Fertilizer Matters!

See these weeds in my pasture?  That's their normal size - about as tall as my wheelbarrow.

Below are the exact same species of weeds, but these are growing about 50 feet away in my vacant chicken yard.  It's the first time in 17 years there haven't been chickens in there to peck every green thing to death.  The ground is a few inches higher in there, due to years of compacted chicken poop.  And man, does that stuff work well as fertilizer!

Yum, Wasps!

A few weeks ago a large hole appeared near my garden one morning.  I checked it out, wondering if the groundhogs were expanding their territory, but found this instead:

That's what's left of a yellow jacket nest.  The combs were empty of larvae, and a couple confused wasps crawled and buzzed around the nest.  Whatever snacked on the larvae must have done it hours before, because the rest of the hive had evacuated.  For all the years I've seen yellow jackets crawling into the ground, I've never seen a nest dug up.  I had to check this out.

To the Google!  (This is where I get all tingly!  I love research!)

It turns out the larvae are a favorite snack of raccoons and skunks, both of which are plentiful around here.  So maybe someone had a nice meal.  Or maybe they got there too late, after the larvae had hatched.  Either way, the nest was doomed.  At the end of summer the old queen dies and the new queens fly off to mate and ride out the winter until they can begin a new nest in spring.  There were probably thousands of wasps in there.  Fascinating!  But I'm glad I didn't know that this summer when I was picking rhubarb a foot away from that hole.

Lost Summer

This summer I lost a good friend to cancer.  Another close friend was diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer and began chemo.  And I wrote a book.  Lots of conflicting emotions and pressures.  I thought I handled it all pretty well.

I didn't, not entirely.  Because I lost the interest in life's curiosities and humorous moments that compels me to post on this blog.  I know that now, because it has come back.  And so I will take a moment to catch up.

I mentioned back here when noting my horse's 31st birthday that he would look much better once his summer coat came in.  This is what I meant:

Much better, yes?  That was a month ago.  Now he's shedding those fine hairs, replacing it with a thicker winter coat.  But still looking good!  You go, Fritz!


We also added a member to our family.  My friend who passed left a lot of pets - a little too many for one person to care for.  One of them was a dog we fostered for 6 months during my friend's first round of chemo.  She loves us, loves Nikita, and loves cats, so she passed the entrance exam with flying colors.  She lives here now.  This is Lily:

 

 

It's kind of weird to have a dog that barks an alarm when she hears someone come up the driveway.  After thirty-five years of friendly-but-stealthy huskies, we finally have a tough little watch dog who greets visitors with, "Stand back or I'll cut you!"  Good girl, Lily.

 

I also enjoyed the annual trip my mother makes from Florida to spend the summer with us.  With my usual writing deadline that keeps me busy, she had a lot of time to fill.  She read a lot of books - I didn't keep track.  But I did keep track of the jigsaw puzzles she did:

 

I helped a little.  I can't walk past a jigsaw puzzle in progress and not stop to find a piece.  Or twenty.  But my book was done on time, the puzzles were all finished, and summer is over.  Moving on.

 

 



Waking Up From A Long Winter's Nap

So I've skipped some time here.  Let's call it seasonal affective disorder - those short, dark days take their toll.  But that's over, and here's what I've missed -

April 8th was Fritz's 31st birthday.  Way to go, Fritzy!  Unfortunately at this time of year his winter coat is starting to shed out and he looks pretty mangy.  But for the record, here he is today, playing Wild Horse on the Range, standing in mud and drinking from puddles.  Because trudging back to the clean water in the barn would just be too much trouble.

That scruffy coat gets brushed out every day, most efficiently with the shedding blade, littering the stall floor with crescents of horse hair.  If he looks muddy in that close up, that's because he is.  All that loose hair is itchy, and he rolls every day.  I'm just glad he can get up and down easily, and flip himself over.  He can get as muddy as he wants.




















And on a smaller scale, you might remember our little cat Harley who likes to kill inanimate objects.  She finally found the ultimate prey at my granddaughter's second birthday party:

Think you're tough, T-Rex? 

You're going down!





