My Neck of the Woods

 Everything is in a frenzy....the trees are all of a sudden green, the invasives are leafing out and getting ready to flower, the birds are nesting, wildlife baby season is upon us, and we are almost into May. Of course there are days that I don't mind flying by, but there are those moments that I wish I could hit the stop button to prolong them. But time waits for no one and I am doing my best to be present in each moment and spend as much time as I can outside. Now that I am done with physical therapy, being outside in nature becomes my daily physical workout and my internal cleansing and healing. With each passing day we find ourselves pulling away from people and allowing our circle to become smaller and more quality, finding more comfort and peace and joy in nature.

Morel season is here where I am at, and I now have Woodchuck hooked on going into the forest with me. I am ever the person that believes that any gift I find in nature is meant to be, but also needing to be earned. So while we hunted for mushrooms, I also pulled garlic mustard and bittersweet and honeysuckle sprouts. The first morel of the season always gets a photo shoot!

But there are other fungi to be seen and to be fascinated by! Enter Witches' Butter. This is a parasitic fungi that feeds on other wood-eating fungi and not the wood itself. It is edible, but I have not been able to bring myself to try a jelly fungus yet....it took years to get up the nerve to try morels!

And let us lend an ear to Wood Ears, or Jelly ears. This is an edible mushroom, and powerful medicine with lots of health benefits. Again, I have not. Maybe one day!

Still so many things that I can't identify yet! I am looking forward to spending every day finding the smallest signs of life in the forest and on the land. To watch these things grow and change from stage to stage and to wonder and anticipate if it's something good to keep, or bad that needs to go! What a thrilling way to spend every day in nature, learning about the natural world around me. My app said that this is a magnolia, but time will tell.

I stopped weighing them out at some point, but between the two pieces of property, I think we managed about 3 to 4 pounds this year.

Everybody has a preference on how to handle their mushies. Mine is that I soak them in water for a short period of time, rinse and set free all of the insects that come out, then soak again for a short time. I cut mine in half, then flash freeze on a sheet tray with unbleached parchment. Then I put them in Ziploc freezer bags and freeze until I'm ready to use them. I know that is blasphemy to most, but it works for me to extend the harvest magick through the rest of the year.

Woodchuck and I are finally feeling better! Whatever we had was ROUGH, and I am so grateful that the allergist helped us, unlike the family doctor who told us to take Mucinex (we already were), and drink chamomile tea (I already was). We don't like being on medications, but some times you need them to fend off something becoming a much bigger problem. Although it was rough being outside on some days because of the wind that would irritate our chest and make us cough more, I also feel like we needed the healing that Mother E brings.

As we start wrapping up our life here at our current home, I am taking stock of some of my favorite things about it. The violets have come in full force.

I haven't cleaned the flower areas up yet this season. I like to wait as long as I can.

The wild geranium/cranesbill has gotten larger!

And the patches of Solomon's seal in the tree line are spreading now that more invasives are being removed.

 

With so much rain, I've mowed the lawn twice now, though admittedly it could have used it more often. A busy schedule, rain, some days being a little less strong physically have gotten in the way of that at times. The nights are cool, the days are warm, and this drone fly was sleeping under a flap of leather that protects the padlock on the shed. How fascinating!

Speaking of rain, I got done mowing just in time! The winds picked up towards the end, and the storm clouds rolled in.

Time to make dinner of spinach artichoke stuffed puff pastries (the guys didn't like them), and to try some new coffee. I normally would not buy it, it's pricey, but I got it on sale. It was good stuff!

I am also making sure to carve out creative time in between everything else. Even just 5 minutes a day sets my soul right. You can find my items for sale at www.offorestandheather.etsy.com 

On Woodchucks recent two days off, we had GORGEOUS weather for being outside and getting stuff done!

 While he mowed for the first time this season at the land, I finally dug up the Tiger Lily that I planted at the land entrance a few years ago. I was working at the resale shop and someone dropped them off and I didn't realize that these were the non-native ones. I've been saying for the past couple of years that I wanted to dig them up, and I picked one of the days that I felt the crappiest to stand in the wind and sun, coughing and sniffling, to finally get it done! 

Nearly every trip ends with a walk. What will the land reveal to us each time? He's getting better at finding them and has turned it into a friendly competition. I won this year, but he found some good sized ones!

The Summer in the back forest is going to be brutal for me. Standing water, mosquitoes out in full force already, and large patches of Lily of the Valley. I think that this will be the year that I spray them versus trying to dig them all up on my own again. I tried digging out a few recently and it is so wet that they just fall apart, leaving the root/rhizome behind.

But the Packera is a ray of sunshine back there, and makes my heart happy.

Finding the good things is necessary when you find so many bad, like this burning bush inside of my forest. I am sure that there are sprouts all over the place that I either haven't run across or haven't been able to identify in the stage of growth they are in. 

Muscadine, native to the states, though not necessarily in this area. I have never seen fruit on them, the plants themselves stay very small here.

