Still Here, Just Busy

It's been hectic. Restarting Kurt's horse. Getting Doc's feet fixed. Barrel racing. Riding lessons. Writing. Working. Gardening. And my niece Erin is here. I put the city girl to work. Here she is pulling weeds. You have to earn your keep around here.

Wood and Weeds

Two days ago we were out there doing wood. Kurt was splitting it and Kelly and I were loading it into two canvas bags we keep for wood carrying and hauling it up onto the deck near the sliding glass doors where it will be easy to get when we run out. We carried the bags to a red wheelbarrow at the top of the stairs and then rolled it the rest of the way. The hard wheel on the wheelbarrow went bum, bum, bum, bum, over the wooden 2 X 6 floor. The wheel on this wheelbarrow doesn’t have air so it never goes flat. This is the wheelbarrow that we normally use for things like mixing cement or potting soil. It’s got a shallow metal basin pitted with rust and low metal handles with rubber grips like bike handles. It’s not the most comfortable thing to push because of the hard wheel and how low it is. You wouldn’t want to be using it long term.

The one I use on a daily basis has a nice, air-filled tire and two long hardwood handles smooth and shiny from me using it so much. If I keep the tire filled, it bounces easily over all kinds of terrain. I fill this wheelbarrow with manure three times every morning. Sometimes I use it to transport weeds or bags of grain. I keep an empty supplement bucket hanging on one of the handles that I fill with junk I may find out in the gully—I was tired of sticking shards of glass and muddy plastic fragments in my pockets and then forgetting about it and washing them in the washing machine. So I thought of the bucket. It is even good for putting your hat in if you get too hot while you’re picking up manure. When I was sneaking cigarettes out behind the tobacco shed, I hid the pack in the bucket. It’s good for all kinds of things.

But my favorite wheelbarrow is the dually. I got that one for Christmas one year. It came with a big red ribbon. It is big enough to put a pony inside. It is yellow plastic and has two tires, hence the name dually, and two massive wooden handles you can barely get your hands around. It is the big mama of wheelbarrows. You don’t have to bend at all and it rolls like it’s on shocks. The only bad thing about it is it’s hard to dump because of the two wheels. You can’t just flip it over and shake it back and forth like I do with my regular manure wheelbarrow. I use the big mama for hay. Hay takes up a lot of space. Once a week I fork up all the loose hay in the shed where I break open the bales and bring it outside for the horses. If I didn’t have the dually, I’d have to make many more trips. But I can fit a lot in there. I have also used it to bring Kelly places. She hangs her legs and arms over the sides like she’s in an old fashioned bathtub and cries, “Go faster!” We tried to get the Big Stupid in it one time but he got all giddy and excited like he was caught on the couch and jumped right out and ran around the yard in circles with his tongue flapping and his tail clamped onto his butt.

I also have a miniature wheelbarrow. I bought it for Kelly back when I was trying to break her in right, when she was three and still believed me when I said picking up horse poop was a lot of fun. It is an exact replica of my red metal wheelbarrow but about the only thing you can use it for is decorative purposes. I have it half buried in the mulch in the flowerbed in front of the house and I plant petunias in it because they spread and it looks like someone was pushing it and then it tipped over and all the flowers spilled out.

Today I pushed the regular manure wheelbarrow up front and filled it with weeds. Even though we were stacking wood just two days ago and burning it like there was no tomorrow, it’s seventy degrees now and there is something crawling around the foundation that looks like chickweed but I don’t know what it is. I know it’s not lawn, that I can tell you.

You never get a break on the farm. One minute you’re doing wood and the next minute you’re pulling weeds. Sometimes it even overlaps. Tomorrow we’re supposed to get an ice storm. They’re already announcing the school closings on the TV. Eldon is out there right now pushing the spreader, weeding and feeding the lawn. I don’t know how I’m going to break the news to Kurt. I could try telling him getting wood and pulling up weeds is a lot of fun but he’s not three-years-old anymore. He won’t believe me.

