Posts Tagged ‘property management’
Gentle Melt
This week we have been blessed with weather that is melting the snowpack in gradual steps, stopping overnight when the temperature drops below freezing and then gradually starting to melt again as the solar rays increase throughout the day. It’s the best outcome for avoiding flooding extremes.
Yesterday afternoon was the first time I finally was able to see the water flowing out of our drainage culverts as the snow cover receded.
There still is evidence of the significant amount of snow we received this year. I saw in yesterday’s news that the Twin Cities snowfall amount thus far is the eighth-snowiest since records have been kept. The snow that has slid off the hay shed roof all season is going to take a long time to melt, being in the shade most hours of the day.
It’s hard for me to see it but I read recently that our snow cover melts from the ground up. The roots of our trees must be warmer than the surrounding areas because the snow has visibly disappeared around the trees faster than everywhere else.
We are anxious to enjoy some 50-degree days but I’m willing to wait while days in the 40s are slowly, gently melting the snow and calmly flowing through our drainage ditches. One question lingers… how much longer should I leave the plow blade mounted to the ATV?
I will never shake the memory of our first spring here when 18 inches of heavy spring snow fell on May 3 after a dry warm spell in April. If I take off the plow blade, it won’t be stored very far away from easy access if needed.
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Got View
Despite a day-long spitting snowfall making work a challenge of really cold hands, the camera is up and running and I now have a live view available on my phone or our computers.
[mic drop]
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Madness Method
It is the season for easy sighting of the invasive Common Buckthorn which we regularly seek out for elimination from our woods. The leaves of Buckthorn hold a deep green color longer than most other undergrowth in the fall. Now is the time when I can spot what was previously obscured by other summer growth in the woods and venture off-trail to cut back any progress made by the pernicious invader since last year.
The small sprouts that pop up from seeds dropped by birds are easy to pull by hand. New sprouts that emerge out of a root structure that was already in existence don’t pull as well. If I bring a shovel with me on these missions, a lot of those can be dug up. Anything that has made it to “tree” size presents a bigger challenge.
I have decided on a process that I call my method of madness, partly as a result of a handsaw being all I was carrying way back when I first started cutting Buckthorn on our property. I cut off the trees at a height of 3 or 4 feet so the stump will be noticeable the next time I pass by, knowing there will be subsequent growth since I don’t apply an herbicide to the cut.
This process wouldn’t be practical if I wasn’t constantly walking through these woods and following up each year on the re-sprouting stumps. After a while, new sprouts will stop showing up. Here are before and after images of one example of my madness:
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This year I have also removed a section of bark on some of the stumps to see if that will prevent new sprouts above the break.
I found an interesting video from the University of Minnesota Extension that reveals how Buckthorn has become a winter haven for soybean aphids. An added incentive for farmers to pay attention to the invasive growing beside their crop fields.
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Boggles my mind that people figure out stuff like this. Who noticed the aphids were going to the Buckthorn and laying eggs that survive the winter?
Seems like madness to me.
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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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Interrelated Accomplishments
One thing conveniently led to the next in the series of projects we chose to take on in yesterday’s unseasonable heat. While we had been working in the woods the day before, Cyndie discovered a spot that looked promising for digging up more rocks for use in the labyrinth. There remained a surprising number of plaster fake rocks defining the pathway that we have always intended to replace when we find suitable real rocks.
I can no longer recall how many of these faux stones were left behind by the sellers of our property because it’s been so long since we used them all up in the labyrinth. Since we started reclaiming them again and storing them on a pallet, we’ve reached roughly five layers of the plaster half-rocks now being stored in the hay shed. That is more than enough to keep in reserve for replacing ones that fall from the veneer of supposed field rock plastered around the foundation of our log home and the shop garage.
Yesterday’s rock exchange in the labyrinth resulted in a wheelbarrow full of the faux stones which I needed to purge. Convincing myself that we didn’t need to store any more fake rocks, I came up with a good use for them. I dumped them on the corner where our loop around the hay shed meets the new pavement of the driveway.
I have been working to build up the corner to support the lagging trailer wheels that follow off-track in a turn onto the narrow driveway. After adding rock to the shoulder of that corner, I have been covering it with composted manure, our most available natural fill.
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Our great need for fill along the driveway is conveniently coinciding with my goal of clearing out space in the compost area to make room for the coming winter.
So, to review:
- We replaced faux stones that were temporarily used in the labyrinth.
- I was able to use the faux stones as fill for building up the turn from the hay shed loop to the driveway pavement.
