There is something going DOWN in the poplar tree near my porch.
I don't know everyone involved, but one of them is a wren, I saw his distinctive tail.
He is shrieking a weird, rattling call at the other participant.
Who is yelling back equally loud, but a different language.
How can creatures that SMALL make THAT MUCH noise? It sounds like they have mikes.
The dispute has moved further out into the yard. Sound and fury.
Someone in the poplar is saying "twit!" very anxiously. and continually.
Come oooooon, rain . . .
Come oooooon, rain . . .
So much water drains off the mountain in spring. There are springs, seeps, underground creeks (you can hear it bubbling under there!) and wetlands both temporary and permanent. I really want to get some shrub-type willows started here to support the edge of the creek. I put out a few last spring, and I'm curious if they survived the winter. Maybe today I can go cut a bunch of little branches from the Streamco and pussy willows and try to root them.
More-or-less all of this area:
is permanent wetland; it has its share of really interesting plant species but also a depressing amount of invasive thorn bushes. I would LIKE it to be full of elderberry, buttonbush, spicebush, hazelnut, swamp alder, and willow. The little white dot and the larger gray dot in the field are Nutmeg and Hero.
The weekend rains a-l-m-o-s-t flooded the creek, but not quite. It ran muddy for a day, then cleared up. By Monday it was all ready to sparkle joyously in the sun. I was standing in it to get this photo - bless my wellington boots.
It makes the loveliest noise at this stage. I checked on the silver maple I planted last spring; it has lively-looking terminal buds and seems to be all ready to go for growing season 2024.
Lady living deliciously, please appreciate that fluffy tummy.
I was looking for something else on the library shelves and came across this little farm journal that my grandmother must have written.
She was only around 40 in the photo; she had the 'early gray' gene that most of my family have. I don't remember her using latin names of things when she talked to me, but she apparently knew quite a few of them. Pretty fascinating. Garden, holiday, and mushroom-foraging notes from 1964 up into the 80s. I used to watch her at her loom, utterly intent on the shuttle sliding back and forth.
As far as I know, everybody hunts mushrooms with re-used breadbags!
I haven't made a LOT of progress cutting brush in the far field - but it's non-zero.
There's a lot of open space there that wasn't there before! Nutmeg continues to relish browsing on the bushes I cut down, nibbling twigs and rosehips. If I turn 180°, you can see that the mess continues - seemingly forever! {sob}
("More for ME," says Nutmeg) There is a really nice wild crabapple tree here, and it should be absolutely covered in blossoms in the spring. I will try to remember to get photos.
The snow started around 9 am, and it has been pelting down ever since, sometimes so fine it looked like falling sand. Here is the face of a girl who is NOT done playing and does NOT want to come back inside:
She did get to stay out as long as she wanted, which wasn't really all that much longer.
Marilla hopped up on the chair, making a beeline for the BEST nap spot behind the Christmas tree. (That is a 1940s-era radio cabinet of my grandfather's that was later repurposed into a cabinet for craft supplies.)
Only to find that Baxter had already nabbed it.
She would like to speak to the manager.
The chickens made an error in judgement and decided to ride out the storm between the shrubs and the foundation of the house. I had to go out just a little bit ago and round them up. They were escorted/carried/shooed back to their coop, protesting LOUDLY, and I gave them corn. Hero has his blanket on, a rare occurrence, and he and Nutmeg will sleep inside the barn tonight.
A good day to be home and safe.
I'll try not to spam y'all with this field-clearing project. BUT I did make a lot of progress yesterday and today.
Starting from The Above Mess ^, I've gotten to here:
I can now walk a straight line across this at least 50 feet (15ish meters). Nutmeg has participated fully the whole way, sometimes looming over my shoulder and trying to shove me out of her way when I'm leaning over cutting the stems. Thanks. Nutmeg.
The very large bush that remains there is impractically big for me to cut with a hand saw, so it will have to wait until the next time I have the chainsaw out. Unfortunately, the trees there are dead or dying. My husband might choose to cut them before they get any worse, so they don't come down in a windstorm. Now I can either continue in a straight line, or turn uphill
into this wretched mess. Yay, me!
(Also, when I started the frost was still lingering in the shadows, and by the time I finished I was drenched in sweat and had to change clothes completely and shower. Yuk! November shouldn't feel like this.
The frost was picking up the blue of the sky, and my camera actually managed to capture that. Onward to the mending pile, which has gotten out of hand.
This morning was 'small chainsaw' morning. I am not a fan of using the chainsaw; I would do better if I used it more often but - que sera. There are quite a lot of trees down on our trails that Hero *can* step over, but it's a pain and makes the ride less fun. There are also a few smaller tree leaning into the trails that we have to duck, and leaning or dead trees that are just one windstorm away from coming down.
I tried to take care of as much of that as I could, although I ran into one leaning locust that kept shaking as I was cutting it, and I chickened out. A leaning tree can "jump" once the saw goes through it, if there are stresses on it that you can't see. Other than that, I got a lot done and tired myself out way too much.
