Greenwood existentialism

Life and death, struggle, defeat, triumph, and determination.  The beauty of it all is in the beholder?  It depends who's beholding. 

Bonnie caught me cutting the new seeded pasture ground at about 10 inches, opening up sunlight for the legumes and grasses I planted to grow.  My interference with nature.  See all the weeds? Obviously, they want to win over my seedling perennial pasture forbs.  Fortunately, after lots of examination, I found we have in this field only one weed that's listed as noxious.  But it is totally nutritious, so all the weeds in here make good forage.  In a couple weeks I'll cut and bale it, and see who wants it this fall.  The noxious one is only a problem for tender lips.  If your lips can tolerate the prickles, canadian thistle is delicious.  Goats love it, sheep will eat it, stickers and all, as long as it's green.  In this field, only a few dozen square yards have infestation.  We are committed to spending a half hour a week this summer keeping it uprooted.  As you may know, it's about the most difficult perennial to control, because of the vast lateral root network.  One thistle plant growing from seed in the spring can infest a circle 30 feet diameter with over a thousand plants by fall, all from lateral roots. Of course, it also produces seeds.  If we humans could network like that, we could out-populate our enemies too, if not the whole earth.  

This and other challenges get put aside in the evening to watch the sky to the west.  I couldn't resist using the camera last evening, after a hard day's work on cutting weeds, Russian Olive brush, gardening, digging in the bottom of the drainage ditch so it drains better, pulling fence posts, rolling up rusted barb wire, and rubbing sore muscles. See the progress of the sunset? It's like progress on the farm.  Sometimes so subtle it takes a picture timer to get the flow.  Near the end, Venus, the evening star, appears to remind me of a globally warmed planet with 400 degrees sulphuric acid atmosphere, and I'm glad to live on fragile planet earth.  It's enough encouragement, or barely enough, to handle the latest tragedy. 

The last picture is of the wood door frame on our chicken coop. A carnivore splintered it while attacking the latch until it gave way.  Bonnie has had difficulty opening and closing it, because I made it tight and strong so no predator could do the very evil act done.  I lost, he won.  It's not fun.  One lonely hen was left.  All the others disappeared.  Sheila the dog found one carcass, with a small hole from which all the blood was consumed.  We looked around, and found no others. 

Shall we give up?  Bonnie says no way.  I have plans in my head to build a heavy chicken range shelter using cottonwood logs for rails, and varmint proof wire (chicken wire is not strong enough), the whole thing heavy enough to keep it down in the wind, but not too heavy to scoot behind a tractor.  And now especially, with our Boston family coming in a couple weeks, we can't imagine anything but determination to make it better.

So the sunset progression reminds us of truth and beauty.  It's in the hope of another day, and the possibilities of winning in the bio struggle.  God rest our cute chickens.  We miss them.  And our culinary plans are now defeated, but there's another day. 

Problems ad infinitum

 I've about gone my mental route with myriad problems for which solutions bring on more problems challenging solutions that are problematic.  This post is the problem post. 

1. Shade. No critter shade on the west border, since our drainage ditch is completed and the Russian Olive got trashed.  Solution: plant wild cottonwoods.  Anyway, these trees will help lower the high water table. Problem: the only ones I can find easy enough to dig are in sand, so the roots lose all soil when pulled up by my front-end loader.  I got 9 trees in one bucket load, and the root soil all fell off.   Solution, plant them in saturated soil next to the ditch.  Problem: They need lots of water, and even then they might not make it.  Solution: Bonnie, the water girl.  See her work.  My back does not allow me to reach like this, and she is so agile anyway, I had to get her in the picture. 

2.  Frosted blossoms.  Here is a newly planted crab apple trees, with blossoms newly frosted.  The good side is newly planted trees do better if they don't produce seed.  So it's OK.

But even better after frost is these cottonwood flower buds.  They got zapped.  This spring I have no cottonwood blossom allergy. 