Guarding her kill:



End of Summer

My poor neglected blog!

It's been an eventful summer on the farm, mostly due to loss and near-loss.  A couple weeks ago, I lost the last of my chickens.  She let herself out and never came back - same as the one before her.  No trace left.  A Disney ending is looking more unlikely.

This means the chicken coop is now a cat house for Zoe, the little cat who bunked with the chickens.  So I dressed it up for her, going from feathers and hay to wood floors and rugs:

Zoe took one look and fled in terror.  Civilization is a frightening thing when you've lived your first ten years in a barn.  But she came back and gave it a try.  The bale of hay I added in the little room to the right probably helped sway her.

Hay for the horses - that's still a loss, but one I hope to correct this week with some outrageously expensive hay I will pick up myself an hour north of here.  The farmer hesitated when I asked if he'd ever put up that third cutting, which made me think he bought this batch at auction and is selling it to desperate horse owners like me.  I can only hope for a better growing season next year.  Global warming sucks in so many ways.

But this summer's near-loss has a happy ending - Fritz's hoof appears completely healed, to the point where my 30-year-old horse has actually broken into a canter. Several times!

Summer wasn't so bad, after all.

This Land Is Your Land (and the oil companies')

A story, because I love this land.

Four houses up the road from me, someone buried something 60 years ago.  The someone was Enbridge, Inc., a Canadian based oil company.  The something was an oil pipeline.  I never knew it was there. 

Should I have known?  No one was obligated to tell me.  My neighbor who owns the property it's on knew about it, but didn't give it much thought.  Maybe we all should have.

Enbridge has the world's longest crude oil and liquid pipeline system.  (That's from Wikipedia.  But if you want an idea of how extensive the oil transportation system is, check out this map .)  They've had a lot of leaks and spills.  Like, over 800 in a recent 10 year period.  A big one in Michigan in 2010 dumped close to a million gallons of tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River.   They should have safeguards for that, right?  They do.  Operators overrode them when they signaled a problem.  Twice.  Hmmm.

So Enbridge wants to update these pipelines.  Good idea!  That inclues the one that runs just a few thousand feet from my house.  Right over my water supply.  Sounds responsible.  They'll just "seal" off the old line and put in a new one.  But, hey, times have changed and they want to ship MORE oil around the country right beneath our feet, so let's make it twice as big as the old one.  We'll just rip out whatever's in the way, because it's called "eminent domain."  Remember that from civics class?  You thought it was just for the state or the federal government, so they could build highways and such for the common good.  Nope.  They grant that right to Big Business too.  Your land is yours - except for the part that's theirs. 

It starts like this, looking all festive with their colorful pennants.

Then they bring in the heavy equipment, like this:

 

And this:

 

Enbridge can't park on the right-of-way they're ripping up, so they park beside it.  No one will miss this big tree, right?  It turns out it's legal for them to rip out stuff that's near their easement and that they say is in their way.

 

Hey, in another sixty years you'll never know the difference.

 

So yeah, I'm a little pissed off at the wholesale destruction.  Especially since I don't know what will happen when they need to bury their pipeline here - under the wetlands - where they aren't allowed to rip stuff out willy-nilly.



 

I talked to one of the workers about it, a woman directing traffic around all the huge trucks parked along the narrow dirt road.  And I learned more than the basic facts about what her employer is doing.  It's not Enbridge, by the way, it's the company that clears the land for them.  She's a single mom who was out of work for a year during Michigan's painful recession.  She was glad to get this job so she wouldn't have to lose her house.  Like so many people, she's willing to do whatever it takes to have a job, which for her means driving 90 minutes from her home in Battle Creek to Howell, where she then gets in a company truck and drives another hour to the work site here.  After a 10 hour day, she drives an hour back to Howell, then 90 minutes back to Battle Creek.  It's a long, tiring 15-hour day, but she's glad to have the work.  And she gets Sundays off. 

 

Ironically, guess what's right in her back yard in Battle Creek?  The site of Enbridge's 2010 oil spill that closed down 35 miles of the Kalamazoo River.  And now it turns out that Enbridge is providing the job that has saved her from losing her house. 

