Posts Tagged ‘images’
Take Two
What do you do when you step outside in the morning to discover you have 2.25 inches of water in your rain gauge from overnight storms? We decided it was a good day to transplant some trees.
A few days ago, I noticed a lot of maple trees were growing in the middle area of woods where my foot path to the barn cuts through. They looked to be in surprisingly good condition, considering they are well beneath the canopy of mature trees above, leaving them in shade all day long.
Yesterday, when Cyndie and I stepped out into the soaking wet conditions once again, I suggested it would be a good day to plant trees, pointing out the candidates I had found. She was all in, and soon we were selecting tree after tree, as each consecutive find seemed better than the rest.
If you have been following along, you probably saw my recent exclamation that the tree we transplanted to the middle of our labyrinth was alive. Turns out it was just barely alive, and not doing well enough for our purposes. We had dug that tree out of the ground last fall with a shovel, and the only new growth that appeared this spring was on a couple of sprouts along the lower trunk. There were no leaves budding from any of the branches above.
Photo taken by Cyndie
For our second attempt, I wanted to try pulling the roots of a tree from the ground, digging it up by hand. It is a method we had wonderful success with at our previous home. By saturating the dirt with water, which wasn’t hard at all yesterday since the ground was already saturated, it becomes possible to work the roots free by hand, but it takes a fair amount of patience.
Delilah couldn’t figure out what the heck I was doing, crouched next to that tree for so long, with my hand in that mud puddle. Luckily, she was tied on a leash and unable to get her paws in there to help. She resorted to digging 4 or 5 holes of her own, probably to show me how it’s done.
In time, the tree gets very tippy, and eventually, it pulls all the way out with minimal effort. Prior to that, my hand received quite a workout, trying to remove the thick clay soil that encased the roots, large and small.
Spending that much time getting intimate with the root structure of a tree this size made me aware of something that should serve as a valuable metaphor for the path our lives take. In similar fashion to the way moving water will meander and create rivers with an amazing number of 180° turns, tree roots will often make a U-turn and grow in the opposite direction from which they started.
From above, the sight of a root growing away from the trunk gives the impression it would logically continue in that direction. My probing hand found that wasn’t the case. It becomes apparent that a 180° change in direction is common, and provides strength and stability toward holding the tree upright despite forces that might otherwise bring it down.
How often do people assume the best path for our lives is straight ahead? A reversal of direction seems like a negative thing. I think reversing course, whether forced by circumstance or freely chosen, will more likely contribute to making us stronger and more stable in the long run.
The new transplant is in the ground at the center of our labyrinth, leaves already showing hints of the trauma. Today we are starting over with a second take, watching for signs indicating it is satisfied with its new location and the bright sunshine. No less than we were with the first tree, we are filled with hope that this one will survive.
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Exhaustion Accumulates
It happens every time I have been up at the lake. For a week following, my mind is pulled away from the here and now, continually yearning to return to that precious body of water. Our lake has a special allure that is definitely lacking from the otherwise idyllic surroundings of Wintervale.
It has been a tough week for me at the day-job. I’m so exhausted that I struggle to stay awake during the commute, and my mind has noticeably lacked focus. Poor Katie has had to repeat things multiple times for me, and even then, I’m not sure I’ve properly tracked the pertinent facts.
The added responsibility while Cyndie has been convalescing from her hip procedure has definitely taken a toll on me, and I’m noticing that the effects have been accumulating. I am so looking forward to my vacation of biking and camping with my cycling clan in a couple of weeks. I will be more than ready for the refreshing reset that will provide.
After work yesterday, I was taking care of some mowing. It was a simple enough task, but I found ways to complicate it. The grass is growing so fast now that it had gotten too tall between mowings and I ended up with unwanted rows of clippings laying on top of the grass. I have been long overdue to figure out the sweeper attachment that the seller included in our purchase of the lawn tractor, so I decided to give it a shot.
It actually seemed to work pretty well, until I got stuck when trying to force the tractor over some of the deep ruts that still haunt us from the skid loader tracks left by the fence installers. I had to get off and disconnect the sweeper and then push the tractor out of the ruts. When I went to re-attach the device, I didn’t have the clip that locks the pin through the hitch.
I have absolutely no memory of where I put it when I disconnected it. In a pocket? No. Dropped it on the ground? No sight of it. It vanished into thin air.
As I pulled the sweeper forward over the ruts to bring it up to the tractor again, it dumped all the grass clippings that had been collected. I decided to laugh at the absurdity of my situation and forge on.
