Posts Tagged ‘landscaping’
Couldn’t Finish
With a threat of rain today and tomorrow, yesterday Cyndie hinted I should work on outdoor projects while the weather allowed. Fair enough. Since there are practically endless opportunities to trim back overgrowth along our trails and fence lines, I decided to start on the place that needed the biggest effort.
Using the electric string trimmer, I worked my way down the fence line. I always feel so good about how it looks when the fence wires are all free and clear from being swallowed by tall grass, weeds, and vines.
Next, I used the hedge trimmer to clean up the overhanging branches sticking out in the pathway.
When all the sliced up trimmings cover the ground, the pathway deserves to be raked clean. That becomes the finishing touch of a job well done and provides the ultimate visual reward for an end result.
It’s too bad I couldn’t finish in the time available. I left the rake down there in hopes one of us could, at the very least, make a quick sweep to clear the bulk of the debris the next time we are walking that trail.
We had to wrap up chores early yesterday for a trip to the Cities to celebrate some June birthdays with a dinner out at Ciao Bella in Bloomington with our kids, Cyndie’s mom, and her brother, Steve. What a fine batch of menu choices we were served by first-class staff.
Maybe I was extra hungry after skipping lunch to do that trimming, but every bite of my entrée and the several others I sampled tasted incredibly delicious. It’s as if they must have pushed past the limits of healthy eating by adding copious amounts of the good stuff, like butter, and salty seasonings. Even the starter loaves of fresh-baked bread tasted like the best bread I had eaten in a long time.
It made the packed parking lot and too loud ambiance worth overlooking. For a normal Tuesday night, the place was jumping! Good thing we had a reservation. Since we had picked up Cyndie’s mom, we also had a card allowing us to park in one of the handicap spots near the front door.
My meal was so good that I had no worries about not being able to finish that part of my day.
Maybe I’ll use that fuel to get out and do the unfinished trail raking between rain showers today.
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Quality Hay
We received a delivery of new hay on Friday afternoon. Since we are caring for horses for the rescue organization “This Old Horse,” the hay was procured by one of their staff. I don’t believe we have ever received hay twice from the same source in the years we’ve had these horses.
Of the last two batches we’ve received, one was much better described as “straw,” and the other was primarily a hair-like grass blade of little substance. Each time, we believe it will be just fine, but the horses soon demonstrate whether they think it’s good hay or not.
Friday’s batch showed up in a hay wagon, not strapped to a flatbed trailer, and the farmer, Josh, radiated a feel-good energy that both Cyndie and I perceived. These were promising first impressions.
Johanne told us this was organic hay because the field where it was grown is leased from a farmer who operates under completely “organic” principles. Works for us.
We tossed and restacked 150 bales from the hay wagon to the shed, and I didn’t notice a single bale that looked odd. One thing Cyndie and I have learned over the years is that our impression of hay being “good” doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if the horses don’t like it. That would prove to be the ultimate test.
Once the wagon was empty, we swept up a full wheelbarrow of loose scraps that had fallen from bales. Cyndie then included a mix of those scraps along with the old hay in the nets she topped off when we served up the horses’ evening feed buckets.
When I checked on the horses later, I found them all feeding on the hay bags even though they hadn’t finished the grain in their buckets.
They must have smelled it and couldn’t resist. They obviously liked it!
I’ve written before about how much incidental grass grows in the packed gravel driveway where hay scraps fall in front of the hay shed. I couldn’t get grass to grow there if I tried, but doing nothing resulted in more turf than gravel.
That gave me an idea. In October, I added compost fill to the slope of our new lookout knoll to cover the barren, sandy edge of the slope and, ultimately, improve it to become a mowable grade.
We were planning to plant grass seeds on the improved slope in the spring, but why wait? Cyndie raked up as much of the leftover hay scraps as possible from the ground where the hay wagon had parked. Logically, much of the grass seed probably stayed behind to thicken the grass already growing there, but any fraction remaining is now moved to the lookout knoll.
