gotten lost in the blur of other work that needs attention.
Meanwhile, we have plans for a Wintervale web site to market Cyndie’s services as a leadership trainer and to offer seminars and retreats here. The “under-construction” image is as far as we’ve gotten.
I’m sequential in nature, so I’d like to go back and get the first things done, so I can move on to the next few, but life doesn’t work like that. I’m back to playing “Whack-a-Mole” with whatever pops up in the moment.
Yesterday, since I had the Grizzly out, I ran it up and down the driveway to clear off the drifts that had developed over the week of historically cold temperatures. It was pleasing to so quickly and easily “whack” something from the list.
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Missing Katie
For those of you who may have noticed something suspicious about the amount of activity I have been engaged in on the ranch lately, I will reveal that I have stopped going in to the day-job. For reasons beyond just saving gas money for the 65 mile one-way commute, or reclaiming the hours lost to driving, I am on leave from my usual employment.
At about the same time I started my leave, a person I worked with there moved on to a new position at a different company. How do you part ways elegantly when someone you used to see every day disappears from your life? Not a day has passed without me thinking of something that I would normally have told Katie about when we next saw each other at work.
Instead, I now find myself trying to talk with Legacy. It’s just not the same, I tell you.
I am trying to be open about the possibility of finding work closer to home, but my few attempts thus far have been met with rejection, so my inspiration is waning. In the mean time, it occurred to me that I can balance the loss of income by taking on some chores that we would otherwise need to spend a lot of money to get done. Yes, that means building fences.
A year ago, I didn’t know a thing about how to build a fence, but after watching the professionals put in our paddocks and string up the border of the big field, I’ve learned a lot. I thought it took them a long time, but now that I am digging my own holes and burying posts, I have a new appreciation for how much they could get done in a day.
It is very important to Cyndie that we get rid of the barbed wire fencing that is close to the trail where she plans to ride horses. Yesterday, I surveyed the most exposed section and came up with a new idea: Leave it be.
That fence has been there so long that trees have grown around the wire. It will be much less work if we simply erect a new fence, just inches inside the old one, and choose fence material that will serve as a barrier to the barbed wire beyond it. Since that old fence defines the boundary of our property, it is technically shared by our neighbor. Leaving it in place eliminates any question as to the location of the old boundary and avoids putting any burden on them to make changes they don’t need.
We really don’t want to cut down trees if we don’t have to, so putting our barrier up just inside the old fence means we can run inside the trees that have grown up right on the old line. It’s a win-win scenario!
Except I’m slow, …and I don’t get to talk with Katie.
Language Barrier
It appears that I continue to be hampered by my limitation of being monolingual, when it comes to communicating with all our animals, and none of them are showing any signs of understanding a word I have been saying.
I kind of expect that from the cats. They are naturally aloof. Although, I haven’t tried too many phrases on them. Mostly, they just hear me repeat, over and over, “What do you want? What do you want?”
Delilah sometimes responds to single syllable commands, but she is inconsistent about it, so I don’t have much faith that she is actually interpreting the words or sentences I have used.
With the horses, I know I should be trying to move out of speaking just from my head, into trying to use my gut and heart energy more, but sometimes the message feels time sensitive and my words are the quickest tool I have. Most often, it is Legacy who I find myself face to face with, and my words have been eliciting a blank-stare response from him.
He seems as frustrated with me, as I am with him. I expect he is probably transmitting his messages to me loud and clear, but they aren’t coming through in plain english, so I am at a loss as to what he is trying to say.
Yesterday, he showed up at the other side of the fence while I was cleaning the ground in the paddock. For some reason, he started chewing on the fence post above the electric wire. Now, the wire is there to discourage them from chewing on the wood fence, so I was half-hoping that he might get too close and feel a shock that would teach him to leave it alone. He may have been just trying to show me that he could, that he was that good, he could work around our little deterrent.
I didn’t want him to do it, so I was feeling peeved. At first, I tried ignoring him, so he might notice it would gain him nothing with me. My frustration got the better of me, when he continued, so I walked over and told him not to chew on the post, and I slapped my hand on the top of the post a few times, to emphasize my point. When that didn’t alter his behavior, I stepped up again and pounded on the post and then told him I was angry. I wanted him to know in his language, so I put my hands on my head, to mimic horse ears, and I pinned them back, telling him, “See? This is how I feel about you chewing on the post. I am angry!”