Eating Weeds

We have big pasture problems. It turns out the weeds are no laughing matter. The horses have been eating them. Harley and the new pony, Apache, are covered in hives. Apache’s are pretty bad. Some of them are breaking open and I’m watching to make sure he’s breathing okay. Do you give a horse Benadryl for an allergic reaction like you do a child or a dog? I bought a bottle just in case. Maybe I should have bought ten bottles. Horses are big.

The problem is we never mowed the fields. There was no grass to mow. The grass was iffy when we moved in and then with the drought, what was there, turned to dirt. Except for the weeds. I’ve learned that I’ve got every toxic thing that they make in Virginia. Jimson weed, pigweed, hickory nuts, acorns, cherry trees, red maple. We have beggar’s lice. I don’t know if that one is poisonous but it certainly sounds like trouble. Pokeweed is poisonous when it gets higher than a few inches. Ours is about as tall as the barn. I have an assorted variety of plants in the deadly nightshade family. There might be a persimmons out there but we couldn’t be sure from a distance, and the vet, who pointed it all out to me, didn’t volunteer to go out there and investigate.

The vet was here last week to examine Apache, the pony who was too good to be true. He did a lameness exam and a neurological exam as much as a country doctor in the field, literally, could do an exam, and he and his assistant and the neighbors who came over to watch pronounced this to be a perfectly fine pony. The vet took a vial of blood to hold just in case Apache goes berserk in a month and we need to test it for drugs, but he laughed and assured me, “You just bought yourself a nice pony.” Then they went on to chitchat about the brothers Lester, Darryl and Billy-Bob down the road who are grown men that ride four-wheelers with a big Confederate flag flying off the back of one of them and who are having a fish fry on Labor Day weekend. Everyone’s invited.

I was hoping I wasn’t going to have to get the vet out again until it was time to do the horses’ Coggins tests next year but then they got the hives. It’s always something, no matter where you live; either animal, vegetable or mineral. In New Jersey, it was mud and the people who moved down from Staten Island because they liked the country living and then promptly plowed everything over and complained that the horses drew flies and the chickens made noise. In Oklahoma, it was rattlesnakes and coyotes, almost as bad as the New Yorkers and just as cranky. If there were any poisonous weeds on that property, the horses didn’t zero in any because they had 110 acres of World Class Bermuda grass to dine on.

I don’t know if I have any black walnut trees here like I had a forest of in Ferrum. Black walnut shavings will cause a horse to founder but not the leaves or the bark. There are saplings that look similar. They are either trees-of-heaven or black walnuts. I haven’t gotten around to going over and breaking off a piece to smell it—trees-of-heaven stink to high heaven, hence the nickname stink-trees. Either way, I am sure it will be something toxic.

Normally we would have gotten out there with the tractor even though there was no grass and mowed the weeds down just because they’re an eyesore. But we were busy moving in, doing projects, fixing fence. Mowing weeds was low priority. Now the horses are entertaining themselves with them. Basically having a party out there. Even though I give them plenty of hay to keep them busy, they’re not quite busy enough because there’s no grass and being grazing animals, they’re bored. They’re like a bunch a teenagers slouching on the street corner with their hands in their pockets and too much time on their hands looking for trouble. I’ve seen them take a nibble on all sorts of things. Yesterday Bullet and Minnie were munching on something that looked prehistoric. I chased them away and went to pull it out. As soon as I touched it I jumped back and screamed. It was covered with microscopic thorns like fiberglass. Dumb-asses. That’s what Kurt calls the horses; dumb-asses.

Right now I have the pony locked in the barn so he can’t get to whatever he’s been into. He doesn’t like being cooped up inside by himself so I put Bullet in the stall across from him to keep him company and they whinny now and then—“Hey, have you forgotten us in here?” Sometimes there’s a thump. Someone’s kicked a wall. I hear a bucket clanking around. They are playing with it and so I’ll have to go and make sure they didn’t empty all their water out. I don’t like stalling my horses because it isn’t natural for a horse to be confined but until the vet comes back on Monday, the least I can do is keep Apache away from the weeds.

The other day my friend had me so freaked out about having Jimson weed all over the place that I got out there and pulled it all up by hand. There I was, out in the blazing sun, wearing gloves and plastic goggles because I was afraid the stuff was going to give me hallucinations, tugging and pulling and ripping it out by the roots if at all possible. I was paranoid. I kept thinking, am I feeling something funny? Are my eyes burning? Am I getting heat stroke or am I high? Oh no, I just touched my nose!