We’ll still probably toss more seeds on the slope in the spring, but it feels like we are helping nature to work with us a little bit by covering the surface with hay scraps.
Especially since the horses are showing us that it’s good quality hay.
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Fresh Greening
We’ve survived a few days when the morning temperature teetered around the freezing point with no noticeable damage to new growth sprouting everywhere we look. One of the early above-ground wild plants to show signs of leaves is the black raspberry bushes.
Here’s hoping it will be a good year for the berries.
The grass has gotten bushy enough in spots to warrant mowing. I pulled out the electric push mower to get after the back side of the barn. The ground is not yet firm enough to support the weight of the riding tractor. That exercise went so well, I decided to give the labyrinth a go.
It was my first time walking the labyrinth since the ground thawed. There were many stones pushed sideways and/or toppled by the combination of frost heave and burrowing rodent activity. Mowing was a bit of a hassle. It felt good to finish and move out to the much easier cutting of the area beyond the stones.
I’m expecting the growth of grass blades will pick up dramatically now and I will soon be mowing some section or another almost every single day until we happen to reach a stretch of very dry weather.
Mowing is easy compared to the landscaping project I’ve decided to do myself. The first order of business before improving the grading on each side of the garage will involve sealing cracks that have formed in the concrete blocks. That’s one more thing I have no experience doing but I will shop for materials and then fake it.
The other fresh greening happening is inside on the table in our sunroom where garden plants Cyndie started are bursting out of the dirt with impressive spurts of growth. I suspect they will be transplanted to the great outdoors very soon.
We’ll be eating fresh produce in a blink.
And speaking of things happening in a blink, in just over a week it will be one full year that Asher has been in our family. I think he has accepted us as worthy keepers.
In April, three years ago, the four thoroughbred mares arrived at Wintervale. At the time, we didn’t know if they would stay any longer than the summer grazing season. The fact that we are transitioning them onto green grass again for the fourth year makes it pretty clear we settled into keeping them here year-round. At this point, I dream of them never needing to ride in a trailer again.
It would be great if they would offer their opinion on the subject. I certainly wouldn’t want to keep them here if there was somewhere else they’d rather be.
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Good Dog
We have reached another milestone in the last phase of the driveway project. Yesterday we completed planting grass seeds over the last portion of the dirt along the newly landscaped sides of the asphalt. Now we wait. Well, we occasionally water, but mostly, we wait.
Turns out, we’ve got a dog who doesn’t appear to mind waiting around with us. While we have been working up and down the driveway, Asher has hung around patiently between bouts of zoomies where he sprints back and forth between us.
Asher had disappeared from sight for a while and Cyndie found him lying just inside the door of the barn. Such a treat for us to find him looking so content.
I was home alone with Asher for a little while yesterday and working along the driveway. He busied himself for a little while digging after a mole and then I lost sight of him. When Cyndie returned, she found him sitting quietly on the steps at the front door of the house.
I think Asher is showing a good level of satisfaction with his current situation. We are feeling a good level of satisfaction with his adjustments to living with us.
He’s proving to be a really good dog.
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Grass Gripe
While I have been toiling to prepare the dirt along our driveway and in the back pasture for grass seed, one thought keeps going through my mind. We are working hard to nurture grass seeds to germinate. 
Preparing the soil, distributing the seeds, raking the seeds into the dirt, spreading straw over the top, and watering the area in an effort to establish a carpet of green where previously there was none.
Meanwhile, grass has grown in front of our hay shed despite a total lack of effort from us to make that happen.
Over and over yesterday while raking, my mind reviewed the unlikely fact that grass seed falling from baled hay lands on the hardened gravel drive. The soil wasn’t prepared for seeds. We never watered that area. It gets too much sun. Vehicles drive over it. We don’t want grass to grow there.
Despite all the reasons grass should not sprout there, it has done so with unbelievable effectiveness.
It’s just plain wacky. It’s an imbalance in the universe. It defies logic.
