Posts Tagged ‘landscaping’
Changing Landscapes
As I so often do, I ended up choosing hand tools over the diesel tractor for reclaiming some of the lime screenings that have washed into the drainage swale in the field beyond the paddocks.
It was just a lot easier to start the task when the moment presented itself, I have way more control over what I am doing, and I could work without bothering to isolate the horses.
The washout isn’t all that dramatic in the picture above, where I had already dumped several loads back on top, but the erosion was beginning to get a lot worse with each batch of heavy rainfall we had been getting. I’d like to interrupt the pattern of increasingly greater washouts as early as possible.
It would be grand to add something like a grid or fabric to hold soil in place but hoof traffic through that space tends to destroy that kind of thing. We’ve got some thick rubber mats under the overhang where we place feed pans and the horses’ hooves do a surprisingly good job of tearing them up.
They have been stomping their feet to knock biting flies off their legs and that tends to bust up their hooves a bit. I spotted a big rock that had recently surfaced on a slope of one paddock. It appeared to have scuff marks on it so I asked Cyndie if it should come out. Her response was, yes, because it can be bad for their hooves.
When I finally pried it out, it fell into two pieces. I think a horse had already broken it by stomping.
I took “before and after” pictures of a different project yesterday afternoon.
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We cleared out this path along our northern property border last year to create our newest walking trail. Everywhere I had cut a tree, new shoots sprouted with a vengeance from the stumps. I hadn’t given this any attention since spring and the weeds and tree shoots were taking over. Now the path is much more inviting.
This coming weekend we are hosting a Hays family gathering that will include a scavenger hunt for one of the events. I now have one more trail where I can think about sending hunters in search of some unique item or landmark.
Cyndie and I have already agreed that no clues will require digging, moving anything large, looking under manure piles, or climbing trees to find designated items.
The scavenger hunt beat out my idea of a treasure hunt where increasingly helpful clues would be provided each time a task is completed. What kind of tasks? I was thinking of things like splitting some firewood, filling in erosion ruts, hauling hay bales, or turning compost piles. The treasure was going to be a seat in our reclining easy chair and a glass of ice-cold lemonade.
See ya this weekend, Hays siblings and offspring!
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Modifying Finish
We have not discovered the secret to convincing our favorite gravel guy to come landscape the bottom half of our driveway. Since we have reached the point of not even receiving callbacks from him, I’m assuming we will need to look for another source of landscaping help if we’re not able to do it ourselves.
In the interim, we are taking a crack at applying an improvement to our original thinking about how to finish the edge of the driveway asphalt in the sections where we already tried smoothing the grade with some composted manure.
The limiting factor in this plan is the relatively small supply of our manufactured soil currently available for the task. I wrestled with the decision of using what little material we have in places where none has yet to be applied or using it to improve the areas landscaped last summer.
I went with the latter, for now.
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I have settled into a pattern of creating piles roughly 1 meter wide by 1m deep by 1m high. The small pile on the left in the foreground of the first photo is just getting started and receives new, fresh manure daily. The pile in the foreground on the right is no longer getting any new material added and it is cooking at a perfect composting temperature.
The pile just behind them is in the final stage of composting. Just beyond that one is an area shown in the second photo where I just removed two composted piles to use for the driveway landscaping project. In the background is a large pile that was created over the winter and never got turned in order to fully compost.
I will use that for fill eventually but it needs to be broken apart to dry out because the majority inside is a stinky green mess due to never having been regularly turned to promote the composting process.
My attempt to finish the driveway edge last summer using the remaining exposed gravel left me with a rocky lip that I now want to eliminate. The new plan is to pull down the gravel to form a more even slope and to cover it all with dirt or compost right up to the asphalt.
We will need to plant grass to provide some competition for the weeds that absolutely love an opportunity to sprout in freshly exposed soil.
I had originally envisioned the possibility of having a gravel edge along the asphalt. Now I want to just cover the rock completely. Driveway edge landscaping two-point-oh.
If I find this latest plan works, I will probably order a load of black dirt and do this the rest of the way down the driveway.
