Posts Tagged ‘Wintervale Ranch’
Sensing Familiar
It is only August, but already, there are enough hints of the season ahead that I am noticing flashes of recognition for our experiences of one year ago, when we came to this place we are now calling, Wintervale. I am sensing that we have accomplished that first year of newness, and now will begin drawing on memories of the year before, as we navigate each new adventure that pops up for us here.
There are still daily incremental changes underway. Yesterday, when I got home from work, I resumed the project of putting up boards lining the stables in the barn. While the task seemed to breeze along easily for me on Sunday, last night I struggled with every step. If something could fall, it did. If I could drop a board or tool, I did. I finished the second stall, but without much in the way of joy for the accomplishment.
I had been diligent about not leaving behind a stray screw on the floor of the stalls that might poke the feet of the future tenants. As I stepped up on the ladder to mount the final board, the entire box of screws flipped off the ledge and dumped in a heap below. Oh, joy.
Time to clean up and stop fighting the trend.
The upgrade of two stalls is complete. That leaves two to go. We are making progress.
Grand Day
It was a beautiful summer day yesterday for us to showcase our place for friends. Delilah got loads of attention, and was a charm the whole day. I walked our trails several times, guiding tours. I noshed and nibbled all afternoon, to my heart’s delight. Unfortunately, I didn’t pull the camera out more than once or twice, because I was so occupied with having a wonderful time that I kept forgetting to capture all the fun in pictures. Here’s a collage that samples some of the atmosphere of our grand day.
Having Company
Our many friends, coworkers, and acquaintances have been listening to us gush about our new place throughout the 10-months that we’ve been here, and only a portion of them have been able to make the trip out for a visit. For most of those who did, it was back in snowy December when we hosted an initial open house.
Cyndie and I have long hoped to host another event to welcome visitors, initially targeting June, envisioning live music in the barn, and combining celebrations of multiple family birthdays which fall during the month. That event didn’t happen. Another month slipped by, and we weren’t able to pull anything off. By August, I started to worry that, unless we just picked a day and did it, we would completely miss the summer opportunity to invite people to come enjoy a first-hand experience of this place.
A couple of weeks ago I convinced Cyndie to let me choose today’s date for a subdued “open house” event that wouldn’t require a lot of preparation from us. Then I sent out a few email invitations, mostly to folks who haven’t been here yet,
Initially, many of the responses reported conflicts, which didn’t surprise me at all. Now that the date is upon us, we are thrilled to find that more people than we expected have responded that they are intending to come. Of course, Cyndie and I can’t help but want to try to tidy things up a bit before visitors arrive, so that feeling of a “subdued” event is fading fast. I am getting the feeling that it could be a real wing-ding of a day.
There are just two things missing from the vision Cyndie had in mind for the June version of our party: a live band playing tunes, and horses in the paddocks, but I don’t think that will be a problem.
As a matter of fact, it presents an opportunity to invite them back again at another time, when things are in full swing around here.
Critter Controllers
Back in October of last year, when we arrived as new owners of this property and home, we immediately discovered that mice and moles appeared to be all too comfortable here. The mice inspired our energies toward getting a couple of cats as house mates. Mozyr was to be our big mouser, based on his incredibly intelligent and athletic showing-off performance during our visit to the feline rescue shelter.
Pequenita is just a wee little thing, but proved to be quite the go-getter and primary instigator for affection and initiator of conflict.
Neither one of them has left a gift carcass for us, during the time since we brought them home, but we have not seen any evidence of a mouse indoors during that period, either.
They are doing something right for us.
Last fall, the grounds here had an unnerving amount of dirt mounds and trail scars to indicate we had quite an infestation of moles and/or gophers. There are oodles of suggested ways to trap them, poison them, or chase them off. One brilliant method involves eliminating the insects and grub worms under the lawn that the varmints find so appealing. I’m just not up for all of that.
We got a dog.
Up to this point of the summer, we haven’t been seeing any new mounds of dirt, but something is slowly, but surely, tunneling under the grass, leaving a maze of scars in the lawn. I have no idea if Delilah will turn out to be the solution for driving off the moles, but last night, she displayed a fair amount of interest in chasing a scent she picked up when I directed her attention to one of the soft spots trailing across the turf.