Don’t mind me, that’s just a little grass gripe I harbor. Let’s end this post on a more positive note. How about a photogenic ground cover in the rocks just beyond our front steps?
Add to that a shot of the golden sunset Cyndie captured the other day:
Beautiful, no?
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Fall Planting
There is a lot of new dirt on our property since the 13 loads were dumped and spread along the edges of the driveway and down the drainage swale across the back pasture. If we let nature take its course, that dirt will be an open invitation for a wide variety of gangly growing weeds common to the area.
One alternative is to plant enough grass to claim the dirt in place of opportunistic weeds. We dawdled for some time during the most recent dry spell, not wanting to put seed down where we can’t reach with hoses to water. Planning ahead, we purchased a 25-gallon tank with a sprayer to water along the majority of the driveway.
The on-and-off rain showers over the weekend have prepared the dirt nicely so we are now ready to go full-speed toward getting seed down. Yesterday, we started in the back pasture
We invited Asher to enter the pasture with us so he could hang around while we worked. It looked like he was doing well in ignoring the piles of manure everywhere, putting his primary focus on running under the shower of grass seeds and straw being spread.
I told Cyndie to watch for grass growing out of the hair on his back in the next few days. Then he came close enough for me to smell that he must have rolled in one of those piles of poop. Silly pooch. He earned himself a rather crude version of a sponge bath before being allowed back in the house.
After lunch, I checked the radar to see if there might be enough of a window of time between rain showers that we could start seeding at the far end of the driveway by the road. With two wheelbarrows, we hauled bags of grass seed, rakes, and a bale of straw down near the mailbox.
Shortly after raking each side of the driveway in preparation for the seed, the dark clouds and rumbles of thunder moving toward us hinted it was going to arrive sooner than I suspected. Fearing the potential for a strong enough downpour to wash new seeds away, we decided to delay seeding for another day and retreated hastily indoors.
We hope to resume planting today. It is tough to know how much time we have left in the growing season with climate warming extending our 80°F days into October and rumors of a strong El Niño lasting at least through January-March 2024.
It will feel better in our minds to have tried to get grass started this fall, even if the percentage of yield is lower than we’d like. It’s a healthy distraction from thinking about embarrassing team losses on the football turf.
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Days Long
Once again, we find ourselves engaged in a project that is much larger than two people can complete in a short amount of time. Cyndie and I could work on the newly graded dirt along our driveway from sun up to sun down if our sore feet and blistering hands were equal to the task and it would still take many days.
Since the project isn’t truly completed until there is grass growing in all this new clay/dirt combination, it will be months if not a year to reach the ultimate goal. Luckily, getting beyond this first raking and grading effort will be a welcome milestone. We’ll no longer feel driven to work intensively at every possible moment.
As always, it is a labor of love. It looks so much better already and will be a great improvement for mowing and plowing along the driveway. I’m looking forward to doing both on the improved slopes.
To accommodate allowing Asher to loiter off-leash, Cyndie and I split up and she stayed with him to work out-of-sight from the road and I took a second wheelbarrow down to the road to rake, shovel, and scrape.
Removing the large chunks of clay and the occasional big rocks leaves the task of heavy raking to pull dirt up from the bottom and smooth out the slope as evenly as possible. I find the result highly visually rewarding.
It actually inspires me to want to get right back out there to pick up where I left off except for the one-sided toll it takes on my body. I can’t master the art of raking left-handed. Hours of pulling only one way creates a stress on my body that is decidedly lopsided.
Maybe I’ll do some mowing today on the zero-turn mower. I need to steer that with both hands equally.
It’s another labor of love, don’t you know.
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Clay Chunks
For a change of pace after breakfast yesterday, I went for a bike ride to check the status of a route I’ve invited friends to join me on in a couple of weeks. The roads are all still there. Crops in the fields are starting to yellow but very few trees were sporting the colors of fall.
I am curious what the scenery will look like in two weeks.
After lunch, it was back to landscaping and increasing the calluses on my hands. The dirt the contractor hauled in for the job matches our soil pretty well for the percentage of clay it contains. With the bucket and tracks of the skid steer, the guy could press that dirt to a cement-like density.