3. Contaminated irrigation water. Then there is our major organic transition problem: our water source has drainage from over 500 acres. Here is the origin of our farmers' ditch, a smaller canal flowing out of the main "Two Leggins" irrigation canal from the river.  Problem: it uses 1.6 miles of Williams Coulee creek, which serves as drainage to adjacent fields.  After it crosses the road in the right it bends north and is higher than surrounding farmland, which can then be irrigated.  My NRCS folks thought this would be a very small problem.  This problem doesn't yet have a solution.  I'll call my organic tech expert.

Here's our farm from a satellite pict, see the Williams Coulee water flowing in the channel past our property, and off to the right into the Big Horn River. 

4.  The neighbor's tiller.  It fits on my 3 pt hitch and the PTO, and works great.  But not if it picks up twine.  The twine will pull itself into the bearing seals, breaking the seals and destroying the bearings.  Solution: knife and wire cutter pliers, and pretzel-capable spine that I don't have.  Volunteers?

5.  Chickens on the farm.  Great source of meat, fertilizer, and fun for grandkids.  Problem: Also great attraction to Sheila our dog, who continually feints attacks and scratches on the chicken wire.  Eventually she'll get through.  Solution: kill Sheila before Sheila kills our chickens.  Nope, wrong solution, our grandkids love both.  But they also love to eat chicken.  Any ideas?  We need a dog trainer?  Reminder: Sheila dispatched our Colorado grandkids favorite bunny when she persisted in attacking the cage until it fell over, the lid fell off, the rabbit ran, and quickly suffered a crunching fatal bite.   This carnivore needs to learn a behavior change or be dispatched elsewhere, unless the household wants to give up on chicken raising. 

6.  And then there's our salt cedar problem.  My hired help cut the salt cedar in the snow last winter, leaving low stumps in the ground. But because of the stumps, I cannot mow here to keep it down, it would wreck my mower.  The stumps need to be cut again with the chainsaw.  Who will do it?

And when we cut the Russian Olive, we did not get all the slash out of the channel.  It is lots of work, and steep, and slick in the snow.  And now, the slough is full of water, since the river is up, and the mosquitoes have heaven on earth.  Solution?  Jump in the goo and pull them out?  It's really deep foul mud.  And, notice the salt cedar budding from its red stems on the left.  There's no end to problems.

So it's better to just gaze on the beauty of the place in spring....

Here are three of my favorite farm techs, son Scott, and grandsons Isaiah and Elisha.  They came last weekend, finished the tree watering dams, and cut and piled an enormous amount of Russian olive slash by the channel.  Isaiah and his wife are parents to our two great-granddaughters, and plan to move to Australia in a month.  How times change, and problems get solutions with problems and solutions and the joy of living. 

News from Iowa

We went to Iowa, my parents' farm, now owned by my brother Phil.  We drove our neighbor's truck there to a memorial for my aunt, my father's sister.  We took my neighbor's truck to cut some hedge posts from hedge trees in my brother's timber.  Hedge trees are considered weeds, but make real good posts except for one thing.  They do not grow straight.  You might see hedge trees in eastern Texas, that's where they originally came from.  People don't like them because of thorns, lots of trash, and grass won't grow under them.  And they spread fast in a pasture. 

So we cut the trees into posts and loaded our truck.  We hope we have a good trip back to Montana Monday.  We hope they will last twice as long in the ground as the steel posts we're putting beside them.  At least that's what my brother Phil says... (we'll keep you posted as time passes...) 

Fires and near-misses

The tiny bird flying to our big oak tree seems oblivious to the sun dog in the western sky, guarding the sun off the picture to the left.  We often see these bright sun dogs in fall and winter, and they are supposedly a harbinger of bad winter weather.  But we believe it's spring.

So, we got to work on Russian olive.  We burned the big pile near the barn.  And we cut firewood from the rest of the Russian olive piles from the ditch just off our south border, and burned the slash.  I got the help of Sam and Naomi, our renters in town, and Pastor Josh.  So I bought a second chain saw.   

