A Very Big Fir Tree Log

Kirk has been enjoying the use of our new road up from the pasture, using the tractor to haul up debris from down there that was a bit too scary to drive on the street. Much of what he’s retrieved are standard-sized logs, metal chunks etc that have probably arrived here from past floods.

But this mammoth looks like it may have been something from the original farmstead, back in the 1800’s. I know that the homesteader family logged the hill and had an on-site sawmill from which they cut boards to build the barns. It took Kirk some finessing to get this onto the tractor bucket (you can only see the tractor’s roll bar and Kirk’s head behind the log, it’s so big). But he did, and got it up the hill and into the to-be-processed scrap pile. Our little 30-hp tractor does pretty well carting big loads like this around.

We’re thinking of what we could do with this one, to keep it around for posterity. Maybe we’ll make it into a bench or something. Any creative ideas?

 

Fence Posts: Wet or Dry Cure Concrete?

I’m gearing up to start another round of fencing. I do  add concrete my fence post holes, because in the floodplain, the flotation forces of full-submersion flooding can cause whole fence lines to float- or so I’m told by a neighbor who learned this the hard way! So the question I’m pondering this year is, pour the concrete in the hole dry and let it cure on its own, or pre-mix the concrete first?

 

Kayaking in the Pasture

Here is Kirk, kayaking in our pasture! It’s not too often you can say you are boating in your yard!

His report of the sights out there: pumpkins everywhere, from our neighbor’s pumpkin patch farm. And the nursery tree farm, their irrigation tubes are also everywhere, in a huge tangled mess. Our ex-neighbor Nick’s port-a-potty is stuck on our fence- ugh! I’m hoping it wasn’t full of “stuff”, chemical or otherwise.

Below is another panoramic, this is taken from the hillside near our silo, looking across the valley. It’s really hard to capture the magnitude of the flooding in photographs, it’s really something you have to see in person to grasp just how MUCH water comes through. But, this does a pretty good job of showing how there is water as far as the eye can see. It literally does spread across the entire valley.

 

Ms. Dolly Llama – Doin’ Fine

I stopped by my parents’ house Saturday to bring more feed for the llama and check out how she was doing. She is looking just fine. I could find no swellings, cuts or other damage to her, she’s not lame, not coughing, or anything. Amazing! My mom took this photo of me in the stall. You can see that once I am able to get a hold of her halter, she is calm. But she avoids it as best she can. I even managed to pick up one of her feet this time to look at her toenails, which I haven’t been able to do before. Her toenails look good, I don’t think they need any trimming.

While I was in the stall, I pointed out a dead rat to my mom, it was right next to the feed. My mom said, “hmm, that’s odd, I don’t remember seeing that this morning.” When she went to scoop it up with a shovel, it was still warm! So, I’m guessing Dolly stomped it? (They are not using poison at their house, so unless it died from somebody else’s poison, I’m guessing it was killed.) My parents were glad at the possibility of her paying some rent by killing rodents during her stay!

 

Pumping Out the Valley

They must have turned on the pump station last night, because this morning there is a good 1-2 feet less water in our pasture. I can see fence posts, gates, nursery trees and the sheep shelters emerging. And the road is reappearing, now it looks like maybe only a 100-foot stretch is still under water. We saw a man out there wading in it with hip waders on, to see how deep it goes. It seemed to still be crotch-deep to him in the middle. People are starting to drive large tractors through it to access their homes. The road is much higher than the pasture though, so I think the pasture still has about three feet of water.

Our fence, from what I can see so far, looks good. Maybe a few T-posts bent, but the gate posts all held with their concrete feet. Though things could be worse in a dike breach, I’m glad to see that in a normal over-topping, the design seemed to have held up.