Evening Excitement
There was a little excitement in the Wintervale house last night, after Cyndie and I got back from working on the labyrinth garden. Actually, Cyndie was still down watering the plants when Delilah and I came back to the house. I was getting ready to shower and spotted a bat flying circles around our spiral staircase. I turned on some lights hoping I could keep an eye on him, and stepped into the garage to grab a broom.
The cats were visibly interested, but basically useless as predators. I thought it was going to be up to me, except the bat had landed and was now out of sight. Since Delilah appeared to be totally focused on her food and water, I decided to get the shower out of the way. When I came out, I heard Delilah’s bark and figured the bat was airborne again. Cyndie had returned and figured out there was a bat, so I pointed out the broom, and reported sighting the critter perched on a beam.
Cyndie took over from there, drawing on her years of experience evicting bats from the cabins over the years at the lake place up in Hayward. She grabbed a small step-ladder, and conked him to the floor. By this time, Pequenita was showing interest in finishing him off, but Cyndie would have none of that, and bagged the remains for disposal.
Order was restored. The labyrinth continues to gain definition, and we again filled every last moment of the day. Before the sun got too low, I walked the trail we worked to clear on Monday, hoping to get some better pictures with my camera, instead of my cell phone. Here are a few…
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Happy Reports
For those of you following my story as far back as June, when I may have mentioned missing my annual June bike trip to remain at work covering for a person out on a surprise medical leave for a potentially fatal affliction… I have news of a good outcome. It has been a long wait since the June diagnosis all the way to an August surgery. The surgical procedure went better than anticipated and I learned yesterday that recovery has progressed in leaps and bounds in the last few days.
What a joyous relief!
While filling in at work, I’ve returned to a full 5-day work week, and yesterday it was a good thing I was there on a Monday. My attention was needed in a lot of directions, most of them customer related. Luckily, business volume is holding steady, although on the brink of not as much as we are comfortable with, and I am processing a fair number of recent new orders.
Then the happiness continued at home!
In the mail, I found we received our first rebate check for the installation of our new geothermal furnace. Woo hoo!
Cyndie and I spent some focused time with Delilah, and decided she seemed a little under the weather. She has been on antibiotics for over a week, treating her Lyme disease. It seems like there is a battle going on in her. We hope the antibiotics are winning.
She recovered enough energy to come down to the woods with us to help clear trail. We let her run loose while we worked and then gave her repetitions at the exercise of coming when called. She performed well every time, earning enough treats that I think she is getting the picture.
I got her to grab a few sticks and move them away, and while I was digging out rocks, she gladly helped do some digging. Unfortunately, she has a penchant for coming back and digging up the holes I had just filled. She returned from one of her forays into the woods, with a particularly precious prize: an animal bone.
Our success with her, and our work down on the trail, brought us much happiness at the end of an already happy day.
I couldn’t resist stacking a few of the stones that we dug out of the middle of the path. Distributed in random groups on the side of the trail, they add a sense of spirit to the wonderfully magical route that we have carved through that part of our woods.
And that made us very happy, too.
Lacy Image
Cyndie captured this great photo of Queen Anne’s lace that grows on our property. Like all plants, some people consider it a weed, while others find it beneficial. Unfortunately, it is considered a pest in pastures, and it is sprouting all over part of the field we want to cut for hay and graze our horses.
Dramatic Tension
The stories of our adventures creating Wintervale would get boring if there wasn’t a little drama involved. Last week we experienced the kind of drama that I could do without.
After we received the latest invoice for the ongoing projects, the dose of reality reverberated with a negative ripple effect. “What-ifs” started to run free for both Cyndie and me, and we are way too inclined toward feeding off of each others’ dark moods. It was as if each thing we were hoping to accomplish was crashing down in a succession of lost momentum. I think there was a moment for each of us where our thoughts were headed toward giving up on the whole long-term wild bunch of ideas we have about this place.
At first, I was surprised by the level of emotion that Cyndie was trying to manage, but eventually I came to understand the reason for her extreme reaction. There is an event in the Twin Cities in two weeks, associated with the program where she just completed her apprenticeship. She wanted to already have horses here and our operation functional enough to allow her to market her training sessions to the gathering of people who will be the perfect target audience for what she plans to offer.
