Posts Tagged ‘trees’
Decidedly Different
From balmy Sunday to blustery Monday we experienced an almost 40° (F) temperature swing, factoring in the “windchill” reading that resulted from the strong northwest gusting wind. Nothing says October like a cold, cloudy, windy day.
I took Delilah out for a short trek around the property when I got home from work, during which we fed the horses and then wandered a few trails in the woods to check for downed branches.
At one point, even though I didn’t feel as though I was seeing anything, I sensed there was motion occurring through the trees, and I kept my eyes glued in that direction in hopes of picking up some confirmation.
Was it a bird? Likely possibilities included grouse, pheasant, or even wild turkey. Something led me to believe it was big. Something else gave me the impression it was right in front of my eyes, but I was not seeing it. Honestly, what came to mind was the movie effect of “Predator” in camouflage mode.
All these mental gymnastics happened in a fraction of a second. Putting it all together, I discerned the white I thought I had seen was, in fact, the tail of a deer.
We had just come down that hill a short time before, and ended up circling back on our path in a way that may have surprised the keen senses of the shy animal. I was energized to find it had stopped its movement at a place that gave me a clear view of the head and face, as the deer looked directly back at me from an incredibly short distance away.
It was probably the closest I have been to a live, wild deer in years. I glanced down at Delilah, who was nose-to-the-ground busy, following the myriad smells that surely exist on our well-used trails, but she showed no evidence of detecting how close we were to something that would no-doubt thrill her to the extreme to pursue.
When I looked back for the deer, I realized how difficult it was to detect it through the trees while it stood motionless. I started to walk again, coming around the corner to climb the hill where Cyndie and I had just been working on the fence, hoping to get a better perspective on where the deer was standing. I was also scanning in hopes of finding others, under the assumption deer are usually in a herd.
What I discovered was that my movement was enough to drive the deer off and I had been unable to detect its departure. Delilah didn’t show any sign of sensing the scent of immediately fresh traffic across our trail. I wondered if the deer had been surprised by the recent appearance of the fence we just put up over the weekend.
There were no other deer in sight as we climbed the hill toward the house, and toward the respite from the wind it would provide. Had I not picked up the fleeting images of that whiteness and the almost imperceptible motion of the body through the trees, I would have missed it altogether.
Allows me to imagine how often I have probably done just that on these trails in the last few years, and been within similarly close proximity to wildlife, while being entirely unaware.
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Cyndie’s View
Yesterday was described by my favorite weather blog as, “July-tober,” for the summer-like temperatures expected. It was a pretty good description, because temperatures made it into the 80s and colors are reaching peak. It was a perfect merging of summer and fall.
During the day, I took on the very July-like activity of mowing the lawn, and Cyndie set off on the very October-like activity of enjoying the fall colors on a walk with her camera. She generously offered her photos to me for the choosing.
Here is the batch I selected from the almost 200 images she captured during the course of the day…
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Future Fence
Long ago —two years, in fact— I started a project to put up fencing just inside the old rusty barbed wire fence that defines our property border along the perimeter trail through the woods. The bulk of my effort at that time was getting posts in place. I did try hanging some plastic snow fence on a short section of posts as a temporary measure, but the ultimate goal was to re-purpose rolls of woven wire fence which were pulled out during early renovations to create our paddocks and pastures.
In the ensuing two years, that snow fence was revealed to be less than adequate. It failed under the abuse of weather and animals, as it stretched and sagged under the forces of wind and snow, and was chewed through by critters that refused to alter their favored route of travel.
Finally, yesterday, Cyndie and I took a shot at seeing how difficult it would be to move, unroll, lift into position, and then attach the old metal fence to the posts. It went better than I feared it might and served to provide a more robust support for the snow fence that we put back up to make the barrier more visible for our horses.
Beyond the obvious financial incentive to put this fence up ourselves, what drives us even more is the fact we are willing to put this up without clearing out every growing thing within 10 feet of either side.
There is no questioning the reasons fencing professionals don’t want trees near their work. We are willing to sacrifice the ultimate quality of our finished fence to preserve as many precious trees as possible.
Of course, we only have this one property to maintain. The professionals are responsible for an always growing number of fence lines. I totally understand their motivation.
We have visions of continuing this re-purposed fence along key sections of our property line where the trails come close to the old barbed wire. These areas also happen to have enough trees that we would like to keep, that the project will not be a quick one. It’s likely that it will remain a “future” fence for a long time, but at least we have the first section in place to give us hope that our vision is possible.
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Turning Trees
Despite the mid-summer-like temperatures over the weekend, the trees are starting to reveal the onset of fall. They aren’t in concert with each other by any means, nor even with themselves, as you can see by this picture.
