But perhaps the surest sign of impending spring is that my driveway is a river. I am not exaggerating, it is a river. Not a rivulet, not a wet spot here and there, a freaking downhill cascade of water seeking it's level or whatever it is that water runs downhill seeking. More on this in a bit.
The other sure sign of changing seasons is that there is, suddenly, WORK to be done. LOTS of work. I am about to run out of "dormant" time for my "dormant spraying" - and 6 months ago I had never even HEARD of dormant spraying. It is exactly what it sounds like - spraying (in this case fruit trees) before the little buggers spring to life and have new leaves all over the place. As a passingly busy (OK, exceedingly madly busy) employed person, there are not a lot of opportunities to get out there in daylight and spray trees, despite my actual desire and willingness to do so. The last day that my time off and sunshine and minimal wind all coincided was last weekend, and I had the best of intentions. I also had a Mardi Gras party. But that was Saturday night, and I had this long list of outdoor chores I planned to do on Sunday. However, while washing the dishes from the party there was a rather catastrophic failure of my large glass beverage urn to stay upright, and it threw itself into the sink in a suicidal rage, sending large shards of glass into the space occupied just moments before by the urn. That would be the space I grabbed in a vain attempt to abort the suicide by smashing. The result was that I slashed my hands up pretty good and there went all hope of trimming and spraying trees, hauling wood, burning burn piles, or anything else requiring pressure on my hands. SO what the heck, we drove up into the hills and played in the snow.
So today is Thursday. I am off on Thursdays. In an astonishing stroke of good fortune, the sun actually has shone all day. And my hands were better enough I could tolerate both wearing work gloves and washing the dirt off after. So it was a work day. But like so many other days off, in the balancing act between hours of light and personal energy on one side, and my to-do list on the other, the to-do list won. But I gave it a good go.First up: moving animals into one pasture.
We have three pastures gated between, and we have had all the gates open so the horses, llamas, goats and ewe could roam freely eating up all the grass and blackberry vines. That was in the summer and fall. Then winter came, the grass was pretty much used up or dried up, and so they started congregating in the end of one pasture nearest to the feed shed. So, it rains here. A lot. Rain produces mud. A lot. And I am not talking about little puddles in the dirt kind of mud, I am talking world class boot-sucking mud, pounded and pulverized and stirred up to a depth of about 12 inches by the hooves, cloven and otherwise, which populate my pasture. So it seemed that now there is grass coming up, it was time to give it a fighting chance of covering the pasture again. So first I put the feed bins (40 gallon trash cans with lids) in the front-end loader and toted them to the middle pasture where the run-in shed is. This of course attracted the attention of the animals, who all tagged along, which was my plan. Then I could close off pasture #1. Of course, there was so much of that boot-sucking mud at the entrance to the run-in shed I could not get in there, especially with 300 pounds of feed-filled trash cans. So I arranged them in back of the shed and put fencing around them to keep the animals out of them.
Then I found a new toy, half-buried in the dirt/grass/mud next to the run-in shed - one of those implements made of pipes with metal mesh between them that you drag over the ground to smooth it out or something. I am sure these things have a name, but per usual I am ignorant of it. I do have a photo though, so maybe one of you can educate me. But I hooked it up to the back of the tractor and pulled it out, and then decided it was just the ticket for spreading all the accumulated and assorted piles of manure all around the pasture to fertilize the new grass. So I spent an hour dragging pasture #1 and felt inordinately pleased with myself for my cleverness. So I closed off pasture #3 and dragged it too.
Then I heard a ruckus in the vicinity of the run-in shed and found Mac, the $(#(*@^$(*! thoroughbred gelding that is part goat, with his damn long neck atop his damn long legs reaching over the fencing barricade like it was nothing and repetitively smashing the top of the feed bins, and had made a big hole in one of them. The result was not quite what he hoped for. For one thing, he couldn't topple them over so he didn't actually get any feed out of the deal, and for another he was suddenly confronted by a cursing crazywoman on a tractor threatening to kill him, and half meaning it. So now the feed was exposed, it is going to rain again tomorrow and for the next 3 days, and it would all be ruined. And feed ain't cheap. So I had to go find a large flat object (found some big plastic thing that looked like the old roof of a playhouse) and put over the feed bins, which I moved into the sheltering arms (read obstruction) of a nearby tree. Time for lunch.
The afternoon agenda was primarily devoted to spraying the fruit trees. I had chemicals, spraying oil, and a large backpack sprayer all of which were discovered in the garage. I thought I was all set. This is inevitably faulty logic, as one is NEVER "all set" for anything to do with farms or animals. The backpack sprayer smelled like herbicide, didn't seem like a good thing to spray on fruit trees, so I had to wash it out, then when I tried to spray plain water as a test it didn't work. Once again, this was operator error and ignorance, but I had to pack it into the truck and take it down to the farm store where someone smarter than me could explain what I was doing wrong. Then come back home and start over. So then when I opened the concentrated spray stuff, it was dried out. I was NOT going back into town, so I just put water in it, shook it up, and made the best of it. Mixed it all up and went down to the lower orchard and sprayed. Memo to self - it is always a good idea to know which way the wind is blowing, and not just metaphorically or politically.
So then on my way back up the driveway it occurred to me I could fix the river that we drive on every day with a little engineering and PVC pipe. See, this is the trouble with farms. One thing tends to lead to another, and pretty soon you are up to your armpits in mud and trouble trying to do something that wasn't even on your to-do list to start with. And my lovely plan to dig little diagonal trenches across the driveway at intervals and put PVC in them with holes drilled in it, to drain the water that flows along the one side of the driveway from close to the house down to mid-lower orchard, where it cuts across the driveway and magically dissipates in the grass, was a no go. The driveway is by turns gravelly mud or something as hard as diamond that my hoe bounced off of. As I stood there contemplating my sins and the driveway, it came to me: The water cuts across the driveway because the driveway curves. The water just wants to go downhill. In a line. What if I dug it a nice straight line along one side of the driveway, lined with some of the mega-billions of rocks we have around here, and then at the point where the driveway turns, just dig a creekbed, let the water go through it, and build a picturesque little bridge over it. Voila! If you think this paragraph, and this blog entry, are long and rambling - THAT IS THE POINT. This is the crazy stuff that people do when (a) they live in the country, (b)they have limited time to do things outside that need doing, and then (c) they are handed a stunningly beautiful day. They (I) get a little nutty and overly ambitious and flit from one great thing to the next until all their body parts hurt and they get a sudden dose of common sense and stop.
But before I did that, I got the scythe and the machete and whacked my way through those blackberry vines, because I remember how lovely those daffodils looked last year when I visited the farm in the spring.
So now the day is petering out, there will be a nice sunset tonight and I may just watch it with a glass of wine in hand. There are still lots of things to do (didn't get to the burn pile today) but I have sequestered the herd, dragged many acres of pasture, and can watch with satisfaction while the grass grows and the robins dive for worms, knowing my fruit trees were sprayed in the nick of time.
Ahhh Spring.