I think I could convince our favorite gravel guy to at least deliver a truckload of dirt and dump it down by the road if they don’t have to spread it. Time and labor seem to be their main shortage and that is something I am able to provide.
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Helping Ourselves
We asked for help in finishing the landscaping along the steep edges of our new driveway. I’m taking the lack of response from our excavator to indicate they are either too busy or simply not interested. They must not need our money.
It is a peeve of mine when contractors choose to “ghost” potential customers after initial contact. I generally follow the idiom of squeaky wheels getting the grease but after multiple unsuccessful attempts to communicate our genuine interest in paying for help with our landscaping, we have fallen back on doing what we can with our limited resources.
Up by the shop/garage, I have been feathering the edge with composted manure. Yesterday, we mined a ten-year-old pile of dirt down by our southern border drainage ditch to use at the bottom of the driveway by the road, filling the trailer behind the ATV with hand shovels. We made six trips back and forth and covered a humblingly short length of both sides.
Cyndie suggested we rent a skid steer tractor. She’s not wrong that it would be a more impressive machine for addressing this size of a job. My first hesitation with that plan is that I would be the person to operate it and I’ve never driven one before. The subsequent issues include our lack of truck or trailer to transport the machine, the small amount of available dirt a machine like that could move, and the abuse my novice use would do to the surrounding terrain.
We don’t make a lot of efficient progress with our shovel-fulls at a time, but I have the skills to operate a shovel and can do the work with minimal collateral damage.
The only real challenge beyond not being able to finish the job quickly is coping with my self-conscious embarrassment about the neighbors’ opinions over our using hand tools to tackle work that deserves machines. Working down at the road leaves our methods glaringly obvious to local traffic passing by.
My slow and primitive methods are less obvious up on the other end of the driveway. I’m not certain our efforts will ultimately produce the desired results but Cyndie and I agree what we can do ourselves will be better than nothing. Time will tell.
Having successfully made that small bit of progress near the road yesterday, I’d like to keep going while the weather allows until we use up the rest of the old pile. It’s a good exercise in coping with my apprehension over the impressions my methods give to local observers.
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Added Steps
This morning’s frost was cold enough to create a cover of ice over the horse’s waterer, affirming our suspicion the automatic heaters are no longer up to the task they performed so well in the early years. We have hopes of remedying that before the daytime temperatures no longer climb above freezing this fall.
There was enough frost on the grass this morning that I “skated” along after we popped out of the woods on our way to feed the horses.
At first, we worried that Mix might be suffering some medical issue because her behavior of pawing the ground, snorting, rising up, chasing after others, and kicking seemed to indicate she was in pain. When she settled down enough for feed pans to be served, calm chewing replaced the wild behavior.
I suggested to Cyndie that Mix might have just been trying to rev up her engine in response to the cold morning. While they were all eating, the sun cleared the horizon and instantly began to warm surfaces. The horses all stand sideways to the warming beam, soaking it up as they gobble up their feed.
My projects yesterday included the addition of steps on a path from the driveway that had gotten even steeper than it already was before the resurfacing increased the height of the pavement. Over the last week, we’ve collected a spare wood beam and some rocks for the task.
There weren’t a lot of fill options handy so I attempted to sculpt something minimal and then scrounged the surrounding area for shovel-able dirt.
What I found was so fine it couldn’t be called sand. It was more like dust. On the edge of the woods, a tree had tipped years ago and this was the “soil” around the root bundle that looked solid enough until I dug into it with a shovel.
After that proved marginal for my purposes, I gave up on finding something close and headed down to the small paddock where I needed to re-dig a drainage channel that hoof traffic had obliterated over time. That was a long way to push a heavy wheelbarrow so I chose to finish with a lighter (and closer) load of composted manure.
I’ve got two rocks yet to place but the new steps leading past Cyndie’s strawberry patch have met with her approval thus far. We’ve walked that slope for years without steps so having just a few added breaks to the slant seems like a significant improvement.
We’ll have to see what a few freeze/thaw cycles, some heavy rain, and just passing time will do to the stability of the improvised effort.
I hope it holds because we are both pleased with the rustic look that my crude attempt has produced.
