Posts Tagged ‘property management’
Everything Right
It is not uncommon to hear people lament that “It’s been one of those days,” where everything goes wrong. On the other hand, how often do you hear about a day when everything went right? That was an experience that I enjoyed yesterday.
We have a pretty significant number of projects we could undertake right now. I started the day yesterday by asking Cyndie if she had any priorities since she wasn’t going anywhere and the weather was dry and sunny. We agreed that doing some wood chipping would be a valuable precursor to continuing to primp the labyrinth garden plants before World Labyrinth Day on May 2nd.
Now, we don’t have the luxury of just stepping out the door and turning on the wood chipper with the flip of a switch. The steps involved before beginning this project are a little complex since it is the first attempt of the season. (Another first!)
Here is what needed to happen in order to get to the 3-point PTO wood chipper:
Since the ground is too soft for the big diesel tractor, we decided to chip up on the driveway. That meant we would need to collect tree limbs from the woods and then haul the wood chips down to the storage area near the labyrinth. That meant we needed to use the ATV and its trailer.
- Make sure the New Holland 3415 tractor starts.
- Make sure the Grizzly ATV starts.
- Remove the snowplow blade from the ATV.
- Put batteries in the Greenworks riding mower and move it out of the garage.
- Back the big tractor up to the wood chipper and make all the connections.
- Drive the ATV down to the hay shed to get the trailer stored there.
- Remove the water tank and miscellaneous apparatus from the trailer.
- Drive the ATV and trailer into the woods to collect tree limbs from staged piles.
- Unload the limbs onto the driveway so we can shoot the wood chips directly into the trailer.
By the time we finished all that, I needed to get some lunch. Not on the list, while I was in the hay shed getting the trailer, I noticed a couple more pallets that would be perfect for a second set to use in the compost area. They were stacked behind a lot of other things, so it took a few minutes of acrobatic arranging to pull them out.
After lunch, Cyndie suggested putting a tarp in the trailer to catch the wood chips. I brought out the big tractor and parked the two machines side by side.
The only thing that didn’t go as planned was that a couple of limbs we’d hauled up were a hair too big. We just set them aside and forged ahead, undaunted. We filled the trailer two times with the limbs we had brought out of the woods.
I drove the ATV down the hill and pulled the tarp out of the trailer to dump the chips. It worked slick.
The wood we hauled made more chips than we expected, so we chose not to bring more branches up to the driveway and began the process of cleaning up and parking vehicles back in the shop garage.
It is rare that I ever accomplish anything without having to cope with some interruption or failure along the way. I’m happy to report that yesterday was very special because everything we set out to do worked without a hitch.
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Noticing Green
In the absence of an enjoyable run of warm sunny days, spring greening has advanced undaunted. I get the impression I will need to begin the season of lawn mowing soon. In a defensive reaction to that reality, I have been trying to imagine how and where I can step back the borders of mowed grass to expand areas of natural ground cover.
Unlike that pathway in the photo, some of our mowed trails are becoming more moss-covered every year. I would really like to avoid driving over the moss with the mower in those areas, but I will need to devise an alternate plan for controlling the growth of anything taller than moss that continues to show up.
There are a lot of buds beginning to appear on the tree branches, triggering a sense of anticipation for the weeks when green growth flourishes at a pace that becomes nearly impossible for us to keep up with in the places where we need to manage it.
Lately, it feels like our greatest challenges have been in striving to eradicate invasive garlic mustard patches and defeating a tenacious web of tree-climbing vines infesting a large portion of our woods.
We experienced some heavy rain showers last night, and the ground is very swampy everywhere we walked in the woods. In the paddocks, it’s just plain muddy. We took the coverings off the horses this morning. The rain sheets had become mud-caked and weren’t doing much to keep the horses dry anymore. I wouldn’t call the weather warm yet, but it looks to be just enough beyond that freezing precipitation threat that the horses will be able to cope with their backs bare.
I don’t want to appear greedy, but it would be great if the universe would consider tossing us some extended sunshine and a run of daytime temperatures above the 50s (F). Maybe throw in a full purge of all criminals holding office in our government and incarceration for the villains pulling the strings behind the scenes for good measure.
I mean, as long as I’m putting in requests…
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Unplanned Accomplishments
We expected yesterday to be a rainy one, so I didn’t have it in my mind to tackle any big outdoor projects. In the middle of the morning, I grabbed a pruner and took Asher for a walk in our north loop field to trim a sprout of growth that looked like a willow tree in bush form. I am trying an experiment to see if I can cut off the outer shoots to push that energy into one main trunk to get it to become more of a tree than a bush.
