Posts Tagged ‘labyrinth’
More Mowing
Does it look like the labyrinth was in need of being mowed?
I can assure you, it definitely needed it. I worked long and hard to conquer the task, but remained cool and comfortable the whole time in the September sunshine.
I looked up at the world around me when I finished and discovered that the leaves of some of our trees had changed color in just the span of the day.
I expect it will take a couple of frosty nights to finally get the grass to take a break for the season, but trees have begun their shutdown. The autumnal equinox is just days away.
I’m lovin’ it.
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Fabulous Time
What is the deal? Is my camera broken or something? I haven’t taken any pictures for two days, so I can offer no visual proof that our friends, the Morales family, have arrived, or that we have already had so much fun being with them again that little else is receiving our attention.
The one exception turns out to be my stealing any spare second to get after the never-ending task of mowing or trimming grass. I now have just one section of fence left to be mowed before having that whole job complete. I’m planning to sneak that in early this morning before packing up to head to the lake for a couple of days.
We decided to drive two of our cars up there to give me the option of returning earlier than others on Friday to enable me to —can you imagine this?— mow all the lawn grass in preparation for the big knock down, drag out shebang we have scheduled for Saturday night.
Some years the grass growth slows around here in late July and August so I don’t have to mow as frequently, but this year I’m finding that it looks like I need to mow again after just a couple of days. When I wait a whole week, enough grass clippings are created to make me think I should have George bring over his baler.
We are having a fabulous time with our precious friends. Despite their late arrival on Monday night, which had us getting to bed around 3:00 in the morning yesterday, we made it to Hudson in the afternoon for a brief moment of shopping, and a fine patio lunch overlooking the St. Croix river at Pier Five Hundred restaurant.
Later, after a stint of grass trimming, both along the fence and in the labyrinth, George and Rachel Walker joined us for dinner. Marco graciously accepted Cyndie’s invitation to grill steaks, which turned out perfectly delicious. Poor Delilah doesn’t have a clue what happened to her usual sleeping routine the last two nights, as we lingered around the table after the meal, sharing stories and laughter well-past her usual bedtime.
Today, we leave her behind to be cared for by friends for a couple days while we will all be visiting with Cyndie’s parents up at the lake place in Hayward. With any luck, I’ll remember to take a few pictures of the frivolity expected to ensue.
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Labyrinth Water
I only accomplished a short portion of my list of things deserving immediate attention yesterday. First and foremost, I completed the project to install a hose spigot for water to the labyrinth garden. Despite my 3 attempts to achieve a leak-free set of connections at the bottom of the hill, I quit while there remained a slow drip and deemed it good enough for now. Perfection isn’t everything, you know.
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If you look closely, you just might be able to spot the transplanted maple tree by the large rock at the center of the labyrinth. It appears to be holding its own in this first summer out in the open sunlight.
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Four Inches
I expected to see a lot of water in the rain gauge after yesterday morning’s early deluge, but four inches was a surprise. I knew right then that walking the property with Delilah was going to be a messy adventure. After the rain stopped, we received a couple of dramatic gusts of wind that audibly torqued the house and visibly stressed the trees. I prepared myself for the possibility of damage to buildings or trees.
Happily, the wood shed withstood the gusts, due in large part to the added anchors that we installed when Mike Wilkus and I rebuilt it. I do need to get out there and re-stack one row of logs that has fallen over, but that collapsed long before yesterday’s weather.
We found only small debris of branches and leaves on the ground for as far as we ventured. It was just too wet to take the main perimeter trail through the woods, so that remains un-inspected.
The horses seemed entirely nonplussed by the excitement of the downpour and wind by the time we happened upon them. It seems to me they are getting used to the flash-flood situation that happens in their paddock every time we get heavy downpours.
One good thing about the wet ground was that it made it easier to bury the new irrigation line down the back yard hill toward the labyrinth. We opted to go low-tech and just slice a little opening with a shovel and drop the tubing under the sod. If I had tried using the tractor with the ground so saturated, I would have made one heck of a muddy mess in the yard.
It feels a bit odd to be working to get water to the labyrinth at a time when it least needs it, but it will feel great when things eventually dry up and we grow desperate to provide the optimum amount of hydration to all the growing things down there.