- I’m using composted manure to cover the added material along that turn.
- Using that compost helps to clear out space for winter collection of new manure and possibly bedding from the barn stalls.
It is wonderfully satisfying to be making these improvements and having our efforts pay off in advancing other projects concurrently underway. It feels like we are getting two rewards for one effort, multiple times!
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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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Full Day
I didn’t set out to put in such a long day yesterday toiling away on big accomplishments, but circumstance allowed and I achieved much more than I thought possible. Cyndie was occupied in the kitchen canning jam with the help of her mother in the morning so I was on my own working outside. Since I got home from my bike trip I’ve intended to take the chainsaw to the large limb that broke off a big maple tree beside the back pasture.
I was eyeing that task while walking Delilah in that back pasture and pulling weeds that were getting tall. The dew point temperature was high and it was going to be a sweaty day in the great outdoors. Delilah likes being out with me so I picked the weed-pulling for her benefit before it got too hot. While walking the field, I sensed it would be mowable if no additional rain fell during the day.
That left me with two significant projects competing for my attention. I decided to start with the chainsaw on the downed limb. It was one of those cases where the more branches I cut and pulled out, the more branches it looked like remained. By the time I found myself soaked in sweat and exhausted, I had a mess of tree shrapnel, cut logs, and limbs for chipping to clean up. I began to think I may have bitten off more than I could chew.
Time for a lunch break in the air conditioning!
That renewed my energies and I immediately set out to finish and clean up my lumberjack work. Without a moment’s hesitation, I brought out the diesel tractor to take on the pasture mowing project.
Starting very slowly along the fence, I completed the full circumference before kicking up the speed to see if I might be able to cut the entire pasture before rain or darkness stopped me.
I made good progress navigating the Ford New Holland around the corners and recesses. Cutting at a different angle than the last time to improve results, I triumphed within minutes of the dinner hour.
Two large tasks knocked off the to-do list in one day, with credit given to Cyndie for being able to take on the afternoon horse feeding and dog walking that allowed me to mow uninterrupted to the end.
Color me extremely satisfied this morning with such progress achieved in just one day.
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Home Fields
As we rolled up the driveway on Saturday after Cyndie picked me up upon my return to the Cities, I asked her to stop at the barn. I wanted to let the horses know I had returned home. The unpacking of wet things could wait a few more minutes.
Swings greeted me first from her spot against the fence rail under the overhang. She breathed in the scent of my hands and lifted her head to let me scratch her neck. It feels pretty special to have developed a relationship with these horses after all that they have been through. I moved from Swings to Light and then to Mia. The chestnuts had each waited patiently on the other side of the overhang space. They breathed in my scent and accepted a few scratches
Finally, I looked to Mix who had yet to approach. She stepped up to the gate when I looked toward her. The herd welcomed me home.
Home to our fields. Cyndie took the above picture while I was away. The horse is standing in the back pasture. Beyond the fence is the hay field and it looks very different today. Yesterday the field got cut by a neighbor who will be taking it as round bales for his cows. It looks pretty good freshly cut. I’ll have to take some pictures.
Cyndie was in that spot to capture the grazing horse because she was taking pictures of the limb that had broken off one of the old maple trees near the back pasture.
It’s nice to be home but it means I have to get to work using the chainsaw first thing. After I finish mowing, that is.
Something tells me I’m not on vacation anymore.
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That Close
I knew I might not finish trimming the grass along the fence line before the gas ran out but the closer I got, the more I hoped I might make it. My decision to leave the plastic gas can behind probably doomed my chances of not needing it.
There were one and a half lengths between posts left to cut out of the entire distance of our fencing when the motor sputtered out on me. Nothing to do but walk back to the shop garage and bring the gas can back with me.
We haven’t always been proactive about trimming the grass along the fence before it gets problematically tall, especially during the time when there were no horses on the property and we didn’t need the electricity activated. When the fence is electrified, contact with the growth around it puts a load on the circuit that pulls down the voltage.
The first time I used the power trimmer along the fence line, there were several areas where woodier stems of some plants would break the plastic cutting line. This time, around the entire length of our fences, I did not run into anything that the plastic line couldn’t cut. It was very rewarding to discover that we’ve been cutting it enough times now that there is no longer anything robust trying to grow under there.
It fits with what I was writing yesterday in that the job of keeping the growth off the fence is getting easier to manage over time. It would be just fine with me if eventually, nothing tried to grow beneath the fences and I didn’t need to cut it anymore.
I could intentionally neglect it. 🙂
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Relative Something 