Posts Tagged ‘rocks’
Snake Aversion
Why did it have to be snakes? All I wanted to do was pick a few rocks. One of the first that I lifted uncovered a young garter snake, causing a typical startle, despite my awareness of the likelihood of the possibility. The stone garden on the side of our house where we have a fire pit, happens to be the spot where snakes are known to reside.
I am not a fan.
The next rock I moved revealed the ghost of a snake, skin that had been outgrown, which conjures an image which has the potential of being even more shudder-worthy than the real thing. There is a snake larger than this lurking somewhere nearby. The power of the mind makes this more ominous than an actual snake.
All this anxiety-inducing effort I was engaged in was for a good purpose, of course. I worked yesterday to replace the plastic grates on the path out the back door of the barn, with stones.
Upon simply placing the first few stones, it became so obvious this was a better solution, both functionally and aesthetically, that I marvel over why we didn’t do it at first.
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Some improvements take a couple tries before we get them right.
In a way, I think this path will mean more to me now, after having first tried something that didn’t work out as well as I imagined it might. It will certainly be worth the repeated scares I endured while hunting for the perfect stepping-stones from the snake-infested quarry beyond our deck.
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Prototype Blend
Between the thundering copious downpours yesterday —which by this morning have dropped a 24-hour accumulated total of 5 inches of rain on us— I began production of our first prototype mix of custom horse-manure-fertilized growing soil. It was an extension of my working on the rock pile we received from a neighboring farm field last spring.
That dump-truck-load of field rocks included a significant amount of dirt that surrounded and buried a lot of the stone. Slowly, but surely, this summer I have been prying out rocks and moving them down near our Rowcliffe Labyrinth Garden. As I am getting closer to the bottom of that pile, it is becoming more dirt than rocks. I decided to shovel that rich field-dirt into bags for future distribution, and in so doing realized the opportunity to mix in some composted manure to create our first dose of Wintervale old souls super soil.
It’s kind of like harvesting our first crop! There is a different reward to mixing the composted manure with dirt, as opposed to just using it to fill low spots around our property.
This will be a long-term process, as I won’t really know how successful my concoction is until a season of growing passes and I can learn the results from growers who receive our initial distribution.
Not that I have any real doubts about the potential. I have seen how robust the volunteer growth was that sprouted out of this rock pile all summer, and I have ample evidence of the accelerated growth around all the places I have used composted manure for fill.
Together, I expect they will produce even greater results.
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Got Rocks?
Our neighbors are slowly getting familiar with our peculiarities, and don’t seem all that fazed by our interest in collecting rocks. It is an easy request for them to fill, because farmers are always trying to get rid of rocks. I got a call yesterday afternoon from the man who lives just south of us, and he said the guys who rent his field have a truckload of rocks for us. They just needed to know where we wanted them.
The options on where they could deliver on our property are pretty limited by the wetness, so he had to stay on the driveway. I had him dump them on the edge of the new loop that runs around the hay shed.
There were two skid loader tractors maneuvering in the fields next door all morning, collecting rocks. One had a mesh drum that rotated, which could dig out large rocks that were still half-buried. When it got the rock up out of the ground, it would spin to drop the dirt and hold the rock.
The man who delivered the rocks said some of these have been underground for a long time. He had broken up the hard ground last fall and these rocks pushed up as a result. It will take a couple of good rainstorms (just what we need [end sarcasm]) to wash them off and allow us to see what we’ve really got here.
There is a good chance a lot of them will end up being used under the opening where that culvert is visible, in the background of this image. The others will need to be given a ride in the bucket of our tractor, back toward the area of the labyrinth.
It is a great feeling to value material that other folks are constantly trying to get rid of.
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Final Preparations
I took advantage of being home on Monday and whittled away at the list of things we want done before the horses arrive. Cyndie had to work, so I was left to choosing tasks that I could accomplish alone. One of the big ones for me was to finish preparing the area we have set aside for manure management (just in case the 4 horses happen to produce any manure).