I pushed wheelbarrows full of it, piled high, down to the manure pile by the back gully where all the brush is waiting to be burned one day. Now and then I hit a rock and a clump fell off. I ran over it and had to stop and pick it all up. It got caught in the wheel like how a carpet fiber gets tangled around the roller in the vacuum cleaner and you have to stop to unravel it. After I dumped it, black seeds were still in the wheelbarrow. This is the bad part dumb teenagers eat to get high and sometimes die. They should know better. They are the real dumb-asses.

I poured out the seeds. What else was I going to do with them? There was no where else to put them. I know we’re going to have an even bigger problem on our hands next spring since we let everything go to seed this year. According to the internet, I’ll have to get an herbicide. That probably means we’ll need to buy a piece of expensive equipment to distribute it. We’re not talking about backyard garden beds here. I have acres.

I made an appointment with someone from the agricultural extension agency to come over and advise us. An expert in weeds and seeds and animal feed. Whenever you call them, they are eager to help, as if they live for educating city slickers like me about pasture management. And best of all, it’s free. Hopefully she’ll get us all straightened out and this won’t happen again.

On Monday, the vet will be back. I hope that this isn’t an indication of things to come. It reminds me of when we moved to Ferrum and I begged the large animal vet, who wasn’t accepting any new clients, to please take me on. I assured him I had healthy animals and I gave my own shots so I would only need to call him in the rare emergency. I had that vet out so many times in the first year that he claimed we purchased his vacation home. He’d leave and I’d have another sick horse so fast that I’d have to call him back before I even got the bill from the first time. Kurt got to the point where he said, “Just give him a blank check.”

Maybe Lester, Darryl and Billy-Bob have the right idea. Four-wheelers don’t eat things that aren’t good for them and they don’t bang their buckets and kick their stall doors when they’re bored. In fact, you don’t have to do a darn thing with them unless you want to go riding. Maybe we’re the dumb-asses.

Praying For Rain

Nothing is in my pasture except pokeweed. Well, there are other kinds of weeds. Morning glories count since they grow wild. There is something I don’t know the name of—purple Velcro pods stick up out of the cracked orange dirt—prehistoric-looking things surely kin (I’m trying to pick up the lingo around here) to Venus fly traps. These are things that look like they should be on the Rocky Horror Picture Show. There are sticky vines sprawling like spiders and plants with spikes and spines somehow both ugly and beautiful at the same time. There are stickers, thorns, nettles and burrs, thick stems that splash liquid when you chop one (we call it milkweed, though I have no idea what milkweed is), and tangles and knots of something drying up it’s easy to get your foot caught in when pushing a wheelbarrow through the gully looking for manure to pick up.

But there’s no grass. Somehow the weeds flourish in a drought but everything else stops growing. Maybe it’s Mother Nature’s way of evening the score. Weeds get such a bad rap. Everyone hates them. Perhaps they deserve to have gotten an extra dose of hardiness from whoever decides what’s what.

I’ve given up on my petunias. I put all the baskets in the wheelbarrow and dumped them in the manure pile. No matter how much I watered them, they dried up. I don’t know what we did wrong. We did exactly what the guy at the nursery said to do. We bought everything he told us to buy. Little white balls that slowly release nutrients. Special disease-free soil so soft you could lay a baby in it and so expensive I considered panning for gold. Something liquid in a spray bottle and metal wire baskets lined with brown moss. But nope. None of it worked. We’ll never do that again. From now on it’s the $5.99 pots from Wal-Mart that you just hang up and throw away come the fall.

Sometimes I dump tomatoes in the manure pile but I put them in the pile farthest away from the horses so they rot before the horses know they’re there and eat them. I don’t know if they’ll give the horses colic. I have three manure piles. One is by the barnyard right next to the barn. Pokeweed and pigweed is growing all over it. The other one is in the front pasture by the tobacco shed and where you wouldn’t know it’s there because weeds taller than a man cover it. It’s a jungle in that part of the pasture. The third one is down by the gully. When I’m picking up manure, I empty the wheelbarrow into the pile that is the closest. Someday Kurt will scoop them up with the tractor and push it all into the gully in the back. The gully is filled with split, splintered trees from when the old owner bulldozed them all over to make another pasture. It is a skeleton of rotting wood that shifts and moves according to the amount of rain and wind we get. We haven’t gotten any rain in a long time.