 

Nothing is ever black and white, is it?  But I'm still sick over the carnage that was wrecked through our peaceful rural landscape today.

I Have Gas!

Natural gas, as opposed to propane.  Or intestinal.

We almost have it, anyway.  As soon as we use the last propane in the tank, we will complete the switch-over.  It was a long time coming, but finally the gas company got approval from at least half the homeowners, and they laid a line down our road, along with a few other roads in the township.  After that, they laid lines for each house that wanted to hook up.

First this truck came.

 

Then this one.

Doing this:





With this:

It was a noisy day.  There will be a big bill to go along with it.  But in the long run, it will be cheaper than propane.  We have joined civilization.

Except for the well.  But I'm fine with keeping that.

The Ultimate All In One Product!

I was walking through my local Tractor Supply store, and saw a large bottle of clear liquid with a name that gave no clue to its purpose.  So I read the label.  And what a revelation!  I can throw out both the Tide and the Mane and Tail shampoo because this stuff will wash both my panties and my horse!

 

Mowing The Lawn - Large Scale

It's 90 degrees.  Not a cloud in the sky.  Humid enough that walking from the house to the barn will make you break a sweat.  A swimming pool sounds great.  So what so farmers do?  Cut and bale loads of dry, itchy hay, then stack them in airless barns where the chaff fills the air, your nose, and your bronchial passages.  Then let the hay grow for a few weeks and do it again.  All for low pay, no health plan, no pension, and no such thing as an 8-hour day.

Free Range Ends

It was only two days after this post that the free range practice came to a tragic end.  I walked out to the barn in the middle of the day to find a scattering of feathers in front of the big doors.  Too many feathers.  More were inside.  Also inside were two confused chickens, instead of three.  The missing chicken was the white Aracauna, the girl who'd been so desperate to live wild and free that she initiated the chicken prison breaks.  I can only hope she enjoyed her brief freedom.

I herded the chickens back to the coop and locked them in.  That evening when I went out to feed the horses, a large raccoon scurried across the top of the stalls.  The murderer, returning to the scene of the crime.

I discovered I had lied - I can lock Zoe out of the chicken coop during the day in order to keep my two remaining hens safe.  She won't like it, but she can wait until evening when I feed the horses to go inside again.  She loses her option to come and go at will, but I keep my chickens.  She knows how to avoid raccoons; they don't.

A lot of farmers out here shoot any raccoons that wander into their barn.  Groundhogs and 'possums, too.  I don't.  And I think it's my responsibility, having the larger brain, to find a way to keep my "domestic" animals safe from the native critters without driving them away.  So I'm not looking for revenge.  But damn it, that was my chicken, inside my barn, in the middle of the day when all raccoons should be asleep - a clear violation of the Geneva Accords.  Not cool, Mr. Raccoon.  Don't make me haul out the live trap, because I will relocate your ass far, far away from here.  I've done it before.

UPS vs My Driveway

I like a company that keeps track of your orders.  When I had bookmarks made for my new Barringer's Pass series, Earthly Charms told me when it shipped - Monday - and when it would be delivered - today.  UPS seemed to be running late, as it hadn't arrived by late afternoon.  Then I got an email from the company - did I receive my bookmarks?  UPS said they couldn't get all the way up my driveway and left it by a tree half way to the house. They wondered if perhaps deep snow made the driveway impassable.

I hopped in the truck to check it out - sure enough, there were two parcels wrapped in plastic and propped up by a tree.  The other package was the edits from NY on my next book.  If it really had been snowing, I might never have found them.

In fifteen years of living here, this is the first time a delivery didn't make it to the house.  This is the treacherous driveway he couldn't handle.  The package is at the base of the tree on the right.

A previous UPS driver had told me that company policy says they're supposed to park on the road and walk up to the house.  Obviously, if he did that in my neighborhood where most houses are far off the road, he'd never get done.  But that was the rule - walk it up to the house. 

I went to UPS.com and used every character permitted to me to explain my dissatisfaction with their service.  They're supposed to answer within twenty-four hours.