Hero and Nutmeg didn't get their rose-hip-munching time this morning, and they let me know about it. Two times this week I do that and suddenly they think it's an entitlement! Nutmeg is nearly as wide across the tummy as she is tall. "I AM in shape," she says, "Round is a shape!!"
I need to wash off the smell of chainsaw exhaust and figure out the rest of the day. oof.
Today was the second day of brush cutting in the pasture fbo Hero and Nutmeg. Yesterday was firewood day, and an hour and a half of carrying dead elm piece by piece out of the woods and tossing it in the truck was ENOUGH for my shoulder.
I'm starting sort of in the middle, but I would like to open up the area around that pine tree in the background. The leaf&berry nibblers were on high alert.
Also two Verminators were in attendance; Baxter practiced pouncing by attacking the vines as I was dragging them out and Lady was doing fox-pounces in the high weeds.
I didn't work very long, but enough to make visible progress, get plenty of forage cut for Hero and Nutmeg, and give the dogs a morning outing.
I'm sure everybody loves a two-for-one deal; getting your own exercise while taking care of a garden chore or similar. My 2for1 today was cutting the thorny scrub out in the pasture. At one point we had that pretty much under control; there were some brushy areas but that's good for wildlife and songbirds anyway; the open areas stayed open because my husband went through with the brush hog once or twice a year. Then there was a year, for whatever reason, that he missed . . and it sort of fell off his 'chore calendar' . . and how there is a wall of thorns (4 different invasive species) 8 feet high in places all held together by honeysuckle vines. It is. a FORMIDABLE challenge. Also, the slope of the ground plus the trees would make it difficult to cope with by heavy machinery. So it just. me and my pruning shears. against the world.
Correction. Me and Nutmeg and my pruning shears. At this time of year, the multiflora rose is covered in rose hips, tasty and nutritious. Nutmeg will also cheerfully eat the tops of the honeysuckle vines - if she can reach them. So if I cut brush now, I can get the nutritious stuff down low enough for her and Hero to actually get at it. That's the '2' in my 2for1. (They have already nibbled all the lower stuff that was edible) Like. . this:
Between picture one and two, you have to picture me scrunched non-ergonomically under the bush on the uphill side, clipping the stems with large pruning shears and swearing quietly. I did not feel up to drawing that.
Hero is perfectly capable of nibbling the clusters of berries off the bush on his own. He has learned however, that is he simply stares at the bush with sad eyes, I will clip a large handful of rosehips off and feed them to him with zero effort on his part. I am being scammed. I know I am being scammed. But I choose to go along with it.
[ID: A simple line drawing of a woman and a goat looking up at a very large bush with red berries at the top. "Hmmmm," she says. The second picture shows the woman pushing the bush over sideways, so the berries are within reach of the goat. The goat is excited. The third picture is a dopey-looking horse face with a gloved hand offering him red berries.]
Y'know what, it might even be three for one. Because the dogs were out there having a good time running around while I was working. Hey, AND I got my exercise. I am killing it!
Wednesday was firewood cutting day again this week. Oof. I lost all my energy before the truck was quite full, and the last few pieces got rolled across the ground instead of carried. I wasn't very active the last two days, so I'm kind of surprised that I got that tuckered out. We filled the truck again, though, and the woodshed (which holds enough wood for a full winter) is nearly full. There are stacks of "green" wood up near the barn getting well-dried/cured for next year. I'm hoping that my husband considers us done after next week. There are other things to do around here! He's just bonkers about cutting firewood. We don't have to pay for gym memberships, that's for sure!
Boy, do I need a nap.
Town or city folks' perceptions of "country living" will never cease to baffle me.
Example one. I have an acquaintance in town who is a few years younger than I am. She lives with her husband and four kids who range from around 10 to 23ish. A few days ago she sent me email asking if my son could come stack a load of firewood for her. From her perspective it probably seemed like "oh, these Farm People stack wood all the time! Totally a good job for him!"
From our perspective, Son is working all the hours of the day either on school stuff, OUR farm work, or his pt job at the school gym. He barely has time to eat, much less take on chores for another family. And MY perspective is; why in that house of SIX able-bodied people is there no one who will take the time to stack some wood? They could do it all together and be done in no time? Yes, they're busy, but so are we! I told her no politely, and it was no big deal, but . . left me with questions.
A few years ago I mentioned to a guest of my father's that I would need to cut down some little pawpaw seedlings that were growing right underneath the parent tree. Pawpaw aren't very transplantable, because they have a tap root and they die if it gets damaged at all. In our heavy clay soils, there would be no practical way to gently dig even a small one up without damaging the root at least a little. The elderly lady I was speaking to made puppy eyes (seriously? making puppy eyes at me?) and sweetly cooed, "but can't you t-r-y?"
I did not throw up. I did tell her "No" very bluntly. Because on this land which contains literally thousands of trees and more work than I can ever possibly do, it is not worth my time to try to 'rescue' a seedling that came up in the wrong spot. I can plant other trees in better spots! Just by tossing a ripe fruit down in the fall and letting nature handle it!
Anyway. Folks are weird sometimes. THEY have busy lives and sometimes more work than they can handle. But we, taking care of this farm, do not. ?