Did a lot on Tuesday.  Got a lot done.  Hard work.  my shoulder and back had enough.

But back home and we found sparks had jumped across to the grass in the slough, and started burning around the big dead cottonwood tree stump that I cut off high a year ago because I don't like cutting into barbed wire embedded in that tree.  After we controlled the grass fire, the hollow center of the tree was burning.   I didn't even notice.  What a roaring blow torch!  Louder than our rocket stove. 

Water would not put it out, I couldn't reach the core with the hose. I decided to let it burn.

So we decided to soak everything around the burning stump and go eat dinner.

I wasn't too worried, with everything soaked.  Of course, if one of those rare nighttime chinook winds started up, sparks could possibly fly across the channel to the Eagles Nest resort....I didn't want to think about it.  But see those sparks in the pict? 

At 10:00 I just happened to check the weather on line.  Warning for high winds at 3:00 AM!  So I went out with the chain saw, Bonnie helped me, and we cut the burning stump down.  Fortunately by then had dropped all the embedded barbed wire, and a much thinner shell was unburned.   Bonnie and I labored to douse every ember, but it was hard to see with the clouds of steam coming up from the burning roots.  Then we went to bed.  For an hour. 

Then Bonnie woke me with the words, "the wind is blowing.".  Confident, I went to look out the east door at our dead fire.  Spots of hot embers with even some flame!  We soaked everything again, and this time we could see better.  The wind blew until 4:00 AM, then it started raining, and a potential disaster was averted.  So watch out for sun dogs.  I didn't know they could be harbingers of too much hot as well as too much cold!  Thank God for Bonnie's alertness to the wind. 

The latest...

It's embarrassing how long this took for me to get the next post off and running.  Yes, we too had snow, but nothing like you folks farther east.  We have been getting cabin fever rehabilitation from our Lacy the cat who runs the place, harasses poor Sheila the dog, and occupies her perch of power on my chair back.

In the background is the green chimney on the floor that keeps us warm.  When we have two days in a row of no sun we our thankful for our heat build up in the floor from burning, and like the fact we don't need to stoop over to feed the fire.  Just toss in a chunk.  The stove works better than we had hoped.  Of course, there's plenty to do, and cabin fever is not a legitimate excuse for laziness.  Above the green pipe notice the window trim.  The top valance covers the roll of bubble foil insulation, and the side covers the newly designed limit switches and counter balancers for our automatic curtains, which to date are working just fine.   

For more cabin-fever antidote, here is our almost done carved cottonwood sofa.  Pastor Josh, a good friend from the Allliance church in town, is wielding the adze.  That tool, the least expensive quality one I could find ($99), came from England.  It's a one-handed curved-blade adze that used to be an indispensable tool for chair makers.  It really works neat, when we have a hammer to drive it. 

But the main source of heat is the sun.  It has gradually moved its arc higher in the southern sky, and now we have about half the heat from the sun that we had December 21.  It really shows!  but the sun still helps.  Our teapot still heats water on the stove for coffee when we run it, and we hope this view of our living quarters makes you feel like you would be welcome to stop in any time.  If the Lacy won't welcome you, our teapot will.  And Lacy will climb into your car when you want to leave, unless we restrain her.  She just loves car rides. 

Our Russian Olives are pushing, see the red sheen on the branches by the channel. It seems like ages ago when those trees were frosty. now that spring is pushing. 

After church I took a walk to see how our west field was doing.  Bonnie helped me start cutting the many piles of Russian Olive we need to cut since John stripped them out of the big drainage ditch that belongs to our neighbors. Mr. Koyama is kind enough to allow us to connect our drainage ditch to his.  You can just barely see our junction at the bottom right.  Our excavator man so easily plucked out the trees and lowered the ditch a foot to make sure we would have drainage.  This will stop the rising of the water table along our west border, caused by the main irrigation ditch that serves our irrigation district.  The water table rises to a foot below the surface at most, and leaches to the surface where it dries and salts get concentrated in the soil.  That's why 10 of our 30 acres produces almost nothing.  After draininage, and irrigation, production can begin again, but it may take years. 