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Still Hoping
I wrote earlier about being on my third attempt to successfully transplant a young maple sapling to the center of our labyrinth. Each time, we have tried something a bit different from the time before, hoping to eliminate issues that contributed to those failures. This time, our method was to dig out as big a root ball as possible and transfer as much intact soil as we could, and to do so before the tree had leafed out.
We were a few days later than I had wanted, as the buds were just starting to open, but it was still better timing than the previous two attempts we had made. I was greatly relieved to see the buds continue to open and full leaves unfold about a week after we moved it.
I’m a bit like a nervous parent now, checking on it every chance I get, as if peeking in to see if our little baby is safe and sound while she naps. I thought the leaves looked a little droopy yesterday afternoon, but looking around at all the other trees of that size, plenty of them have that same look. I wondered if it might be a result of the shift back to colder temperatures.
There were frost warnings posted last night for central Wisconsin. No wonder the leaves are experiencing a little shrinkage!
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Third Try
I have not been mentioning the sad lack of progress toward my dream of having a transplanted maple tree growing in the center of our labyrinth, in large part because I’m choosing to avoid framing the previous two tries as failures. Basically, if I don’t talk about them or write about them, it becomes as though they didn’t exist.
However, failure is what happened, and I am obviously now writing about it, so it is not as though I mean to pretend it didn’t occur. I just haven’t been dwelling on it publicly. The attempt we made last year involved pulling a tree up by the roots and transplanting it “bare-root” to the hole in the center of the labyrinth. The shock of the transplant caused it to lose all its leaves, but before the summer was over, it had sprouted new leaves.
I’m not sure what went wrong, but after a while the new leaves drooped and then shriveled, and I figured we lost it. I held off on ripping it out of the ground last fall in the off-hand chance all the energy was being put into the roots so it could sprout leaves this spring in a return to the normal seasonal pattern.
That didn’t happen.
When I was mowing the labyrinth last Friday, I spotted the bark on the trunk was dried out and split open. Snapping off the end of a branch confirmed it was all dried out. No visible signs of life at all. I yanked the tree out.
Last fall, in preparation for the possibility I would need to try again —and while the trees still had leaves— I located another tree I liked in our woods. Following advice I received from my helpful landscape adviser, I flagged it for future reference. Yesterday we dug it up and transplanted it, taking as much dirt around it as we could in hopes of keeping as many of the small roots intact as possible.
So, number three is now in place at the center of the labyrinth garden.
I have a plan to bury a water line from the house down to the garden, where I will install a valve and a hose spigot. The length of tubing required was not stocked at the store, so I had to order it. I sure hope it comes soon, so I don’t have to lug a half-dozen hoses out on the hill to string together like we’ve done for the last two years.
I’d like the third time to be the charm, so I certainly don’t want the poor thing to go thirsty for any length of time. It’s feeling too dry around here already this spring, which is a sad problem to have since our main complaint for the two previous years has been that this time of year had been way too wet.
Thunderstorms rolled through last night, but we barely received a measurable amount of water in our rain gauge. It’s going to take more than that to satisfy all the growing things currently sprouting forth with gusto, reaching toward the sun.
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Melt Begins
In a short few days we have moved from below-zero bone chilling cold to above freezing high temperatures. On Friday I removed the blankets from our horses and brushed out their shedding coats. The prediction is for a string of days with high temps in the 50’s° (F) this week. For each day that new bare ground becomes exposed due to loss of snow cover, the odds improve for the air temperature to increase.
That snow on the ground acts as a natural cooler, so even though the sun shines bright, the breeze flowing across the white landscape remains chilly. Once the snow is gone, the ground warms significantly and the air then follows suit.
The horses were quick to soak up the direct rays after their blankets came off, which put them in serious napping mode. I think Hunter was planning on getting a drink, but then just fell asleep when he got to the waterer.
Our friends, Barb and Mike arrived Friday afternoon for a sleepover visit, making the weekend feel like a holiday to us. We consumed massive amounts of all too sweet calories (think, Cyndie’s gooey caramel rolls and puppy dog tails, along with some birthday cake and chocolate covered strawberries), walked the labyrinth and wooded trails in the moonlight, communed with the horses, and enjoyed an extended visit with neighbor, George Walker.