That took mere minutes, as anticipated, allowing my attention to turn to Asher so I could burn off some of his energy before we got stuck indoors while it rained. However, it didn’t rain. After some running around and tug-of-war, we hung out and watched the horses taking a rest out in the hay field.
After lunch, I came out thinking I’d head to the shop to work on some heart carving, but it was nice enough that I decided to hop on the mower. I’ve been wanting to make one last pass around the inside of the fence lines this season, and just needed a time when the batteries were charged and the rest of the grass wasn’t the higher priority.
Bang. Check that off the list.
The horses spent most of the day out in the fields, so there was hardly any manure to clean up in the paddocks when we showed up to serve their afternoon feeding. I took advantage of that and moved my attention to clearing out a dormant compost pile. That is another task that is rarely urgent and thus lingers in wait for an opportunity to get around to it.
We often hear comments of wonder over how we are able to take care of all the work that needs to be done around here. It occurred to me yesterday that all of the things I accomplished were unplanned, and that becomes the secret. Take small bites of the large pie of things that need doing whenever the chances arise.
The rain finally showed up after dark while we were snugged in watching the 4th game of the World Series. I was smugly enjoying unexpectedly getting multiple things done and checked off the mental to-do list.
It’s a little sweeter because none of that was in my vision when I started the day.
Hemp Dogbane
We did not know the name of the hemp dogbane weed three days ago, but I was well aware of a strong-stemmed tree-like weed along one of our fence lines. It grows taller than the surrounding grass and is a nuisance when trying to weed whip under the fence.
It caught my attention recently because it stands out dramatically when the leaves turn yellow, and it appeared to be spreading farther than ever before.
I asked Cyndie to look it up on her plant identification app. When she read me the results for hemp dogbane, I realized we needed to take action before it spreads any further. It is an aggressive perennial that is tough to control, and it is toxic to animals in both fresh and dry forms. We absolutely do not want this in our hay field.
Nasty herbicides are one possible means of beating the weed back, but that method doesn’t sound as effective as it would need to be to justify using chemicals that are harmful to humans and animals. Thankfully, frequent mowing is another way to constrain its growth. That is something I know how to do.
Since it is so easy to spot right now, I set out to remove what I could see by pulling it up by hand.
Just a little back-breaking, sweat-making labor for a few hours in the middle of the day. Most of the stalks broke off at the ground, leaving the rhizome behind, but there were a few where the root came up satisfyingly, too. It was obvious that previous field mowing had chopped the stalks and triggered multiple new shoots to emerge from the existing root. Those instances were actually easier to pull the whole root than the other individual new shoots.
We will now be much more focused about frequently mowing new growth in that area in the spring and throughout the summer.
Just the other day, I wondered aloud to Cyndie around the anniversary of our arrival here, as to what this property would be like if we hadn’t done anything to manage it for the last thirteen years. There would be a lot of big trees on the ground, that’s for sure. There’d be no labyrinth garden. And hemp dogbane weeds would have a lot stronger presence in the fields.
I feel like I earned my keep yesterday after that tenacious effort to single-handedly clear out every last dogbane sprout I could find on both sides of the fence. I’m cautiously optimistic that I will be able to stand up straight and walk normally today.
I’m not so optimistic that my muscles won’t demonstrate their objection in the form of stiffness, however.
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Shouldn’t Compare
We had a wonderful lunch opportunity yesterday. It was a first-time visit to the home of friends who live just a few miles north of our place. It’s not fair to compare our worlds, but it is hard not to, and it has given us a fresh perspective about everything that we have accomplished on our 20 acres.
It feels like they have achieved a dizzying amount more on their 40 acres, particularly in the realm of landscape plants and an incredible garden of vegetables and flowers. After lunch, we got a tour of their gorgeous log home –with an impressive finished basement that they did themselves– and then walked some of their property.
They hired a crew to burn one of their fields to replace it with a variety of healthy prairie plants. Many of the grasses and beneficial pollinator plants are as tall as me or taller. It is beautiful.
I am humbled by how many impressive improvements they have achieved on their land, even though they have lived there half as long as we have been at Wintervale.
I was particularly inspired to see the number of new plantings they’ve put in, including quite a few apple trees that are producing fruit for the first time this year. The produce in their garden, and the developing squash and pumpkins out beyond their modest stand of field corn, look bigger and better than anything I’ve seen in a grocery store.
When it came time for us to go, they loaded us up with pickles, green beans, carrots, purple cauliflower, basil, cucumbers, and two varieties of apples, plus an arrangement of flowers.
As soon as we got home, I went out and mowed some grass. Suddenly, that feels like much less of an accomplishment to me than it did the day before.