Ranunculus Recurvutus, aka Blisterwort or Hooked Crowfoot. Native wildflower.

The watershed is alive with so many species of plants...bergamot (wild bergamot, bee balm)

This species of clover is not native to the area, but took over the fire break path on its own. I LOVE the smell of clover.

The wild strawberry flowers are reaching for sunshine! I rarely find any berries, and these would be super small anyway. I leave them for the wildlife.

Hard to believe that a storm will blow in a few hours after this walk! The sun is hot, but the wind is perfect enough to keep me comfortable!

I noticed the same kind of tree that I just found at home...a boxelder maple. While native, it's a fast growing tree that has brittle wood. Not something I want right next to our cars, when we are already having to cut down trees that broke and nearly hit our sons car...twice! But out there, it is the right kind of conditions to find it in, but will it out-compete the oaks? They can get up to 50 feet tall, with a canopy just as wide. I might post about it in a native plant group I belong to and get some feedback there.

As soon as we got out of the car, I told Woodchuck that it smelled like lilacs. We don't have any of those, so I knew right away what it was. The dreaded Autumn Olive are getting ready to flower. They.are.everywhere.

The flood waters continue to be a third pond, and I am unable to get close to the blueberry bushes without waders on....and I don't want to take the chance of getting stuck in the muck and irritating a hip trying to get unstuck. I can see that the pruned two bushes that are left are leafing out well though! Though this area will still be marshy at the time the fruits show, I may be able to get to them to harvest some. This area gets full sun nearly all day, so that will eventually cause the water to evaporate, and hopefully too by that time the contactor will be out to fix this area. One of the really cool things though is that there was a plover of some sort walking around the edge of the water on this visit. I couldn't get close enough to get a picture, and I didn't want to scare it away. They move so funny, it was adorable to watch!

Still under water! Blueberry bushes that we didn't realize we had for a couple of years at least, and this is where we were hoping to make a trail from the watershed back up to the prairie area. Will have to wait until the flooding is resolved with drainage pipes and vegetation. Woodchuck would lose his tractor in this, lol.

A wonderful way to spend Earth Day week! 💚

And now that we are out of hibernation season, I am enjoying the fresh, raw ingredients of Spring! A cucumber, avocado gazpacho with croutons I made from some store-bought sourdough.

As we pack this place up, it strikes me how each part of the year will be our last here. I am ready though to let this be someone else's home. I hope it's a young couple and this is their first home, like it was mine. A place to raise their kids, a small town to let them run and play in, a small-town school where you have your classmates from k-12 and the high school and elementary are in the same building, just on opposite sides. I foraged for some mushies, and realize it will be the last time doing that here. I am watching the grapevines leaf out, and realized that I won't be here to harvest them. I will miss the bird song, noticeably the robins, in the early mornings and evenings and the way the sun is in the front of my house all day, the South. Will we use the fire pit one more time before we move? We've reconfigured it yet again, getting rid of the broken blocks.

 But it's time, and I know it. I am allowing myself to feel the joy and excitement of the next step, of something new and fresh, of being able to walk out the door and into the trees. We are deserving, we are rich in blessings, and they keep coming. )O(

Throw it down and walk away

We have had some hard decisions to make recently. About the land, about retirement, about building a home. We are no closer to an answer, the right one at that. We even toyed with the idea of filling in the main pond, or selling the land and starting over. A quick online research of property for sale, with or without homes, showed me that that would be an asinine thing to do at this point, and it didn't take us 20 years to find this property because we had so many options to choose from! If we were to sell it, we would be back at the start with no other viable options for getting out of the this house and into nature and our forever home. So the obsessing and worrying continues.

As we continue the back and forth between Winter and Spring, and are finally in the woods of whatever hellish virus we caught, we continue to do the little bits that we can. I have spent more time than I should trying to finish these pumpkin earrings. I usually have to start over no less than three times. First one is done! Just need to trim the threads and put on the ear hook.

Although Woodchucks intentions were good, and goals lofty, he indeed did not meet the goal of getting our sons bathroom completely remodeled before his surgery (which I am taking him to in about an hour). Plus, with me not being there to see the little things, he didn't notice that some of the older plaster has mold on it. So that will all need to be torn out. Maybe he was going to tear it out anyway, but he seemed surprised when I sent the pictures of the mold.

Those are some wide boards! This is the area where the exhaust fan will go. Woodchuck said that there's still asphalt shingle-style siding on the house too!

They picked up the drywall already, so just a tad more demo to do, then wiring for the exhaust fan and some replacement wiring for other things that might not be up to code and are a fire hazard.

While the bathroom is on hold for now, we are making quick stops at the land. An important stop was to cage the front arborvitae that we planted last year and that have been stripped by the wildlife. I don't know that these cages will make a difference, but I had to try some thing.

We also got the chain unwrapped that the neighbor wrapped around a small tree. It took both of us to get it unwrapped.

I saw my first bluebird of the season out there! Not my picture, found this one online. I had to use it to help me decipher if it was a bluebird or blue bunting. I can never remember which is which.