When we first learned our offer on this place had been accepted, I suggested we live here for a year, and work on the infrastructure before actually bringing horses into our daily lives. Cyndie had a different timeline in mind, and we were trying to accomplish her more aggressive goal, but the weather has been a primary hindrance for that.
Only recently did we get registered with the state as a business, and we have yet to complete a lot of the administrative steps that we have in mind. It’s all work we can do (unlike some of the farm tasks that neither of us are interested in tackling, like managing a sprayer and hazardous chemicals to apply weed killer to the hay-field like everyone is informing us we need to do), but it doesn’t lend itself to being done all at once.
With that target date that Cyndie was eyeing, we were finding ourselves forced to try to do just that: all at once. And, to do so while trying to train our new puppy dog. See why I was feeling ready to throw in the towel?
I still am not sure what will happen. We obviously won’t be as ready as she wants, but as she slowly recovers from the feelings of giving up entirely, I think she is formulating a way to be just enough partially ready that she can still get her name out there, and collect names of others who have interest in what she plans to offer.
One of the things looming on the list of “needs-to-be-done” is smoothing out some of the rough terrain and getting a pasture mix of grass seed planted to improve our hay and grazing. Just when we were thinking we’d never get it all done, an angel appears to help. Our next door neighbor made a surprise visit yesterday. While we were talking, he suggested he could smooth out that area for us if we wanted.
It wouldn’t have felt right to ask, but there he was, volunteering for the very thing we would love to have him do. I found that to be a pretty dramatic moment. And that’s the kind of drama that I more than welcome.
Slow Process
Last year, late in the fall, we kicked off our big fencing project, enlisting the services of a fencing company to remove a portion of old fences, including some very old barbed wire that was entangled in years of tree and brush growth. When that work was done, the ground in those areas was a mess of deep divots with tangles of root remnants protruding every which way.
Two giant piles of root bundles and brush were created from the tree debris that was removed. Slowly and methodically, we worked to burn those piles through the winter and spring. Meanwhile, the fencing crew moved on to build new fences, creating our two paddock areas attached to the barn.
The incredibly wet spring disturbed most of our progress and planning, and the areas of dirt and divots that were too muddy to go near, fell to neglect. We ended up leaving them for nature to address. They eventually became less conspicuous beneath a cover of grass and weeds that grew through the summer.
A couple of weeks ago, when the excavator was here to dig the trench for our new water line to the paddocks, they dug two huge holes and buried what remained of the piles of root bundles that never did burn.
Last fall, a large pile of cut logs from those trees was left at the bottom of our back hill for me to split and stack for firewood. Yesterday, I finally got the last of that pile moved up to the top, near the wood shed.
The uneven terrain remains to be dealt with, but 9-months after we started that first phase of our initial fencing project, we are just now feeling close to having completed the entirety of that goal.
Of course, I still have all that wood to split and stack, but that task will get lost in a never-ending exercise of firewood production here. There are a couple of perfectly burnable dead trees waiting to be felled, and a few new ones that came down in the spring snow-pocalypse, that are all awaiting being cut into logs.
More Fence
Yesterday, our fence crew pounded the last posts for the paddocks, and put up a lot of boards. After boards, they will mount one line of wire along the top, which will be able to be electrified. This will discourage horses from chewing on the wood of the fence. Next, they will attach gates, and then complete the installation of the automatic waterer, and we will be out of excuses for not having horses here.
I guess it is time to take care of all the little details we have neglected to worry about until after the fact.
This afternoon, Cyndie is expecting a visit from a person with the local extension service who will review our situation and offer advice on best practices and available resources to support our efforts here. It’s another step in our effort to learn more about what we have gotten ourselves into, even as we forge ahead with plans to establish the infrastructure from which we will operate.
We have stumbled here and there, seeming to get ahead of ourselves sometimes, while allowing a few important details to fade into the background, but the progress we make is part of the way Cyndie works. It gets us moving toward our goal, and forces us to learn on the fly. It creates a bit of mental stress for me, but I can accept it, because if it were up to me, I think we’d be stuck before we even started.
I’d be hung up trying to answer the practically unanswerable questions, trying so hard to avoid a misstep that I’d end up not taking any at all.
Here’s to Cyndie’s brilliant capacity to bring our dreams to life, and our amazing progress thus far!
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