We wanted to connect George with Mike so they could talk “flight-speak.” George is working on getting his pilot’s license, when not trimming horse’s hooves or tending to their CSA farm. To the rest of us, much of their conversation sounded like a foreign language with the acronyms and specific phraseology.
I was able to enlist Mike’s adventurous energy to help work on cutting down a long-dead tree limb that was hung up in the “Y” of an adjacent tree. We got most of the easier portions down, but the main trunk turned out to be too much for the rope-saw I was trying to use.
When George heard about our plan, he suggested we borrow his friend’s “state-fair chainsaw.”
Huh?
He said it is a “chainsaw on a stick.”
We couldn’t get the rope-saw to orient over the trunk correctly, teeth down, and in our unsuccessful effort to forge ahead with hope it would eventually get a bite and right itself, the connecting cord between the chain and the one handle began to fray. All we did to the tree was rub the bark off that spot.
I went to get my pole-saw and we took down the smaller branches we could reach, leaving the main trunk for another time. Probably a time when I talk to George about borrowing that state-fair chainsaw.
Today we are off to visit Elysa’s house to help with a bit of spring cleaning. I won’t be around to witness how the second day of big melting progresses. I expect to be shocked at how much ground becomes exposed, though that will be thrilling, too. I need the ground to warm enough to thaw out the drain tile we had buried last fall.
That has my full attention this spring, in hopes of learning whether we will achieve the improvements we seek.
Happy (grumble, grumble) Daylight Saving Time day.
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Expanding Storage
Earlier this year we began removing the cinder landscape blocks Cyndie purchased to help us mark the labyrinth path, replacing them with rocks we have collected. I reused the cinder blocks to create a nook for staging composted manure. 
Yesterday, at Cyndie’s prompting, we finally got back to removing the rest of the blocks. I had no idea there were so many remaining.
We decided to use the additional cinder blocks to expand our materials storage, creating another bay for staging wood chips.
It is a wonder to see how quickly we can convert an overgrown natural area into a manicured space with a new function. Now, I need to find time to get back to grinding up the many piles of brush I have created in the last few weeks.
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Precious Peace
This morning the temperature was September-chilly when we woke up. We built the first fire of the season in our living room fireplace. It is my favorite time of year. Cyndie collected some of our wild American plums that are falling off the branches (they’re about the size of a cherry), with a plan to make jam. The sunlight is painting the trees at a noticeably different angle. The constant transition of seasons is entering one of those phases of being more obvious.
I was working in the labyrinth garden yesterday afternoon under a cool cloud cover and once again the herd made their way over to graze in close proximity. Delilah was mostly well-behaved and as I raked up grass cuttings from the previous day, I found myself in the midst of a most precious and peaceful working environment.
(Speaking of peaceful, as I write this, Pequenita has arisen from her warm curled sleep at the opposite corner of our bed to come lay on my chest and purr. She must have sensed what I was writing about.)
The power of that herd to settle Delilah and swaddle me in a blissful calm is precious. I get the impression that they recognize what Cyndie and I endeavor to create with this labyrinth garden. It seems as though they are letting us know we have their full support.
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Impermanence Is
On Saturday, Cyndie and I enjoyed some blissful moments tending to our labyrinth garden. The horses noticed our activity and wandered over to graze beside us while we toiled. Cyndie pulled weeds and I did some rock-work to add robustness to the entrance of the center circle.
It has become apparent that one of the two boulders in the center is leaning away from where we originally placed it. I’m hoping to pull it back upright with some manner of rigging and then see if there will be a way to prop it up with a small rock beneath.
The almost imperceptible movement of that huge rock is a gentle reminder to us that things we tend to assume are static —permanent, even— are nothing of the sort. I need to keep that in mind and endeavor to incorporate that reality into my designs for enhancements to our property.
I guess the trail I recently worked to reclaim is another classic example. It will not remain a trail without regular maintenance. Another obvious example that comes to mind is how much erosion is occurring in our paddocks after the summer rains. Before the horses were in those spaces, there was grass growing everywhere, which worked to hold the soil in place. That is no longer the case.
Beyond all the intentional infrastructure improvements we have done —clearing brush, adding fences, creating new drive paths— there are natural changes happening all the time. There will never be an absence of change. Everything and everyone is in constant transition, and at a continually varying rate of change.
Impermanence is.
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Relative Something 