Wham! Hello Winter!

When I went to bed, the lawn was green and the trees were brown.  When I woke up, the world had gone brilliant white:

But if you asked the chickens, they wouldn't agree.  Snow clings to chicken wire, turning their world dark.  This is what they saw when they looked into their yard:

I left the light on all day for the chickens.  For the horses, snow on top of dirt that hasn't had a chance to freeze, equals mud.  Every step will churn it up more. 

I might be the only one who thought the first snow was pretty.

That Chicken Attitude

You lookin' at me?



                 Huh?

YOU LOOKIN' AT ME?

Your Federal Tax Dollars At Work

Say hello to the Emerald Ash Borer.  Pretty color, huh?  Some time during the 1990's this little guy hitched a ride from Asia to the U.S., saw all the lovely ash trees, and said, "Yum!"  Then he and his larvae went to work - one more illegal immigrant making good in America.  And boy, did they ever.

Twenty years later, the result is hundreds of millions of dead and dying ash trees.  On our five and half acres alone, that amounts to a dozen or so mature trees, and several dozen half-grown trees.  They're our problem to deal with.  But along our tree-lined road where dead trees stand close to power lines, it's the county's problem: take down the trees before they take down the power lines.  That's a pretty damn expensive problem.

Here's where the Federal government comes in, with a grant to cut down the dead ash trees that are near power lines.  Only ash trees - don't mess with that government money and try to get your dead oak taken down, because these guys know the difference.  Two of these trucks were working in front of my house today, chain saws and wood chippers roaring.  They left me a pile of ash logs that, I have to admit, will make nice firewood once we cut them into shorter sections and split them.

As a result, there is now a much smaller chance that my cable, phone, and electricity will be taken out by the next big wind storm.  Plus, I get some free firewood.  So thanks for that, American taxpayers. 

And f-you, emerald ash borer.  I'd rather have my trees back.

Rock, Part 3 - Don't Be A Sisyphus!

Are you up on your Greek mythology?  Sisyphus was doomed to spend eternity rolling a big rock uphill, only to have it roll back down, forcing him to start over.  I'm sure it's supposed to be an object lesson, or maybe a profound truth.  Lately, it gives me nightmares.

I have my Rock and it's ready to roll uphill.  Maybe.  I'm not sure the slope is gradual enough - I'll have to check with my neighbor who owns the heavy equipment and has some experience with Sisyphus-like endeavors.  I want to pull my Rock out ONE TIME, so I have to make sure I get it right.

This is how it looks now, with a section of lawn cut away, sloping sharply down to it.  The back of the rock is more exposed so we can get chains around it, but you can't see that.  My craziness stands on the brink of becoming reality!  Maybe!

 

Putting Up Hay

We've got a small operation, as farms go - no crops, just a few animals.  So putting up hay for the horses for winter means taking my horse trailer out to Farmer Bob's REAL farm, and loading up bales of (mostly) second cutting hay.  I make three trips and get about 80 bales each time, 70 in the 4-horse stock trailer, and 10 more in the pickup bed. 

The horses LOVE seeing that trailer back into their barn with a full load of hay.  They have free access to their stalls at all times, so they crowd in there and watch the whole unloading procedure.  Fritz nickers about it, sort of a continual "Give me some.  Come on, just a little," even though he can't chew it well with the few teeth he has left, and he'll mostly get hay cubes soaked in water - like eating hay mush.  But he's still operating on memory, and he's always talked about his food.  I recorded a bit of it, while Remi was crowded into his stall with his good buddy Fritz:

Anniversary

I did a head count today of all the animals on the farm:
Horses - 3
Chickens - 4
Dogs - 1
Cats, both barn and house - 13

Every cat and dog was a rescue of some sort, either a stray that found its way here, or an animal I was handed and just couldn't say no to.  Some have weird rescue stories - I'll save that for another day.  It was enough today just to see that grand total and flinch.  I am grateful we have the room to do this, and to my husband for putting up with my penchant for rescuing animals in need!

Yesterday was my anniversary, but my husband was out of town so we're celebrating today.  Two things I KNOW I won't get: a kitten or a puppy.  And that's okay!