If it ever seems like we get a lot done around here in terms of upkeep, just know that it’s a drop in a bucket compared to what plenty of others around us out here in the country are doing.
The best takeaway for me from the revelations we saw yesterday is that I am not alone in tending to a little piece of this planet by nurturing nature. We are both helping desirable trees and plants succeed and controlling the spread of troublesome invasives.
It is great to have found such a close neighbor with a similar mindset. It will be good for me to keep in mind that it’s not a competition.
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Clearing Trails
The list of tasks related to fighting back the natural growth constantly threatening to overgrow our property is getting shorter and shorter. On Sunday morning, I took the chainsaw into the woods to cut up the trees and limbs that had fallen across several of our trails. Yesterday, the tool of choice was the STIHL string trimmer to clean up the paths, some of which we haven’t been walking since they’d gotten too overgrown.
Soon after I’d made it a little way down one of those pathways we hadn’t been on, I discovered another downed tree we hadn’t noticed that would require the chainsaw.
Before
After
The two plants most often cluttering the pathways are Virginia Creeper vines and wild raspberry shoots. Less often, there will be clumps of whispy grasses that tend to resist the spinning trimmer line. Shredding the growth at ground level in the woods with the string trimmer tends to kick up a lot of moist dirt that sticks all over me.
It became a toss-up between the splattering dirt or the mosquitoes as to which was most irritating.
There are two versions of trails through our woods. One is wide enough to accommodate an ATV, which is a valuable thing to be able to do sometimes. The majority of the wide trails were already in existence when we bought the property.
The rest of the trails have intentionally been left narrow to limit them to foot traffic. We have created almost all of these pathways.
This was only the second time this growing season that I have used the trimmer to mow down the trails through the woods. I’m hoping it won’t need to happen again, as growth should begin to slow soon now that we are in the dog days of summer.
There remains some branch pruning to be done to reach my ideal of perfectly well-tended trails, but we are darn close to completing the maintenance of our walkways in the woods.
Forest bathing can soon commence without obstructions.
I suspect I don’t reap the same rewards of walking through the woods when I am wielding a loud and smelly small gas engine and wreaking havoc on a wide variety of growing plant life.
I’ll just have to take follow-up walks on all the trails after I am done, which is easy to make time for since they become somewhat irresistible when they are so thoroughly groomed.
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Picking Battles
The backlog of things we would like done on our property is more than we can realistically accomplish on any given day, so we step out the door with vague intentions and see what claims our attention first. The driving factor is either how fast things are growing or what tree or branch has fallen and needs to be cut up and processed.
We also need to react to whatever the weather brings and adjust our agenda accordingly. Yesterday, the wildfire smoke was annoying, and the high dew point temperature made things a sweaty mess, but since there was no rain, we chose to cut and trim mid-summer growth.
Cyndie took the battery-powered string trimmer down to the labyrinth, and I headed for the north loop trail with the hedge trimmer and a rake.
My goal was to create a smooth wall of foliage along the trail marking the northern edge of our property. There is a rusty old barbed wire fence just inside all that growth.
I think it looks better as a hedge wall.
While I was working, I received a call from Cyndie. She needed my help with the trimmer because the line broke off inside the spool. I told her I would be right down.
When I got to the labyrinth, she wasn’t there. I called her back, and she told me she had gone up to the shop.
If there are two different ways to do something, we will always choose the opposite of one another.
As the afternoon wore on, I finished mowing down by the road and around the house. I found Cyndie disassembling our broken kitchen compost bin so we could put the pieces in the trash before it gets picked up this morning. A replacement bin is on order.
I finished trimming along the north loop trail and mowed along the edge of several trails. They will all need to be raked as a result. This time of year, if we don’t deal with the rampant growth along the sides of our trails, tall weeds, and grasses droop over and almost make the pathways impassable.
At one point during the hot afternoon, I caught a glimpse of the horses hanging out under the shade sail. That was one of the highlights of my day.
Today, I get to choose between mowing the labyrinth, trimming under the fence line around the back pasture, using the hedge trimmer on the last length of the north loop trail, using the string trimmer on the trails through the woods, or using the chainsaw to cut up the large limb of the oak tree that is still laying across one of our trails.
If I don’t feel like picking any of those, I could always rake the clippings off the trails where I mowed the edges yesterday. With how fast everything grows, if we don’t tend to some part of it every day, it just gets harder to keep up with the groundskeeping tasks.
It seems like a lot of work –and it is– but it’s a labor of LOVE!
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Lotta Tree
It happened again. This time, the big willow tree by Cyndie’s perennial garden lost a third of its trunk when the added water weight from the more than 2 inches of rainfall brought down the section with the most lean.