I had a follow up with my GP for some lab and I was feeling freshly sick and thinking we had the flu. They tested me for the flu and Covid and both came back negative. He said that a lot of people were coming in thinking they had the flu and it ended up not being that, just some virus. Yeah well, the "just some virus" was a beast and kicked our butts. Back when I was growing up, you could tell if you had the flu or a cold. Now all of the lines are blurred.

On another trip to the land, we placed markers at the edge of the pond where about 4-6 inches of land is getting ready to slump in. I want visuals. I want proof that others can see that I am not making shit up, and this is not something to ignore. We have ONE WAY to get to other side of the property with the tractor, and we can't lose this land to slumping anymore. At some point I'm going to get tired of being ignored and treated like a stupid girl and I will take charge, but for right now, I am giving others the chance to step up and do the right thing.

With the "Spring" thaw and rains, water levels are high all over. It's a beautiful day though, with mirrored skies in the water.

My hips/legs/ankles were feeling well enough to finally walk the watershed and grab those trail cam SD cards and get eyes on the land. I am always amazed at how many Oothecas I find. On this trip it was three of them.

My eyes are constantly scanning. I'm afraid if I keep looking down too much, I will miss something higher up. These views, for instance.

The sandhill cranes are on the move into the area again, though we have never seen any at our land.

Hello, Mr. Blue Sky!

We thought we would also try and get over along the watershed pond too. I had to be really careful not to slip. These tractor tire marks are always here now, but I can see the watershed pond levels have nearly reached them.

Indeed, I was able to establish that the newest flooding issue we have is because the watershed pond overflowed on the lowest land side. That tree would normally be on dry land, and it is now an island and surrounded by water. We passed that information along to the company that is working to fix the main pond and the flooding to the side of it.

I am so grateful to have seen the pussy willows get their fuzzies! One of my favorite trees since I was a child, I thought I had missed them this year, but they were there waiting for me! 

We refer to this flooded area now as "the third pond", and the ducks are loving it.

The water meal already started back on the warmer days, with what looks like tree bud chafings mixed in.

We feel like we are in limbo right now, but I also feel like everything is happening as it should.

Satisfied that we could do all that we could on this trip, we headed home for showers and dinner. We made the last of the Pierogi up, and in case you ever wondered why we named our cat Pierogi, here's a picture for reference.

I have been itching to get back to creating. I decided to take advantage of the sunlight we get coming in through the East bedroom window! It was short-lived, but glorious.

I always love when we go to the land and hear ducks. After seeing a crane take off from the edge of the water, we could hear ducks (a male and female mallard)....but then also...

Geese. They are not our favorite to have there, but we understand the draw of the water to them. They don't stay long, and honestly, with so much mud, I don't know that they will try and nest again (so far, in five years, they have never had babies).

This was our last trip back to the land before Woodchucks sinus surgery, and the weather was once again beautiful. On this trip, things with the house idea were really coming to a head. A decision needed to be made, or I need out from under this weight. But not just any decision, the smartest one that we can make that will ensure our comfort in retirement, and ability to afford to live at the land. So we walked and talked. The flood waters continue to rise. Have I ever told you about the floods in Louisiana? When we lived there for a bit when I was in pre-K, we lived on a road that ran along the Amite River. And gator danger and contamination be damned, we swam in the flood waters! With the hips and ankles I have now, I am not even walking in this water! 😂

There's nothing quite like sunlight reflected on shimmering waters.

We decided to sit and watch and listen and dream and talk. Such a pivotal time it is! Still recovering from hip surgery, both of us still recovering from something viral, do we keep the land or sell it? Do we move forward with the original house plan, or change that? I know the answer is coming. I just need to keep my hands off and my wants out, while also being a voice of reason. It will all work out.

I could snuggle up and take a nap right here, but Woodchuck says I have to wait until we are living out there, and this bench is used by a squirrel for a dinner table. So, I guess that means that my relaxation time is over.

Between the virus and my autoimmune stuff, the sun is hurting my eyes. But I'm grateful that it's out!

We made a couple of trips to Bailey's Discount Center down in North Judson, for things for us and for our youngest who has been talking about moving out but still hasn't followed through with looking at places yet. The sandhill cranes LOVE that area! Fields and skies full of them!

While we are all grateful for the sun and slightly warmer temps, they fueled some intense storms. I can see the front moving in as we left the discount center to head home.

This is not my picture, but shows what a storm chaser caught. It hit about 20-30 minutes South of us, in the area that we had been shopping in. The lightening, winds, and pouring rain that we had here at home were INSANE. Tornado and severe weather sirens were going off, but we never lost power. I had a video for you to see that showed the intense lightening we had, but I couldn't get it to load.

Pierogi doesn't like storms, but was really brave this time! I could tell when it picked up in intensity because that's when she went and hid in the corner. Once the storm threat passed, she was exhausted and went face first into the blanket!

It took me awhile to type this up, and some decisions have been made about the land and housing! So stay tuned, the next post will updates about that stuff!