The Burn Pile

My ROCK should start a fan club.  This past week I've been asked if I have my rock out yet, by people I didn't even know read this blog.  What have I gotten into?

To dig out the rock, I need the trailer to put dirt in.  Which means I have to get rid of the moldy hay currently in the trailer.  Which means I need to throw the hay on the burn pile.  The burn pile is in the pasture, so to make sure the horses don't get into moldy hay, I have to burn the whole pile right away.  Easy, right?  Ha!  No.

If my husband did this job, he'd stuff some paper in between the dead sticks, throw the hay on top, and set it on fire.  Whoosh!  Twenty foot-high flames.  A bit outside the fire code, but who around here really cares?  No one. 

Except me.  That burn pile - two of them actually - have been sitting there for a year, drying out.  The perfect shelter for bunnies, mice, skunks, and ground hogs.  No way am I going to have toasted bunnies on my conscience.  So I laboriously move every limb and tangled vine to a new pile, burning them as I go - a nice, responsibly small fire.  (Yes, a girly fire.  Girls are responsible; suck it, guys.)  Going through both piles takes a good hour and a half, not counting forty-five minutes in the middle to recover from heat stroke.

And how many bunnies did I find?  None.  But I did uncover one large garter snake that slithered farther into the pile before I could whip my camera out.  To help you play Where's Waldo, I cropped out most of the burn pile.  If you look closely you can see her yellow striped black body weaving through the brush.

So I sweated in the August heat for 90 minutes to save a snake.  Was it worth it?  Heck, yeah.  (Hello, do you know me?)  And now my trailer is free so I can start digging out that rock.

Rock!

I'm writing, but well ahead of deadline and taking care of jobs around here.  Hence, a story about today's project.

I needed dirt to fill the depressed areas of lawn around our silver maples, and I had two options:  I could order a yard or two of topsoil, or I could dig up as much free black dirt as I needed from the bottom of my manure pile.  Lovely stuff.  Being cheap, I went with option two.

I scraped aside the weeds and loose wood shavings on top, then started digging.  The first shovelful hit rock about three inches below the surface - not an unusual occurrence around here.  I moved the shovel and tried again, looking for the edge of the rock so I could dig it out.  And hit rock again.  Moved the shovel again; still hit rock.  Now, you'd have to be a total rock nerd like me to understand how my rock-senses started tingling.  This was a big rock.  A specimen rock of the type people set in pretty landscaped areas so other people can drive by and admire their big honkin' rock.  I love those rocks.  I began digging in earnest.

After moving four trailer loads of dirt, I hadn't uncovered even half of this rock.  But it is MINE, and you may admire my rock in it's natural state:

Oh yeah, baby, that's what I call a rock!  Here's a more seductive close-up:

Yowzers!

I might never be able to move this sucker, but I'm not giving up.  I want this rock!  If my pickup truck can't move it, my neighbor has heavy equipment that can.  I have awhile to figure it out - the rock has been there since the glaciers melted, and isn't going anywhere.

No Cats on My Hot Tin Roof

They're smart enough to stay off it when it's a bright, humid 90 degrees outside.  I'm not.

Our heat spell was broken up by a couple nights of torrential rain, enough to remind me that if I don't fix the leaks in my barn roof, I'll end up throwing away several bales of damp, moldy hay.  So hot or not, I climbed up there with my tube of neoprene sealant and looked for holes - which don't exist.  So I sealed seams that appeared perfectly tight, and covered nail heads that look flush with the roof, and got a fast 20-minute sunburn on my neck and arms.  Because Tennessee Williams knew what he was talking about - tin roofs are HOT.

The horses were inside, hiding from giant, evil horse flies (see blog about them here), but got concerned about the footsteps overhead, and came out.  I took a picture of Fritz and Remi from the edge of the roof.  The hand-size swelling on Remi's side behind his shoulder is from a fly bite.  He has several on his flanks, large lumps with a scab at the center.  Just like with mosquitos and people, there's always some poor guy who gets twice as many bites as everyone else.  That's Remi.