I was feeling a bit of disappointment last Thursday when I looked at the edge of our woods from a distance and got the impression that the leaves of many of the trees were beginning to just fade to brown and drop off.
There was evidence supporting that on the trails, which are becoming increasingly paved with dried brown leaves. Where is the color?
It is not unusual that our trees change colors at different times, but I am always a bit surprised by the significant difference in timing of the variety of maple trees we have. I suppose it wouldn’t be confusing to me if I would simply figure out the identity of them all. That would likely allow me to discover the typical behavior of each to the changing seasons.
On one corner of the hay shed there is the tree with several limbs already a deep red, while the one beside it on the other corner of the shed, remains all green.
The green one made more sense yesterday, when the mid-day heat felt like it might still be June. I won’t even get into details about how much the grass continues to grow.
I have no complaints about the incredible comfort this weather affords. When we stepped out last evening to watch the spectacle of the full super-moon becoming eclipsed by earth’s shadow, the air was marvelous.
The universe put on quite a show.
We walked down to the gazebo in the back pasture to sit in chairs there and enjoy the view. I was hoping the horses might wander over and share the moment with us, but they opted to stay off in the distance.
On top of all the excitement of the beautiful night and shadowed moon, I spotted two shooting stars. The only thing that could possibly have made it any more impressive would have been a display of Northern Lights (aurora borealis) showing up.
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Many Projects
It was getting to be about lunch time yesterday when Cyndie disappeared to get some refreshments. I continued to work in the hot sunshine of the paddock, once again choosing to use hand tools and a wheelbarrow to do a job that deserved the tractor. I get rewarded for that because I enjoy the manual process and I get better results than when working a machine.
Not that I don’t sometimes give in and let our machines do some of the work. After lunch, I cranked up the Grizzly ATV and filled the trailer with assorted tools for some trail maintenance in the woods. I used the chainsaw to cut up a fallen tree on one of our trails, and I revved up the power trimmer to clear the rest of that trail.
Cyndie returned with a picnic lunch which we ate beneath the shade of the gazebo, overlooking the newly sanded round pen, to christen the new viewing station. It will work well for the training Cyndie plans to do there. It is rewarding to finally have arrived at the physical reality of something we have been talking about and envisioning for years.
It was Cyndie’s brilliant lunch-time suggestion that moved our attention to the trail in the woods, in order to get a break from the heavy sweating effort we had been putting in to spread the second pile of lime screenings in the bright sunlight.
I finally broke open the plastic cover on a new pole saw and branch trimmer that I bought for some perceived frantic need a month or two ago. The only use I had put it to up until this day was as a tool to remove a fast-growing wasps nest. It worked well for that, too.
With the new branch trimmer I was able to make that trail into a thing of beauty. I have learned that a simple trick to give the trail a superb visual appearance is to trim the branches that lean across the trail, as high up as I can reach. When I finished, it looked like a hallway in a cathedral.
Next, I was back on the power trimmer and cleaning along the fence line. It became apparent to me that we have more than enough forage for our 4 horses to graze. They aren’t keeping up on their portion of the mowing. I am going to need to cut parts of the pasture again because they aren’t eating enough of it.
After I emptied a second tank of fuel on the trimmer, I switched projects again, and 
moved back to the pile of lime screenings. It was in the shade at that point, and I wanted to get that pile out of the way for the horses. They don’t actually seem to mind it during the day, and someone has been putting hoof prints all over it when we aren’t around, so it seems to me they see it as some kind of jungle gym.
It’s day-2 of the weekend, and we will pick up where we left off last night. More spreading lime screenings, and more fence line trimming. Who knows, maybe even another picnic lunch under the shade canopy.
Happy August, everyone! One day late.
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First Test
Despite my desire to get the already too long grass mowed yesterday, due to an all-afternoon soaking precipitation on Thursday that delayed getting started early, I ended the day without ever having turned the key on the lawn tractor. As so often happens, activities unfolded with total disregard for my feeble plans.
Knowing we had an appointment scheduled for George to trim the horse’s hooves at noon, I chose to dip into a project down at the barn, finally assembling the shade gazebo that we purchased over a year ago. I threaded nuts on bolts for hours on end throughout the intense afternoon heat.
Cyndie provided valuable support, including going to the trouble of making a temporary fence to enclose the horses on some of the too-long grass outside the paddock, so they could do some “mowing” for me.
At the end of the day, we decided to save the work of stretching the canvas over the top for this morning when we would have fresh energy. That turned out to be a really smart decision, especially since I have yet to drive the anchors into the ground.