Here is the pict of our ditch, on the west border.  Note the crusty white hue of the dirt because the salt is drying out the soil in the spring wind and sun.  Now we need some big rains to drive it back down deep in the ground where it won't trouble us anymore.  

We miss our grandkids!  Here is Kelly Jo, one of Naomi's daughters, came to visit.  She and Sam Pickett rent our house in town, and are some of the folks that keep us busy.  Life is good! 

On the organic front:  I have a certifying organization from North Dakota with some very nice, very experienced people.  They say there should be no problem getting organic certification fairly soon, possibly yet this year.  This is a surprise, since my discussions with NRCS and the Montana certification peopled were far from encouraging.  So, with  spring coming on, there's lots to be thankful for!   

grandkid bonanza Part 2

The first real Montana winter in decades, part II.

To our grandkids:

We remember the winter here when your parents were in high school. It was -40 in Hardin, and the almost two feet of snow on the level shrank to a foot turned solid because of warm rain, then came another snow storm, super cold for six weeks, and the deer did not have the strength to paw thru the hard packed snow to get to the grass. We walked and skied on top of the snow. We had a serious winter game and livestock kill, and many elk died in Yellowstone Park. That's not this winter. But, it's not over yet!

We still had problems. This beautiful scene of frost on our window is a symptom. Our Jetta diesel will not start in the cold, and at -30, it's necessary to do something. We parked our cars in the garage the first really cold night. Water from melting snow flooded over the garage door, soaked into the door jam, and soaked up the sawdust I scattered. The next morning I started fires on both sides to warm things up, and the humidity in the place warmed up. Morning after that we had window sills iced up and frost over the windows, and we had work to do absorbing water in the garage and dumping it out in the snow.

Before it can get warm in Montana frequently there is fog. We had some dense soup hiding the frozen swings.

Of course, the deer had more fun closer to the barn since Sheila, our goofy Australian shepherd who protects us from the deer, decided is was cold enough to stay the night in her cozy bale doghouse. But they kept a lookout during the day.

But the hoar frost on the big Cottonwoods takes the breath away in case the cold doesn't. And eventually the fog lifts, and the chinook air from the mountains in the distance comes, gently enough so Grandma and I could really enjoy some cross country ski trails made by neighbor ATV drivers in our bordering city property.

But, we learned again that what we intend doesn't always turn out, and we have to get up and try again, like Caleb so masterfully showed us over Christmas.

Have a merry new year! Grandpa

PS. For a technical thing: the 1/25th HP pex pump died, and the big tank warmed up to over 90 degrees since we could no longer pump hot water from our rocket furnace into the floor zones. We notice that the floor is colder, even though the air in our living room is warm. With the pump running, the floor stays warmer through the house and the tank stays cooler. We have the technology in place to control that with little effort. Just set the T state to the right temp. New pump on order.

grandkid bonanza, part I

Our time being what we are, Grandma and Grandpa to the best grandkids in the world, has been changed into a memory with many good feelings. Inside the house we had lots to do, in case it was nighttime and too cold. But the weather outside was (not yet) frightful, and a most delightful time was on skis. Everyone was successful, even the youngest. We didn't know how imnportant it was for these three to stack wood next to our house. After parking their gear. We also didn't really get it when the sun dog parked over the big horn mountains (the sun is 20 some degrees off to the right). Maybe because this dog doesn't bark. Then the storm came. 8 inches of snow and two days later, one morning, the temp was at it reads. I thought it couldn't be, until I checked with some others in Hardin. The high that day was 14 below (I think Jan 5). But the problem was not just cold cheeks and noses and feet, we had other problems cropping up. But we DID keep warm with our cozy rocket furnace. To be continued...