The next step

 I knew it had been awhile since I last wrote, but since July?! Time is flying by too fast! A lot is happening, at home, in family, at the land, and I'm having a hard time gathering my bearings 😬 So let's see where I can pick up from and have this all make sense......

The majority of the Summer was spent on clearing ditches and their banks and that's still not done yet, but the back ditch is looking better. With us opening up the canopy, the ditch is growing green things! A blanket of Pilea pumila, otherwise known as clearweed or coolwort, and is in the nettle family, likes the conditions of the ditch now. 

I wasn't sure what to do at first! Do I need to get rid of everything now growing in the ditch?! What happens when it rains again enough to get water in there?! But my gut is telling me to leave it, at least for now, and let nature run its course. This plant is a native species BTW, even if to Eastern United States and not the Midwest where I am located. I seem to be finding a lot of plants on the land that are native to the Eastern part of the country. 

We were also prepping the area the pole barn is going to be built on!

We've been letting people know for months that we could use help building it and when we thought we would start on it, so they'd have some notice if they wanted to help. It ended up being hubby, his carpenter nephew he hired, and my previous maintenance manager at a job that I had until Covid hit. We thought that was going to be enough of us, but it turns out it wasn't and things didn't go as planned. Equipment malfunctions, crappy design equipment, I wasn't allowed to help, because they all thought I would get hurt. So I sat around doing nothing the first day except for keeping Woodchuck calm and doing the driving. The second day I sat around for a bit and then said to hell with it, they wouldn't come right out and tell me that they didn't want me to help, so I walked away and started doing my own thing. By the third day I knew what was going on and just did my own thing the whole time. They didn't get as far as they had hoped they would.

The plan was to have us all back the following weekend to finish the framing after getting the trusses delivered. But two days after we all headed back to into the world for the week, the carpenter backed out unless we met his new demands. So Woodchuck declined and hired a crew that has experience putting up pole barns, and with just three of them, this magic happened in a couple of days.

Woodchuck and I went out this morning to fix the smaller boards across the front, on either side of the garage door openings, that we had done wrong. Soon the metal will be on and then we'll work at saving up to buy the doors. 

I'm back to work as of mid-August, back at my previous job at the resale shop but under new management. Worked two weeks and caught Covid and it knocked me on my ass. Like, bad. I felt like I had allergies, flu, and a cold all wrapped in one and at the worst level you could get them. My highest temp was nearly 205 degrees and I felt like I hit by a truck. When I talked with my manager about having to call off and what the guidelines were to come back, he said he hung up and said that I sounded like I was dying. My chest is still crap first thing in the morning, but with asthma and allergies and my allergies always being bad at this time of year, it's expected. 

Never a dull moment!

So what's next? Keep working on the barn, start making a path to the watershed pond so I can treat the phragmite, keep clearing the back ditch, and hopefully get one more night of camping out there since we've only done it once a year for the past two years.

All of the above pictures are the work I did alone on the ditch. Temps were in the high 80's/low 90's and the humidity was terrible and we were all in the blazing sun all three days. That's when Woodchuck and I started not feeling good, halfway through the weekend.

On a trip during the week by ourselves, I saved a toad and baby snapping turtle from getting run over by the tractor. While I've seen many toads out there, this was the first time I've seen a snapper! Where there a babies, there have been adults and for being so small, this little one was super fast and strong!

While on the tail-end of Covid, I also got to see a Sun bow while out there. Gotta see the magic wherever it may be! 

Hard to believe we will have to transition into Fall work mode now.....I feel like we didn't even get to finish the Summer stuff yet. 😬 But we are making progress and seeing the fruits of our labors in projects and what is starting to grow out there! We are truly blessed, even through the hardships 💚

You're such a ditch! the long-winded edition

 Most projects we take on don't go as planned. Take the patio at our current home. When we moved in it was rock and in those rocks were dwarfed trees and other plants that the previous owner enjoyed. We needed a place for our son to play, and ride his bike, etc., so we removed all of the stone and plants and put down patio block. And during heavy rains, it floods. So I got the BRIGHT idea to remove the blocks at the corner and in a design at the patio table area and plant grass only in those spots. Sweet Lords of the Plant Kingdom, what was I thinking?! Oh it helped the flooding issue just.fine. but why didn't I take into consideration that hubby doesn't weed whack but like twice a season and that's only because I keep reminding him that he hasn't done it and it needs done. And now that we are in a drought, the only things growing are what are coming up in all of the seams and nooks and crannies of that patio. Including that grass. Ugh.