In the middle of the night, we were startled awake by an incredibly intense storm. We both fully expected to find the spindly frame tossed into a tangled mess, pressed up against the round pen rails nearby. Lightning flashed at a shocking rate, wind stressed our house, and the power went off for a couple of hours.
The generator kicked in perfectly, but the sound of it tended to fuel the dramatic feeling of alarm over the significance of the storm raging outside. Alarms chirped occasionally within the house, at the sudden absence or intermittent return of AC power during the outage. There are only a few essential circuits that the generator maintains, so much of the rest of our electronic devices remain at the mercy of the power grid.
Getting back to sleep was a challenge. I always think about how the horses are faring when the level of intensity of thunderstorms is so extreme. By the time we find them in the aftermath, they always seem so unperturbed.
This morning they were happy as could be. I wondered aloud if Legacy knew that today was his birthday. The elder statesman of our herd turned 19 today.
To our joint surprise, as we came around the woods and the new gazebo frame came into view, it looked exactly like the way we left it last night. It survived its first test with an excellent result.
Now we need to walk the trails and see if all our trees held up nearly as well.
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High Balance
It has been a while since I cleared out the pine trees that died in the last year, leaving 6 or 7 feet of trunk standing from one of them, in hopes of creating a balancing rock sculpture on top of it.
Yesterday, I got my chance.
I hadn’t set out to accomplish that when I started the day, but activity has a way of evolving here, if you let yourself go with the flow.
I was trimming the growth beneath our fence line along the perimeter of the hay-field, and decided it would be worth getting the tractor to cut some of the areas of tall grass left after George cut the field for hay.
While out there mowing, I took advantage of the opportunity to move out some large rocks that had been left in a corner of the field last fall by the crew we hired to fence in the back pasture. I had wanted to get that done before the field was mowed, but this was the next best time to do it, with all the grass now short.
The first set of rocks I picked up were smaller than the one in this picture, so on a whim I decided to drive up and see if I could maneuver the tractor in place and roll one onto the waiting tree trunk.
Despite a few precarious moments, including one where the small rock tipped over in a breeze just as Cyndie had bent over pulling some weeds so I had to startle her with a warning, the process worked as I had envisioned.
I put the small rock back up, in a more secure position, and we now have the tallest installation of curiously placed rocks that I have ever done.
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Can You?
If you look closely, can you see how much growth has occurred on the spindly little fingerling of the volunteer oak tree to the right of my balancing stone since that first picture on the left was taken back in May? I’d love it if we could get that same amount of new growth every year. We’d have shade on that side of the house in a couple of years.
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Four Inches
I expected to see a lot of water in the rain gauge after yesterday morning’s early deluge, but four inches was a surprise. I knew right then that walking the property with Delilah was going to be a messy adventure. After the rain stopped, we received a couple of dramatic gusts of wind that audibly torqued the house and visibly stressed the trees. I prepared myself for the possibility of damage to buildings or trees.
Happily, the wood shed withstood the gusts, due in large part to the added anchors that we installed when Mike Wilkus and I rebuilt it. I do need to get out there and re-stack one row of logs that has fallen over, but that collapsed long before yesterday’s weather.
We found only small debris of branches and leaves on the ground for as far as we ventured. It was just too wet to take the main perimeter trail through the woods, so that remains un-inspected.
The horses seemed entirely nonplussed by the excitement of the downpour and wind by the time we happened upon them. It seems to me they are getting used to the flash-flood situation that happens in their paddock every time we get heavy downpours.
One good thing about the wet ground was that it made it easier to bury the new irrigation line down the back yard hill toward the labyrinth. We opted to go low-tech and just slice a little opening with a shovel and drop the tubing under the sod. If I had tried using the tractor with the ground so saturated, I would have made one heck of a muddy mess in the yard.
It feels a bit odd to be working to get water to the labyrinth at a time when it least needs it, but it will feel great when things eventually dry up and we grow desperate to provide the optimum amount of hydration to all the growing things down there.
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Unidentified Object
This triangular slab of concrete is in our woods, far from anyplace that would seem sensible to have a slab of concrete. We have no idea where it came from, what it once was or how it ended up in this spot.
Any ideas what it might have been?
Ever since we discovered this misplaced piece of sidewalk, I have been trying to think of somewhere we might make use of it, and how in the world we would move it. It is unlikely that we would be able to get it out of these woods without killing a tree or two, but there are just some small saplings between it and open space.
Of course, it’s been two years since we stumbled upon it and nothing has happened yet, so those trees could become more of an issue if we can’t come up with a plan pretty soon.
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Relative Something 