We selected a site last fall, and did some initial clearing. At the time, it seemed like the perfect location, if only we could remove some stumps. We cut into the bigger of two that were right in front, to see if it might come out with minor effort. It didn’t. Elysa’s friend, Anne, volunteered to work on it, because cutting out a stump appealed to her. She made great progress at the time, cutting through all the roots around the perimeter, but the stump held fast.
Early in spring, when Cyndie initially began cleaning out the stalls in the barn, the old sawdust and wood chips got dumped behind and beside the stumps. We ended up ignoring the area for most of the summer, and it grew tall with weeds and some grass. Yesterday, I brought out the chainsaw and made all the stumps disappear, both front and rear (sorry, Anne). Now we are set to dump manure from the front side, and remove it from the back side.
It is another one of our visions realized.
It will be easy to access the manure composting area off the new road that comes around the back side of the barn. Turning around from the view of the [future] manure pile, I took a picture of what the back side of the barn looks like.
We’ve got some spare gates remaining, which will likely get used in a next phase of fencing, whenever that occurs. Speaking of gates, my next project was getting chains installed to latch all the gates in the paddocks. That was definitely a priority to be done before the horses arrive.
When Cyndie got home, she helped to roll some big rocks into the bucket of the diesel tractor. The semi driver scouting our layout said he could back down toward the barn if the rocks weren’t there. We’d been meaning to move them ever since they were dropped on that spot at the start of our re-landscaping project, so we promised him they would be gone.
Now the rocks are back by the labyrinth.
In the evening, before we turned out the lights and closed up the barn, we turned on the electric fence to confirm everything was in working order, and then proclaimed the place ready for horses.
Today, I will mount some hardware to create tie-points where Cyndie wants them, to secure horses during saddling or other tasks. I will pick up some grain from the feed store. I will bring our collection of pallets down to the hay shed, to place under the bales of hay.
We are one day away from the planned arrival.
Life Saved
I don’t know why, but the last couple of days have been really hard on some of the birds Cyndie feeds. We have been hearing multiple impacts on our doors and windows. Three have died instantly. One looked to be particularly shocked, but still alive. We checked on it, off and on, for a couple of hours. Finally, Cyndie could stand it no longer, and decided to bring him in out of the cold.
The cats seemed happy with that idea. I think they were interested, but didn’t seem overly fixated. Cyndie parked the box in the second bedroom, and shut the door. She had consulted online instructions for rescuing a stunned bird, and planned to see if it was ready to go in the morning.
At first light, she set the box outside and opened the lid. Success! The bird was well enough to fly away. That was pretty rewarding.
I decided to try to get some work done outside, before the predicted rain set in. I chose to work on moving rocks beside the barn. It is still really wet out there. The ground is completely saturated. When I pull up a rock, water runs in to fill the hole left behind.
We are going to try to move only one tree, and then dig out an opening, and move some dirt around the back to provide a path for the tractor. It is very obvious that we will need to make provisions for drainage, on both sides of the path.
This snowy spring is providing us with a very good demonstration of how and where drainage occurs here. Notice how much of the snow had melted by yesterday afternoon?
I ended up moving the pile of landscape rock up the hill to the area where the black container is in the image, to get it completely out of the way. I didn’t want to put it too far away, though, because we are going to need to put it back on the slope where we cut into the hill.
Halfway through that task, it started sprinkling. I ended up racing the weather. As I continued to get closer to finishing, the rain kept growing more intense. I didn’t want to quit, so I worked through it. I was pretty soggy by the time I was done.
If you look closely at the image, beside the eagle statue by the door, you can see the corner of the ice/snow pile that extends along the back side of the barn. We still can’t get the rocks loose in that spot, because they remain frozen in place.
Having a driving path behind the barn is going to be tricky, because of how the snow slides off the roof. It is worse now than it will be in the future, because that pile is from the full winters’ worth of snow that accumulated. 
Next year, I plan to plow that as it falls, so it won’t build up to the same degree.
By the end of the day, the rain had turned to snow, and we began with the next heavy accumulation, just as predicted.
Snow, again?! Yes.
Happy April, 2013, the year of perpetual winter storms.
Relative Something 