We want to burn all that wood. It is dangerous to climb on and it’s an eyesore, plus, it takes up space that could be made into more pasture. Someday, when we get up the nerve, we’re going to light a match. But I’m scared. Even though we had the firemen over here to advise us about doing it. It’ll be a big blaze. It’ll be a ball of fire. People far and wide will exclaim, “Holy smoke!” And my well is iffy. What if a cinder floats innocently over this way and lands on the house? My water is practically worthless. I can turn the hose on for five minutes exactly and then the well is empty. Then what do I do? Wait for it to fill back up again and prime the pump while my house is burning down?

This well might have been fine for the pig farmer who used to live here. There were no dishwashers and no pools. They watered animals like I do but the farm consisted of much more than the eleven acres I own that has no water source—no creeks or ponds—and no doubt included the creeks that are now on the adjoining properties. But someone sold off this piece a while back with no water.

For me, it’s a problem. I have to conserve the water. It works okay if you don’t use it all at one time. You have to spread it out. For example, I water the horses after Kurt takes his shower and I water the garden in the evening. I stick the hose in the pool to refill what has evaporated after Kelly has gone to bed and I put a load of laundry in the washer at midnight. We warn the others when we’re using the hose, “I’m using water, don’t flush the toilet!” and we make plans to wash the car or bathe a horse. It’s an inconvenience. Alright, it’s a pain in the ass. And it’s actually pretty scary because I always worry that the water is going to run out and this time we’re not going to be able to get it back on again. We have five horses who drink ten gallons of water per day each. That’s a lot of water. It would be a hardship if we had to buy fifty gallons of water every day down at the Wal-Mart just for the horses alone if we ran dry and had to wait for the well guys to get over here and dig us a new well.

I keep telling Kurt, let’s schedule it now. Let’s not wait until it goes dry for good and then we’re under the gun. What if the well guys are backed up and we can’t get them right away? But it’s one of those things that’s not fun to buy. It costs a lot of money and you don’t actually see anything for all of your pain. It’s about as satisfying as getting the yearly maintenance done on your furnace. You don’t see anything different but you know it’s got to be done. It’s not even as exciting as putting a new roof on. At least there, you have a couple of choices—black, grey, green, red, the new architectural tiles, metal. Digging a well, you don’t even have a color choice.

And now we’re having a drought. I wonder—will I finally use too much and whatever is down there will dry up hard as a rock like the dirt in the pasture? It can’t be an endless supply. I am praying for rain. I hate rain. I am outside all the time with the animals and rain puts, no pun intended, a damper on things. But this time I am wanting some.

My pasture is not the only one that’s all dried up and filled with weeds. Farmers are using hay they stored away for the winter to feed their cattle now. There may not be a second cutting of hay this season because nothing has grown. Therefore, hay will be in short supply and very expensive, if it can be had at all. We are about finished building our hay shed but I don’t have any faith that I will be able to get anything to fill it up with. It’s always something on the farm. Either I can get plenty of hay and have no where to put it or I have a place to store it but can’t get any.

I don’t know what happens down here when there’s a drought. Is it possible that animals will go hungry? My horses are starting to nibble the weeds even though I give them hay every day. They come up to the barnyard with burrs in their forelocks. They are desperate. They should be knee-deep in grass right now but they’re not and so there’s nothing to do.

If this keeps up, I expect to see tumbleweeds blowing across the pasture. I can pretend I’m back in Oklahoma again. The only good part is I haven’t mowed the lawn a half dozen times this season. But somehow, still, I’ve pulled plenty of weeds.

The Proper Tools and Press-On Nails

I’ve discovered that the garden tools are for something. They’re more than for looks. Forget what you see in Country Living magazine where they’re tied with ribbon and hung on the wall next to rusty wrought-iron gates and butterfly collections. All these years I’ve had them and not used one of them. Didn’t even give one to the kids to dig in the yard. Kitchen spoons are for that.