But the other thing that didn't go as planned as the burning of the tree debris pile at the land. Woodchuck just *had this feeling* that the fire department was going to light it up and POOF, it would be ashes. Since they did keep pushing back the day they would be doing it, we kept adding to it. Fresh, green, healthy bushes and other invasives. It's gonna burn, he kept saying! And we show up the day after the burn and are like, "why aren't we seeing smoke?" as we are pulling in. And "Uh oh, what if they didn't show up again?" as we are walking over to the area. The closer we got, we could smell that something had been burned, and many of the trees were charred, but didn't burn completely because they were still too green, but it did take all of the leaves off. Well shit.

This totally messes up the plan for the prairie area now. Woodchuck called them on the next business day and asked if this is a work in progress or one and done. We've never done this before, we didn't know! And nope, it's a one and done and they said to see if people want fire wood. Soooo, now we have to clean this up. Ugh. Well. we'll have plenty of fire wood for when we camp, which sadly isn't all that often. While out there we took stock of other projects we could be hitting, so we walked around and made a plan.

We have got to get to this back ditch while we have dry weather! (above)

And aw, heck! While we are back here, let's start getting this area cleaned up too! Sadly, this is the ONLY spot we got cleaned up right here. So much to do and only two of us!!! We'll come back to it soon though because I will need to come this way to access the watershed pond to treat the phragmite. 

So when we went back we tackled the front. We always think we are going to get farther than we do! We usually spend about 3 hours on one little spot, and with 15 acres to be working on at various points in the year, it's just not all going to get done. But we managed to liberate an old tree and some young junipers, from multi-flora rose. We need to come back to this area to take down some dead trees and continue moving along the front at some point.

    

                                                                            Before ☝

    

                                                                           During ☝

                                                                        After ☝

And a wall of so much more to go! Checking on the area again days later, the multi-flora rose that we couldn't reach to pull out of the tree has died. Yes, friends, the multi-flora will climb trees! This tree had that AND bittersweet. The majority of the tree died because it lost the battle for sunlight, but there are still green parts higher up where the invasive plants hadn't reached yet.

You know that I always say Mother Nature gifts those of us who fight for her. We are not just gifted with our own lives, but get to see the others we impact. How this little mantis did not get caught up in the tractor, the brush hog, or under our boots I will never understand, but what a treat!

And I have made it a habit of giving myself breaks along the way of the work to make pretty things out of destructive things. I have several wreaths now made from grapevine and bittersweet. Though many have asked what I will do the wreaths, I haven't decided. It is my understanding that I can't sell the bittersweet ones because of the new terrestrial plant rule in the state I live in. I am sure one of the reasons behind it is because they don't want people to see the wreaths and think what a great idea it would be to grow invasive plants like this Oriental Bittersweet. Another idea would be to stop the inadvertent spreading of it. For now they are sitting in my workshop, but once we move to the land I may hang them through as a ward of sorts to keep the oriental bittersweet at bay. That being said, I know it will take years to get the issue under control out there.

                                     For example. The front ditch is one of the worst areas for it.

All of those tendrils reaching up are individual vines coming off of one (at least) main root. (above).

 Directly across from the this spot, on the other side of the ditch, is this monster. (below) I can only assume there's a Staghorn sumac under the crap, but all you can see the bittersweet that has overtaken it. 12 foot tall. I doubt that the sumac is still alive, deprived of sunlight. I'm not shitting you when I say that I/we have our hands full and this will take years to get the land back to the native species home it should be. I admit that I get scared some times that we will get too old and too frail to keep working it before I see it done.

We are workhorses, and all work almost all of the time. So in response to Woodchuck's work schedule getting changed with no notice, we decided to camp out on Das Zem! The few days prior to were PERFECTION. No humidity, breezes, clear skies. Of course that changed the night we decided to camp. We were both dripping sweat barely five minutes into trying to remember how to set up the tent. Why did we even bother showering before we went there?! It's never a fast thing to set that tent up, but

we prevailed!

Home away from home for the night! Always seems like a lot of work for just one night. 😑

It was almost 8 p.m. before we were able to get the grill going, and sit with a beer to watch the sun sink.

Woodchuck even got fancy this time with the bathroom needs! We've always had the bucket, but he added the seat this time.....just wish he would have sanded the wood a little better and centered things correctly. I'm surprised I don't have splinters on my tush.

With the naked eye we could see some bright stars, but with my phone camera, we could see so many more in the pictures. It was truly magickal!

And the darker it got, the more magickal it got! But 5 beers later, and staying up way past our usual bedtime had caught up with us. Time to hit the hay because we had a lot of hard work waiting for us on the next day and it was supposed to be really hot.