He didn’t show obvious signs of reacting, so I brought my ‘hand-ears’ forward, so that he might understand they were supposed to be my ears, and with that, I startled the heck out of him! He pulled his head back, and took a couple of steps backward. I pinned my hands back again and told him I was angry!
It was funny, because the part he reacted to wasn’t supposed to be the threatening gesture. Regardless, it seemed to do the trick. I went back to scooping up manure, and he went back to grazing.
Apparently I know more horse language than I realized.
Mulling Possibilities
I spent some time trying out my hedge idea yesterday, and whether it ultimately proves adequate for a fence, or not, at least it looks a whole lot better. It also will make it easier to mow all the way up to that border.
Unfortunately, this thicket of mostly buckthorn doesn’t run all the way to the road. There are a couple open spots along the way, so we will still need a fence in those places.
This frustrates me a bit. We need to put up fence for part of that border, but we want to keep as much existing growth as possible, which pretty much prohibits us being able to route any fence through the worst of it.
There is always the possibility that we could locate that northern border fence of the grazing pasture just inside the “hedge line” I am creating, but doing so would, over time, be construed as the property line, which I’d rather not see happen.
This may be an ‘either/or’ situation that I am trying to conform to a ‘both/and’ outcome. There is also the fact that by trying to turn that thicket into a hedge, I have created another task that will need attention during the growing season. To keep it looking nice, it will need to be trimmed regularly. Of course, if the horses can reach it, they will be happy to trim it for me.
The hedge shows potential. I’ll see what Cyndie says when she returns, and together we will mull over the possibilities. But like I wrote above, regardless what we decide, it sure looks a whole lot better now that it has been trimmed.
Buried Wires
Our search to locate the rusty old barbed wired fence that demarcated the northern border of our property has reached a temporary pause. We made it to the end of one section of visible rusted T-posts and wires, but now the wires disappear beneath years, maybe decades, of eroded soil that makes its way down the slope from a plowed field above.
I tried pulling up on the wires, but they are so old and rusted, especially having been buried for years, they just broke. I ventured ahead, further along our property line to a new section of scrub brush, to find someplace where the wires show up above ground again, hoping to work my way back from the other direction. What I found was a batch of grape vines so thick that it makes the thorny area we had previously been working in seem like a luxury.
On the positive side, it appears we could grow grapes! This vine sure looks fruitful! Maybe if I give it good attention for a few years, pruning and supporting it, I could nurture a harvest-able crop. Fresh squeezed grape juice would be a real treat.
I did also find where the wires come up out of the ground onto another T-post. As I followed the wires into the ground there, I discovered that they can’t be pulled up from this direction because they are now running beneath years of growth of the thick wood shoots of the grape vines.
At this point, my plan is to just run our new fence in a line between the last posts I did locate. 
The property line is supposed to be straight, anyway, so there’s no real mystery as to where the fence should be. And, there is no sense digging up the buried barbed wire, just to get rid of it. In this case, buried wire is the same as no wire at all.
I have also decided that for the remainder of the thick sections in the direction toward the street, we can forego trying to cut away enough brush to put a fence down the middle, and instead, just use the entire mass of trees as our fence. I will trim the branches on our side so they form a clean line, creating the impression of a tall hedge.
That’s the theory, anyway. We’ll see if my idea works after I spend many hours and a lot of energy pruning trees to test it out.
Spunky Behaviors
I don’t know if it was the wind, or that the daytime temperatures rose into the 50s (F), but the horses were really charged up in the afternoon and evening yesterday.
Cyndie had fed them in the morning, and before she left for work she told me that she had opened two gates from the paddock, allowing the horses access to either the big field in front, or the small area behind it that is enclosed by temporary fencing. As I was heading out to visit the hardware store later, I noticed the herd had split, with the three chestnuts grazing in the big field and Legacy near them, but on the other side of a fence in the back area.
While I was out, I visited Fleet Farm for the first time since we moved here. The place has a whole new meaning to me now, compared to when we lived in the suburbs. I am not fond of shopping, so I do it as rarely as possible, but it works out because Cyndie shops enough for the both of us. In fact, I was surprised at how many items I recognized in the store as things Cyndie has “acquired” for the ranch in the last year.