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To make clean-up more interesting, it dropped into one of the more hearty patches of poison ivy on our property. Generally, we avoid setting foot anywhere the poison ivy grows. Yesterday, with a heavy dew soaking everything, we found ourselves up to our elbows in poison ivy. I fell down into it once when a branch I was tugging on broke free. Cyndie got splashed in the eye by moisture from the mix of ivy and tree leaves as she pulled branches out of the tangled mess.
It will be a miracle if one of us doesn’t break out in a rash in the next few days. We vigorously washed with special soap and tossed our clothes aside for segregated laundering.
I worked my way into the now-horizontal crown of the tree with the big chainsaw, being careful to avoid cutting something that was under tension that would either pinch the blade or shift the heavy trunk. When I had cut as much as I could reach, it became clear I would need to get the pole saw.
After I had removed as much of the weight as possible from the extended limbs, I started in on the biggest parts of the trunk. At one point, a trip up to the shop garage was required to get a pry bar to roll the beast so I could finish cuts. Throughout the entire effort, which consumed our whole day, we only needed to wrestle free the pinched chainsaw blade three times.
It seemed a little unfair that we were doing this again so soon after wrangling the fallen maple tree in the backyard. It was doubly worse because of the added hazards of poison ivy everywhere we worked. However, the saddest part about the timing of all this was that it was Cyndie’s birthday. Cutting up and tossing branches was not the spa day she would have preferred.
That was a lot of tree to process. We put all three sizes of our STIHL chainsaws to good use on the relatively soft wood. Man, that battery-powered trimmer saw is a handy tool for pruning branches.
Our priority of getting that work done was related to the fact that we are heading up to the lake today for the weekend with Cyndie’s mom, Marie. After the big physical effort to get through all that tree, we are looking forward to a few days of R & R on Big Round Lake.
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Clock’s Ticking
We are quickly running out of time to accomplish any of our goals that require an ability to see clearly into our woods. Leaves and flowers are about to burst forth like a volcanic eruption.
Grass is growing enough already that I did a little mowing with the push mower in front of Cyndie’s perennial garden and the sunny spot behind the barn that always grows faster than anywhere else on our property.
While I was tending to compost piles mid-morning, I looked up and found three of the horses on the ground napping with Light standing watch.
I finished the afternoon with a shift clearing out downed branches that have accumulated in the area where we recently pulled out a few miles of grape vines. All the time I spent in there battling vines revealed just how many branches were on the ground.
We keep going back and forth over wanting to pick up dead wood that falls or leaving it to decay. We soon discovered it’s a fool’s errand to think we could stay ahead of the number of branches that are constantly dropping. The problem is that ignoring the situation for very long gives the place a neglected look and makes the clean-up job much more work when we finally decide to do it.
I made piles that must now be hauled away from the lane around the back-pasture fence. Anything dry can be run through the chipper, but the rest will be tossed onto the natural fence wall where we just piled all the willow branches we cut down on Monday.
If we don’t move all these branches today, I worry we will get distracted by other projects. Suddenly, the piles will be swallowed by grasses and brambles, and we won’t see them again for a year.
We are on the verge of a green growth explosion. If we listen closely, I think we could hear leaves unfolding all around us.
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Plastic Goats
Sure, we could get goats to control the patches of poison ivy on our land, but we don’t need large swaths eaten down to a moonscape. We want a more targeted approach and one that will cost us less than goats. We are taking a shot at using plastic and/or cardboard to cover specific patches where the problem plant is most entrenched.
The hope is to turn just a select strip into a miniature moonscape. Since this method kills everything beneath the plastic, it’s not different from spraying entire swaths with a solution of vinegar/salt/dish soap concoctions, so we may experiment with that in a different location. Cyndie donned protective gear and worked to cut out the woody stems of poison ivy with berries that are very easily seen right now. She left her good gloves behind with Asher to stand guard.
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The horses came over to see what was up and lingered in the vicinity for a short while, grazing the dead grass and any new sprouts beneath that might be showing up.
I decided to make myself useful and worked to cut out the grapevine stems from the other side of the brush where Cyndie was working.
Anywhere on our property that we don’t regularly walk through is pretty much guaranteed to have grape vines seeking to become the dominant species, bending branches and entire trees down into submission. Trying to keep them at bay could be a full-time job. I yanked as many strands as possible from the branches of the bushes that were being swallowed and made a pile of vines.
I guess we worked for longer than Asher could stay awake.
We’ll wait a growing season and then see if we can encourage a desirable ground cover to fill in areas that have been under our plastic version of leaf-munching goats. The weather patterns of the last two years produced the largest expansion of poison ivy since we’ve lived here. It would be nice if we could make some headway in the other direction this year.
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Relative Something 