I slept like shit, there is just no sugar-coating it. An air-mattress is no place for a 200 pound Slovakian man named Woodchuck, and his 5 foot tall wife who is the size of a 5th grader (okay, maybe 4th grader. But I refuse to say 3rd grader!). It was hot, and I don't handle polyester anything very well and that is what the sleeping bags are made of, as well as the sheet we put on the mattress. This was the first time we'd camped out since my hip surgery and my hip says NO MORE air-mattress, lady!!!

But the crows didn't come screaming out of the forest this time before the sun rose, in fact, the first bird I heard was a cardinal in a tree next to us at 4:15 a.m. And then the symphony started. Waking up to those sounds never gets old! In fact, as I am typing this I have tossed all caution to the wind, turned off the a/c and thrown open the windows. It may only be for an hour and it may be an irritation to my asthma with the high mold counts, and listening to the neighbors dogs barking by 8 a.m. is always frustrating, but that morning bird song gets me every time. 😍

Up and at them with a quick breakfast of organic chicken sausages on the grill and another beer for Woodchuck. I was already dehydrated enough, thank you very much, so I had juice! 

We packed up the stuff we weren't going to need anymore, took down the tent so that the dew could dry off before we packed it up too, and then headed to the (gulp) back ditch. We have worked on this ditch area three times now, and are not even quite halfway down the length of it. The next trip out there doesn't look promising to work on it again, and I am trying to figure out exactly what *will* we be working on when we go out there next.

The first thing was to get the drainage tubes cleared out and dug out a bit better. We don't know if the previous owner, who put in this ditch, put the tubes in this position, or if they've been heaved up over time by twigs and branches. A lot of what we are doing out there is trial and error. Do something one way and observe it over time to see how it responds. With the lack of rain, there's been nothing to observe right here. Below is what is looked like before all of the work started.

You can just see the black tubes above, at the bottom of the picture.

Many staghorn sumacs wrapped in grapevine.

                                                       I'm just gonna grab a quick snack!

The ditch was dry but a little slick in spots. So many types of toads and frogs in it!

And this corner up on the bank is now clear!

And after, down in the start of the ditch. You can see the black tubes clearly. Farther on in the ditch is another tube that was buried in the second CRP forest by the previous owner. It has a plastic grate covering on it and something large has been gnawing it. Possibly a Woodchuck? (no, not my human one!)

Walking farther down the ditch line, we see it is all dried up and we decide that this needs to be our continuing project for as long as possible.

Lots of various kinds of animal tracks down in the muck!

           Another day, a little farther in to the ditch. So.much.grapevine. and MFR. The before.

The after.

The tree is actually down in the ditch, and possibly rotted, but we don't have time right now to deal with it. It's not causing any issues, and other things are. I slipped and fell while working on this spot too and landed hard on my right hip. I bounced right back up but was a little sore and worried that maybe I messed some thing up. The surgeon told me to be careful through the month of June and this happened right at the end of it. So far so good though!

I tackled the front ditch on my own the last trip out while Woodchuck serviced his tractor. I thought I could whip right through it, as I always think, and I always end up being wrong. I started on the worst part of it, because there was a tree that needed help. It was covered in oriental bittersweet and the MFR was starting to climb it. Before pictures x 2 👇

This bank of this ditch is lined with bracken ferns and while I tried to be careful, a small portion was trampled in my efforts to clean the area up. I always feel bad about that. I have found them to be very resilient though and grow back if they are mowed down, but I don't like to play with the possibility that they may not at some point. 

Once some of the icky stuff was cleared, I found a little treasure! At first glance I thought it was a bone, but it ended up being something more hard to find on the land.

After pictures x 2 below 👇

These piles of vegetation that I cut out and piled will be taken care of by the tractor next time we go out there. 

I left the grapevine wreath on the tree I pulled it from. There's still lots left in the tree itself, but it will die of now that it's cut from the main root source. I could feel the tree sigh in relief and where its prize proudly! It had been liberated!

And once again in the liberation, I found the tiniest of creatures. I was worried at first that it had been tagged the herbicide I had to use when I cut the bittersweet and MFR (and AO!), but I believe it is okay. It's a baby (referred to as a Nymph) walking stick 😍 

And the tiniest bit of amber (tree resin). Something may have injured the tree in this spot. I have gathered tree resin in the past for art projects, but not only do I have enough already, this tree needs this to help protect the damaged area.

                                                        Another oriental bittersweet wreath.

                                                                A grapevine wreath.

And a video of the baby walking stick. Woodchuck and I are getting so excited to start the process of building and to move to the land and to see these things on a more consistent basis. There is magic all around and everywhere we go 💚💜