I connected the sweeper without the locking clip. At the first jarring bump, of which there are so many they are practically continuous, the pin jumped out and the sweeper fell behind as the tractor got stuck in another rut. I left the sweeper there and drove back to the garage to get a trailer to haul away the grass. That done, I came back, with a borrowed clip, to retrieve the sweeper and bring it back to the garage. In front of the garage, when I disconnected the hitch pin, two metal bushings that the pin passes through both dropped to the pavement. I picked up the one that landed in plain sight and began searching for the other one.
It had vanished. Did it roll? I hunted far and wide. Did it land on the mower deck? Not that I could find. Where the hell…?
Exasperated, I threw in the towel for the night. Simple tasks had gotten just too darn complicated for me.
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Risking Exposure
Photos don’t do justice for how much better it looks around the paddock after I mowed yesterday. This is the same spot that irked the horses last time I mowed it. Once again, they were watching me closely, sending signals of shock and indignation over seeing tall grass (and mostly dandelions) go to waste when they would gladly take care of it themselves.
Before
After
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After I cut that area with the lawn tractor, I mowed down the grass in front of the other paddock using my Stihl gas-powered trimmer. I’m not sure that was a good choice. The section nearest the paved driveway was mostly weeds, and everything is pretty wet, so the pulverized plant matter gets sprayed all over me. If there was any poison ivy in there, I’m thinking that was a good way to give myself a lot of exposure.
I’ve been hoping my skin might get desensitized if I keep experiencing regular exposure, and with Delilah likely brushing past the plants in her daily explorations and my inability to be careful about handling her, I assume that has been happening. I haven’t had a verifiable breakout since the first time it happened earlier this spring.
Lately, we have been confining Delilah to being leashed, so her forays into poison ivy territory have been reduced. Based on that, I should be able to determine whether my reckless exposure to the spray from the trimmer involved any PI or not. You’d think I would’ve developed some skill at identifying the culprit so I could avoid cutting it, but that hasn’t been something I’ve ever felt confident about.
I tend to assume it is everywhere until proven otherwise. In this latest case, time will tell.
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Returning Home
“Yes, Pequenita, I will feed you. Have I ever missed a day?”
Boy was she persistent this morning in her attempts to wake me as I tried to sleep in a bit on this Memorial Day holiday in the US, kneading and pushing her face into mine.
I drove home in the middle of the day yesterday, probably passing Elysa as we exchanged locations; she, driving up to the lake, me heading home to take care of our animals. The horses looked thoroughly contented, happily munching hay in the paddock.
Delilah was sleeping so soundly outside in her kennel that I left her there until dinner time, in order to give the horses my full attention.
I am back in our paradise, after leaving our other paradise. The two locations are very similar in how special they are to us, but that large body of water up at Wildwood definitely sets it apart. I already am missing the lake.
The growth down here continues at a rapid rate. The lawn will need mowing again, less than a week after I last cut it. The little path I use as a shortcut to the barn is becoming a tunnel through the trees, with the leaves filling out to obscure our view of the paddocks from the house.
I still have a lot of growth to clear along our southern border, where we will be putting up the next fence. Now the project becomes a bit more work because the branches all have leaves. It has me focused on finding a wood chipper that will allow us to consume the brush piles we create without burning them, which would allow us to use the chips for ground cover over the trails in the low areas that are often wet, and for other applications around the property.
Now I am off to run Delilah a bit and get on with the day’s chores. It’s a holiday, but work here never really pauses. Luckily, it is work I enjoy.
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Pure Joy
Even though there was much in the way of work being done on the main day of ‘Work Weekend,’ at the lake place we call Wildwood, there was no shortage of fun in the endeavors of the day.
After toiling away on the beach to reclaim the area from the unending processes of Mother Nature to take over our sandy little oasis, I pitched in, literally, to help others in improving the landscape in front of the lodge. The grass grows really well in the spaces near the building where it isn’t wanted, and I assisted with digging it up using a garden fork that looked like a very close relative of the pitch fork that has become one of my primary tools at home. A beautiful array of perennials were planted into the newly turned soil.
Throughout the tasks, conversations blossomed in an annual renewing of connection with members of the community who scatter to their city lives for most of the winter.
Taking a pause from the work, I stopped back to the house where Cyndie was resting her hip and reading a book. I sat with her for a bit, until I noticed she had nodded off into a nap. Figuring I might as well go get my computer to take advantage of the time, I climbed the stairs to our room, finding my laptop beside the great big bed. Since she was already asleep, I figured I didn’t need to take it back downstairs to be in her proximity, and so laid on the bed to check in with the world.