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Something’s Different
Is there such a thing as “almost sick?” Over the last two days, I’ve been experiencing sensations that are atypical for me. An astute observer can sense you have a fever before actually measuring your temperature. Maybe I’m just hypersensitive in this regard but I tend to notice even a tiny rise in my normal body temperature. It doesn’t measure high enough to justify claiming it as a “fever,” but I feel all the associated body aches.
At the same time, I have none of the usual symptoms that I always get. No sore throat. No airway issues. No stomach or digestive issues.
I have felt a bit unsteady on my feet, but I don’t feel sick. I just don’t feel like my normal self.
Cyndie’s homemade chicken & wild rice soup and extra rest have been our treatment for my altered reality. It has come at the expense of being outside on two more of our glorious climate-warmed autumn days. It has been “July in October” here in west-central Wisconsin.
The other day when I was out harvesting rocks, I stopped to soak up the beautiful spectacle of some of the successfully transplanted ornamental Japanese Silver Grass we replanted near the labyrinth.
Had I known it would do as well as it has I would have had us take a bigger portion. The home plant we were trying to thin doesn’t look any different at this point. We could have taken twice what we did. This is what it looked like back in August:
It’s funny what a little success will do for my confidence. I’m feeling inspired to do even more land-sculpting next spring to continue our latest trend of finding and nurturing volunteer oak trees to thrive, as well as moving around perennials to enhance our paths and trails across the various mini-environments of our twenty acres.
This month marks the 10th anniversary of our arrival to this paradise we call Wintervale. With only a minor bit of wavering in the ten years we’ve been here, I’d say our little experiment in the adventure of transitioning from suburbanites to rural property owners can be deemed a success.
I don’t want to be any place else at this point in my life. Here’s hoping for another decade to come.
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Chippin’ Away
Little by little, day by day… We made another modicum of progress in dealing with the wealth of downed trees awaiting processing on our property on Thursday. I didn’t have a wasp get into my sleeve and painfully sting me four times when I grabbed a branch to put it in the ATV trailer. Cyndie can’t say the same thing.
Her wrist and forearm looked a bit like a hot baseball bat but that didn’t keep her from carrying on and loading branches into the chipper.
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Under the canopy of leaves that created dappled light over our chosen workspace, we made quick work of the collection of prime-sized, appropriately trimmed limbs we’ve been stockpiling for just this purpose. Once the trailer was emptied, we sought out worthy specimens scattered throughout the immediate vicinity.
That effort reaffirmed my interest in putting more time toward pre-staging the optimum branches for chipping. The brilliant chipper attachment we have can handle up to 5-inch diameter branches but too large a “Y” breakout on a limb will seize progress as it gets wedged in the narrowest point of the chute. Sticks and twigs that are small can also bog things down.
Lately, I find myself inclined toward optimizing production of the best chips for landscaping by choosing ideally sized limbs. There is a time and place for chewing up entire piles of branches, but lately, our purposes call for less shrapnel and more good chip chunks.
Our next task along these lines will be to process the remaining downed trees, trimming and sorting limbs for a future day of chipping. It will be a rewarding exercise on its own, but it is also a form of delayed gratification… if you know what I mean.
There is something really satisfying about grinding a trailer-load of arm-sized branches into a huge pile of wood chips.
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Our Day
A day after we celebrated Julian’s birthday with a family dinner at a Bloomington restaurant, Cyndie and I claimed yesterday for ourselves in honor of our 41st wedding anniversary. Our animal sitter, Grace, was on the calendar to free us up to do whatever we wanted. In the end, we both wanted to stay home and work on our property.
I am thrilled that our first accomplishment involved clearing small stumps, roots, and rocks in our north loop trail that have prevented me from being able to mow that section as low as desired for our walking trails. I’ve been wanting to take care of this nuisance issue for two summers.
In the afternoon, we focused our attention on the labyrinth. I brought down our new favorite tool, the electric push mower to give it a fresh cut.
We rearranged rocks and pulled weeds, addressing only a fraction of the total that is deserving of attention. The progress looks so good it has us both wanting to get back down there again soon to continue the beautification.