In one area where we want water to flow to a culvert, he filled it too much and I needed to dig some out.
That proved to be a lot harder to accomplish than I expected. Asher volunteered to help and for once he was digging exactly where I wanted him to.
I found a good use for the large chunks of clay that didn’t get broken up by the skid steer. I’m dumping them on the slope beyond the shop garage to create a base where I want to reclaim it as easily driveable off the edge of the pavement.
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After the driveway was repaved, that slope had become too steep, just like the edges along the rest of the length. Here, I want to add enough fill to make that spot easy to drive over with the mower of ATV. By busting up the chunks of clay I will get a solid base to cover with composted manure and old hay before finishing it with some of our remaining lime screenings.
Since we only had the contractor work up to the barn area, any improvements between there and the house are up to us. I will be improving this area simultaneously with the rest of the length where we are finishing the work the contractor did.
This includes shopping for a water tank and sprayer we can pull behind the lawn tractor or ATV to water grass seed.
Gives us something to do around here.
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Sculpting Soil
The main order of business for the foreseeable future involves rakes, rocks, and lots of black dirt for us. On Tuesday, we raked out the drainage swale in the back pasture to pick up rocks and debris from the dirt dumped in the field. I think the load they brought for the field was deemed undeserving of the good-quality dirt.
In addition to the many rocks, we came upon trash that included a piece of wide ribbon with the words “buried cable.” Not far from that, I raked up a damaged short length of electrical cable.
We filled a wheelbarrow with the rocks and dumped them where the ground has been washing away beneath the footbridge I built.
I pulled out a select few that will make nice additions to our labyrinth and set them on the bridge.
Yesterday, we spent our time on the new slopes of the driveway, starting with the portion behind the hay shed. It looks great after giving it a thorough raking and final shaping. As rewarding as it is to see the long-awaited improvement, getting that short length done provided a reference for how much work lies ahead to give the rest of the driveway the same degree of attention.
Thankfully, it’s a labor of love.
We rewarded ourselves last night with a showing of the two latest episodes of “Reservation Dogs” season 3, followed by (for me) more hours of US Open tennis matches. Cyndie prefers a book over spectator sports.
Watching more matches in a row than ever before has taught me the importance of capitalizing on break opportunities and avoiding hitting the ball into the net. Finding a way to shift momentum in one’s favor goes a long way toward helping, too.
I think I’ll stick to landscaping and keep tennis as a spectator sport.
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Fingers Crossed
What are the odds that our favorite excavating company will actually show up today with a load of black dirt, a skid-steer, and years of know-how to professionally finish the shoulders of our driveway? It’s only been more than a year of waiting since they agreed to help us. When I checked (for the umpteenth time) on Monday and was told it would happen on Wednesday, I assumed he meant next week.
He corrected me and said this week! I wasn’t going to argue. I played along like I fully believed him. Pardon my skepticism.
Still, I have taken steps of preparation in case today really will be the day. A couple of weeks ago, I tried enticing the scheduler with an invitation to do even more work than just the driveway, hoping a bigger job would make the trip worth more to them.
It is time to reshape the drainage swale that passes through both the hay field and the back pasture on the way to moving water off the property toward the closest river. Yesterday I mowed the area to provide a better view of the current topography and, most importantly, to clearly indicate the direct route I want shaped up for the most effective flow.
Looking up to the culvert that brings water under the driveway:
Looking down at the route across the back pasture:
They actually did this for me about ten years ago when I was hoping to permanently establish a well-defined, wide, slow-flowing grassy swale. How naive of me to think any waterway could be permanently shaped. In the years since, two things have happened: an accumulation of sediment has created a high spot beyond which a series of deep ruts have washed out.
After they finish improving the shoulders of the driveway, I’m hoping they will be able to re-grade the drainage swale.
Fingers are crossed. For them to get both jobs completed and, more importantly, that they actually show up today.
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Relative Something 