No wonder I was dreading weeding the garden. The tools make it much easier. I stumbled upon this fact when I was weeding and found a carpet of crabgrass that was too dense to pull out by hand. The spade shovel, which I had been using for big clumps of weeds, was down at the barn. I looked over there. I didn’t feel like walking back down to the barn considering I was back and forth there a half dozen times already and Kurt was not going to bring it to me. He was busy hammering. He was building an addition onto the barn—a new hay shed. A skeleton of posts and boards was up already. It looked like a giant wooden shipping crate. It was either go and get the shovel or give up and just mow it.

Then it occurred to me. The little garden tool I kept on the shelf in the garage next to the other things I never used like the bone meal and the tiki torch oil was just like a spade shovel, only smaller. What was it for? Could it be used for things other than making holes? I got it out and tried it. It worked! It was a revelation. The weeds came right up. I started making some tracks. Before I knew it, I was on the other side of the pool giving the pampas grass and the hostas some breathing room. Then I dug up the weeds that were choking the blue festucas.

Heck, you don’t even need gardening gloves if you use the proper tools. You just loosen up the offender with the little shovel thing and the weeds pop right out. No more trying to get a good grip on it with your fingers or wearing holes into the fingers of your gloves before the little daisy pictures on them have faded or grinding dirt under your fingernails that you can’t get out without using Lava soap. Forget artificial nails. Those days were over when I didn’t know about the tools.

Why, in my hay-day, when I was single and on the man-hunt, before I lived on a farm, I was famous for my nails and rumor has it that’s how I hooked Kurt. When I showed up on our second date with my nails painted white with black polka dots to coordinate with my little polka dotted shorts and matching jacket and the polka dotted high heels…and then topped it off when I appeared for our Super Bowl party date with my nails painted in the GoGiants logo, I swear, that clenched the deal and he proposed.

But living on a farm, I had to come down to earth in more ways than one and I traded manicures for the farrier. (The farrier, also known as the blacksmith, takes care of horses’ feet) It’s pretty much the same, both involving trimming and filing, occasional soaking and conditioning, regular appointments and tips. And held hostage for a certain amount of time, whether in the chair or on the cross-ties in the barn, this is the person who you yak with. Sort of a quasi-psychologist, you let it all out because there is nothing worse than just standing there, or in the case of getting your nails done, sitting there, in the dead silence while the horse, from time to time, snorts snot all over your shirt or the manicurist clears her throat. So you talk. You share news, swap tid-bits, and gossip. In fact, that was how I found out about Virginia. My farrier told me.

At any rate, Kurt also discovered things today. He stomped past me and reported, “I’ve realized the importance of Mexicans. How come whenever you need something, it’s always on the bottom of the pile?” He was talking about the stack of lumber in front of the barn, chest high, that took us two hours to move there.

“Mexicans are hard workers,” I agreed. “And they work cheap.” Then I looked at the rest of the yard. I was done with the bed around the pool, but there were beds around the house, down the walkway and in the front corner by the mailbox. Tools or no tools, it was not going to be easy.

“Who cares if they’re sending all their hard-earned cash back home?” I cried. “Let’s get them over here! I hear they’re pretty good gardeners too.”

But that was only a joke. We never hire anyone to help us unless it’s something we don’t have the technical knowledge to do and can’t find the information on the internet to learn how. It’s the trade off we make, allowing me to stay home to take care of the farm and our daughter and write my stories. If we called the plumber every time we ran into a problem or the roofing guy whenever there was a leak, I’d have to go out to work to pay for it all and that defeats the whole purpose of this country lifestyle that we love—why, just last night I made a peach cobbler from the peaches Kelly and I bought at the orchard we discovered on our way to the vet’s office. If I was actually working in the vet’s office, there’d be no cobbler, I can tell you that.

Well, maybe now, now that I’ve learned what the tools are for, perhaps I could apply some press-on nails and paint a little farm scene on them. I was thinking of a green and yellow motif reminiscent of a John Deere tractor. Hey, it’s never too late to spice up a marriage. Or to learn about gardening tools.