When I pulled back into our driveway, I noticed right away that the horses were in the same location as when I left. It occurred to me when I saw them the first time, that they might not want to be separated, but had probably lost track of how they ended up on different sides of a fence. After parking my car at the house, I headed right down to see if I could guide them back together.
I think I was spot on about them not wanting to be separated like that, because when I showed Legacy that he had a wide open gate available to travel through the paddock out to the big field, much revelry ensued. The herd went a little nuts, galloping around at full power, leaping in the air and kicking up their heels. Do horses have heels? You know what I mean. It was a spectacularly fascinating sight, as well as a bit nerve-wracking. They were so wild I thought they might run into each other, or fail to pull up in time as they tried to “downshift” from a full sprint before running into a fence.
After that, it appeared that all the celebrating had put Cayenne in the mood for some specific attention from the boys. She did everything she could to egg them on, but other than a few brief hints that they noticed, the geldings showed no interest whatsoever. Back to grazing.
When the usual time for their afternoon feeding of grain rolled around, they walked into the paddock where I was working on bolstering my inadequate tree bark protection scheme, and they announced themselves with a whinny. I obliged them and went in the barn to get their grain. When I stepped out again, they were long gone, out in the big field again. No problem for me, I set out the feed pans and went back to work.
They did finally come back in, but they were uncharacteristically timid about going up under the overhang to get to the feed, which is where we have served it to them almost every time since they arrived here. Even after they broke down and walked up to munch, it was in a completely unsettled manner, and they either chased each other away while trying to get a bite, or all 4 would bolt in the well-practiced emergency evacuation drill.
It was probably just the wind, but I wouldn’t be surprised if their being separated –against their wishes– earlier in the day, was contributing to their nervous behaviors.
Busy Day
Under a sky that alternated between peeks of sunshine and downright threatening yesterday, Cyndie and I started early and worked most of the day to establish a temporary fence around an area we want the horses to graze before the serious winter weather arrives. When we weren’t bathed in sunlight, which happened only rarely, we were being showered by occasional cloud bursts of light to moderate rain, and one blast of ice pellets that don’t deserve to be referred to as snow.
It was our first try at setting up a temporary fence, and now that it is done, we are feeling good about the accomplishment. It was a challenge of trying to figure out the best location, the distance of the run, how many posts that would be, and how to get the tape strung and connected to our existing electric fence. This kind of task is one of those that involves walking back and forth to get one more thing. I bet we made over a dozen “one-more-thing” hikes yesterday.
In addition to getting the fence up, we took advantage of the weather and our proximity, and lit fire to the brush pile located over toward the labyrinth garden. It burned so much easier than the two piles we had from last fall, because this one didn’t have any stumps or root bundles packed with dirt. It was all dead, dry branches that accumulated from projects like making room for the road behind the barn, or cleaning up sticks and branches that continue to pop up in the areas we cleared of brush last year. There was hardly anything left but a small smoldering pile by the time I took the photo below.
It felt like a day of non-stop effort, except for a couple notable breaks. One, to accept a gift from our neighbor. He brought honeydew melons from his bumper crop. He said he liked one he bought from the store, so he kept the seeds and put them in the ground. His wife told him that would never work, but now he as more melons than he can eat. He gave us 8 or 9 and still had plenty in the trunk of his car. Sounds like the story of magic beans!
The other break was when Cyndie made lunch over the brush pile fire. She roasted a couple of brats and we had a little picnic during one of the rain showers. Just 10 minutes earlier, and we could have had a much more enjoyable meal. As it was, it turned into a rather utilitarian affair of eating for the sake of eating, while trying to put things under cover to keep them at least partially dry.
Then it was back to work, toiling away on tasks in the vicinity of our temporary fence so we could watch how the horses would adjust to the new area opened up to them. We were so occupied with our tasks, we barely got in a wave goodbye to Elysa and friends, as they departed up the driveway after an afternoon visit with the horses.
As for the horses, they hardly took notice of the fence, putting their attention almost exclusively toward the ample grass finally made available to them.
Relative Something 