Just as we were about worn out for the day, we looked up to find the horses had wandered back to hang out in our proximity. That was all the invitation we needed to stop what we were doing to go hang out with them.
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Throughout the day we reminisced about our wedding day back in 1981, an outdoor service on a day with very similar weather to what we were enjoying yesterday. I remember the trees were starting to turn colors, similar to what is beginning to happen here this week.
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Concept Proved
I did a test length of backfilling the sharp drop from the driveway’s gravel shoulder to the grass to soften the slope. We plan to toss some grass seed on that and call it finished.
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I think it is a reasonable improvement. Before we can actually achieve this level of finish, there remains a lot of distance of asphalt edge that is still exposed. I knocked off another 25 yards by myself yesterday. A little progress is better than no progress at all. I’m looking forward to Cyndie’s return tomorrow so we can double-team the job, which effectively doubles the distance we can complete in a day.
Actually, we have made enough progress toward getting the gravel pulled up over all the edges that seeing the shrinking distance that remains is starting to serve as “a carrot” enticing us to keep after it to get ‘er done.
I keep picturing the challenge I will have, come winter when I need to navigate the slopes of those edges to plow snow beyond the width of the pavement. The less steep we can make that slope, the better it will be for me for clearing snow.
Unfortunately, what I envision is that the blade will likely tear up much of the grass we might be able to get growing on those slopes by winter. It will give me extra incentive to be careful about keeping the blade up a few inches on the sides. I can hope that we get some good hard freezes before the first plowable amount of snow falls. That makes all the difference. If the ground isn’t frozen by the time I need to plow the driveway, it’s always a messy exercise.
I wonder if we will get much snow this winter. We didn’t buy the heated driveway option to melt snow off the pavement.
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Lotta Landscaping
Enough already with the driveway subject dominating my posts of late. I’m as ready to move on as anyone but there is a lot of work left to get the new driveway to the level of completion we seek. Bear with me for just a few more days. There will be a little break from this topic starting tomorrow. We are leaving this morning for the lake. I get to watch live coverage of the Tour de France for a few days! I can write about how great swimming is in that precious Round Lake water.
When we return home, our plan is to begin cleaning up the edges. It is going to be a big job but we are looking forward to it. Achieving that level of finish will be a very pleasing accomplishment. I know this because I have taken a couple of stabs at what it might involve.
Before:
Old folds of sod from when the original asphalt was dug up need to be picked up. The gravel will be raked up and shaped to cover the exposed edges of the new asphalt.
Here is a section where I did just that:
As we finish them, along the lengths of both sides, I will be visualizing what it will be like when I am trying to plow snow beyond the edge of the asphalt, which needs to happen to maintain a full drive-able width through the full winter season. It will be good to have the gravel base along the edges for that purpose.
A few days of lake life bliss will help us to be fresh and ready to go for a few days of landscaping next week. I’m looking forward to both.
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Tending Growth
Without firm plans about what we would accomplish yesterday morning, I gassed up the big chainsaw and charged the battery on the hand trimmer chainsaw for a walk through the woods. We had a general goal of bringing down the most obvious trees that have tipped but then got hung up on surrounding limbs, but whatever caught our eyes was fair game.
It’s almost comical at times because Cyndie and I approach things very differently. She is given to focusing on multiple goals simultaneously while I find myself inclined to leave some things for later and head off for the next big tree as she lingers behind to take tending to the next level.
Well off the trail, we came upon two noteworthy finds. It is always surprising to find an isolated old fence post and rusty barbed wire in the middle of the woods.
A remarkably thick and fascinatingly curling vine stem was less surprising but equally unwelcome. We pulled it out to save with visions of conjuring some artistic use for it in the future.
When we emerged from the trees, it was time to tend to the ornamental tall grass up by the shop garage. The old growth gets cut back in early spring. This year we went with an extreme cut in preparation for a plan to try digging into the biggest bundle and dividing it for transplant.
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We don’t even have a plan for where we want to transplant them to next but we’ve got enough options that it will become a challenge to decide where not to add this gorgeous grass. The first challenge will be coping with the bed of rocks the main bundle has grown through.
Good thing I am a patient man.
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Relative Something 