Posts Tagged ‘wasp sting’
Extremely Dry
It feels like our spell of extremely dry conditions has caused some plants to end their growing phase a little early in the season. A few of the sumac leaves are losing their green color and turning red already.
The trails in the woods are opening back up as leaves and stems are starting to wither. The trees that drop their leaves early have started to cover the ground with shriveled and twisted brown leaves.
Even though the hay field was hardly lush with growing grass, it was greatly in need of being mowed to knock down Queen Anne’s Lace and a variety of other bothersome weeds and tree sprouts threatening to take over. Cyndie looked up suggestions for improving our field and learned that the most effective thing we can do, if we are intent on avoiding chemical spraying, is to mow it regularly.
I dread mowing the 5-acre hay field with our relatively small brush cutter because it takes so dang long. I spent over 4 hours making pass after pass on it Friday. It was also frustrating to see how many times the tall weeds simply lay flat under the tires as they rolled by, so that the rotating blade passed right over them without cutting.
The horses didn’t seem to care.
From a distance, the field looks pretty nice. It could probably fool a passerby into thinking I used a finishing mower instead of the brush cutter with a really dull blade.
While I was stuck on the tractor seat for hours on end, I watched Cyndie using the string trimmer to cut beneath the fence line. Boy, does she work fast. It made my slog back and forth in tight little lines feel like it was taking even longer.
I failed to notice her getting stung in the ankle multiple times by a wasp. When I got back to the house, she had her foot propped up and was icing it.
Asher added a little of his own excitement as we were headed down to feed the horses later in the afternoon. I noticed him intently focused on a spot under a pine tree, just staring. When I looked back a second time and found him still frozen in the same position, I had a good sense of what was coming next.
Sure enough, he reared up and pounced, driving his snout into the dusty, dry soil with two quick paw-swipes and came up with a mole. What always follows is a protracted pacing around the property for the perfect place to bury his catch. He looked so lost that I commanded him to come bury it behind the barn, where we could keep an eye on him. He deemed that an acceptable option.
A few minutes later, he was back in the barn, regally reclining like the great and successful hunter that he is.
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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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Relative Something 