I awoke in a slobbery mess of drool, after a most delicious unplanned nap of my own.
Hearing the words, “soccer game,” I descended the stairs to rejoin humanity and rediscovered how much joy I get from playing the beautiful game. I think it started as 4-v-4, but soon grew to include more people than the space actually allows. Maybe that is why the decision gets made that we won’t use borders, and play continues regardless the fact the ball is within the jungle gym play area, around the SUV parked on the driveway, or even behind the goals, like a game of hockey.
Slowly, in a reverse of how the numbers swelled to the maximum, players wander off to other pursuits, often without saying a thing. After battling situations that feel a lot like playing short-handed in a game of hockey, the game is paused and a player volunteers to switch so play can resume with reasonable balance. In the end, it came down to me facing one last challenge from 6-year-old nephew, Beck, for some 1-v-1.
He said, “Go over to your goal.”
“No, that’s an awful long way away. Let’s just play a small game right here,” I encouraged.
He kicked the ball around me and headed the length of the field to ‘my goal.’ What could I do? I chased after him to protect my goal. He was a tenacious foe and I soon realized he would not quit until he succeeded in getting that ball in the net. I was tired and wanted to be done, so I provided an opportunity. He missed. The ball rolled wide. A few near-misses later, the ball found the target and he was satisfied. Game over.
Pure joy.
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Work Weekend
Awake at the lake! It is always interesting to arrive in the dark of night, and then open your eyes in the morning to see that beautiful lake out the window.
Back at home, the leaves popped overnight Thursday, and I was shocked when I stepped out to feed the horses yesterday and couldn’t see clearly through the trees to the paddocks anymore. Up here, a 2-hour drive to the north, the growth is a few days behind.
The trillium blossoms are just beginning to show.
Memorial weekend at our lake place is traditionally dubbed, “Work Weekend,” as it is the time when the community of families here clean the beach, wash the boats, sweep the tennis courts, and put things in order for summer activities.
It is funny to me now, to think of it as ‘work weekend,’ since it feels a lot like the effort I put forth every day. There is one big difference: the view of that lake makes all the labor feel that much less laborious.
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Shitty Education
In the time since our horses arrived late last September, we have been stockpiling manure in one primary location. Based on information Cyndie gathered, we roughed out a spot that we guessed would be large enough. That was about as far as we went in terms of a plan of action for manure management.
In my naiveté, I thought we could start piling at the back of the clearing we designated, and just keep dumping new loads toward the front. If it timed out right, we could access the pile from the back to remove old composted manure for use as tree food and fertilizer for Cyndie’s plants. I planned to scoop the front of the pile with the loader on our tractor, to stir and aerate the material, moving the composting manure back and making new space for fresh loads to be dumped in front again.
The more informed method involves an area divided into 3 separate sections. This allows the first pile to become fully composted and ready for use, the middle one to be in process of breaking down, and the last one for dumping fresh manure.
My system didn’t work the way I imagined because our method of dumping full-wheelbarrows ended up filling the designated space all the way to the front in a very short amount of time. Instead of dumping somewhere beyond our designated space, I chose to go up. I created a ramp and we just kept adding fresh manure on top of the previous batches already beginning to break down.
That has led to a pile with layers in varying stages of decomposition. It is obvious our pile shrinks over time, depending on how much new manure is being added, but the two key elements to accelerating the breakdown are the optimal amount of air and moisture, and our pile hasn’t been getting the correct amount of either. Our location is not covered, so I figured we would suffer from too much wetness, but the process of decomposition uses up moisture and will cause dry spots that interrupt decomposition if not stirred.
Yesterday afternoon, after I got home from the day-job, I cut deep into the back of our manure pile for the first time. I wanted to move some material from the pile that was already composting, down to the new location I created by the labyrinth. The impetus for that was our desire to give our newly transplanted tree at the center of the labyrinth a dose of horse manure fertilizer.
Even though the tree is showing signs of new buds along its trunk, there is no indication that the buds at the ends of the branches have any life in them whatsoever. It is really testing my patience.
So, I was able to cut into the main manure pile and get educated about what is going on down below, and I got enough cinder blocks stacked to create the start of a satellite pile where I will be better able to control the rate of composting.
Best of all, it will be conveniently located near the garden of plants that help define the form of our labyrinth path.
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Relative Something 