It's just because they have nearly no concept of what we do, because they are completely removed from any such work, and what little of it they understand at all, they understand as a hobby. As a hobby, any expense is acceptable so long as you're happy with the outcome. That runs you broke far as a lifestyle or a paying job. Sometimes, especially with animal husbandry, the difference will put the farmers and the hobbyists very much at odds.
And even the tasks they do have don't carry the same urgency. You "have to" take out the trash because otherwise it will smell up the garage before next week. You have to water the chickens because it you don't they will stop laying, get impacted, and die. One of those can be put off a lot more readily than the other.
Meanwhile, *we're* probably doing less of what *they* value, which is like.... Paying jobs. I dunno, sports for the kids. A necessary level of looking "respectable" that we only give a shit about maybe once a week, and which takes an obnoxious amount of time and money.
It's a big gap.
"they understand as a hobby"!!! THAT'S IT! Now I get it! So when a family member asked me if it "felt like vacation every day" he was . . . thinking I'm doing hobby stuff all day every day! (Plus a heaping helping of thinking that 'stuff moms do' isn't "work")
jeeeeeeeez
The other evening I was walking* the dogs in the far pasture when I heard a Noise. I perked up and listened? Again! It sounded a bit like a rooster (I do not have a rooster, only hens) and a bit like a small animal being strangled to death. Somewhere by the barn? After the third iteration of it, I decided I'd better head toward the barn and just . . . . check. For my own peace of mind.
Hero was there, obviously peaceful and ok. Nutmeg came into view; she's fine. And then, as I got closer . . my brown hen. She arched her neck and (hor*ri&ble n#oi^se!!)
Well. Hmm. It's not uncommon for an older hen to start to (sort of) crow. It could be described as "hen-opause." But this little lady is only two years old!
Whelp, as long as she doesn't start doing that early in the morning, we're fine. I was just glad nothing was hurt.
Hero very much enjoys a type of broad-leafed grass that grows at the edge of the forest and not in his pasture. And do I take him out of the pasture and stand there with him while he happily chomps on deertongue grass? Yes, yes I do. With Nutmeg interfering in any way she possible can.
(the grass IS sometimes greener on the other side of the fence)
A couple of nights ago I found myself not only Not Sleeping, but really, truly, wide awake in the middle of the night. My head was cycling through Thoughts™, and I knew it would only get worse if I kept lying there. I sighed, got up, and pulled pants on."We are Going OUT” I told the dogs. They were delighted. I grumped my way past my son, who is a night-owl, and out the door. My goal was to walk out through the far pasture, a short route that wouldn’t involve climbing any hills. With Lady running ahead, Chance near me, and Rocky and Baxter trailing behind, I set out through the tall wet grass into a moonless night. I had a head light on, but didn’t use it; there was j-u-s-t enough light from the stars (and the nearest cell tower beacon) for me to walk. I thought that the quiet night noises and the cool air would settle my frazzles a little. As I neared the end of the pasture, two pale shapes loomed out of the night ahead of me. The taller of the two, as you might guess, was Hero, with his ears raised in a silent question. The shorter was Nutmeg, who really didn’t give a fig why I was there. But would I, perhaps, scritch her neck? I scritched both of them, while Lady ran round bothering rodents. Rocky and Bax showed up a little later, seeking pets and excitement, respectively. A tiny, distant meow announced that Marilla had tried to follow us, but was lost somehow in the vicinity of the water trough (orange M on the map). I sighed (this was turning out much less meditative than I planned) and went trudging back to pick her up. Unfortunately everybody, and I mean everybody, decided to trudge with me. I picked Baxter up and carried him to prevent him being stepped on by a hoof. Two cats, Hero, Nutmeg, Chance, and I crossed the field for the benefit of a small, cranky tabby cat. Lady had buggered off somewhere on her own. Back at the water trough I picked up Marilla for a moment, but she never wants to be held long. When I put her down she ran to the fence line, and Rocky pursued her to pick a fight. Reasons unknown. Snarling, hissing, and swearing (me) ensued. Meanwhile, I was hearing ANOTHER tiny mew. It was nearly constant “Mew! Mew! Mew!” and coming from an area of the yard below the pasture, near a campfire pit. Meadow had tried to follow, too, but took a wrong turn and ended up in a willow tree near the fire ring, yelling her head off. (blue M on map) Sigh. There were two fence lines and a mass of small trees and brush between us. I had to walk out and around to go ‘rescue’ her. Hero and Nutmeg decided the time was ripe for a stampede, so they thundered off in the direction of the barn. Lady was still missing, and I couldn’t leave her out there on her own; a night full of barking would not please me OR my neighbors. Yelling for Lady, I stomped wellingtonly in the direction of the fire ring. I plucked Meadow and all of her long, wet fur off the leaning trunk of a swamp willow. Lady raced up to rejoin me, all her fur wet and sprinkled with pollen, face bright and joyous. Night walk! Smells to sniff! Awesome! Back at the house I left my boots on the porch and dragged ass back to bed. I did eventually sleep.
Happy Mother’s Day to the mothers, the mentors, the mom-friends, and all who have ever stepped up for someone who needed them.
