a long time coming

Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote! It doesn't really seem like I have accomplished as much as usual, but I have been doing more triathlon training. That takes up a fair bit of time. I also had the guys for 2 vacation weeks, and would much rather play when they are here than work so much. I can't believe how quickly time is passing by. The days are getting a bit shorter and the nights a bit longer. It's a bit scary, but I do love our evenings and mornings now. It's been delightfully warm, and I've been enjoying having a cup of coffee or tea in the morning on the deck watching the geese battle Vanna for deck territory. Vanna's too nice to fight, so the geese usually win. Unfortunately. Pecking order is definitely not dependent on size. Vanna could kill them instantly, but their attitude and body language is a bit frightful, and keeps her in check. They certainly do scare people as well, although they have never even come close to attacking a human. They run up for some attention, but most people assume it's to peck their knee caps off. Just bending down and saying hi cuts the noise down to a minimum, and everyone's happy. (Kind of like Benj in this picture.) All except Vanna, that is, who would also enjoy some attention.



Started a bit of sheet composting by the rose trellis using the manure from the chicken coop. Boy, the storms and all the rain leaking into the coops brought out Barnyard essence more than I have ever smelled it before. It was pretty nasty. Mostly the coop with cement underneath suffered the most, while the coops with a sand floor did much better. I guess it only makes sense. When I think of the barns built for the commercial housing of chickens and other livestock, I can't even bare to think of what that must be like. Yuck. It is going to take a lot of manure to fill in this area, and I'm just not sure I'll end up with enough by the end of the season, but we'll see. It would be awesome if I didn't have to rototill, though!



I also just had an idea about how to landscape the front yard. So far I haven't been able to picture the finished yard very well, partly due to the fact that it slopes downward toward the horsebarn. Visually, it should slope more toward the house. Although the downward slop is great for drainage issues, I think I would like to diminish that slope a bit. So here's my idea.

Along the back of the horse barn, instead of building another section onto this end, I think it might be cool to begin to make some raised beds. Here's the view of the horse barn from the deck of the house:


I kind of started to get this idea when I began to look at the fencing that is behind the goat and horse barns:

I really love the look of this fencing, but I am realizing, as I am tearing down the goat barn, that the fencing is limiting how I am thinking of using the property. It is basically useless because it is falling down and rotting, and it wouldn't keep any animal but horses in. Because I want goats, it just isn't going to serve the purpose it was put up for. The posts are absolutely incredible to look at. I didn't measure them, but I'm going to bet that many of them are probably as big as 8 4x4's connected together. 6 at the least. They really are magnificent. So I think it would be cool to use the posts for the raised beds.

I would put the first bed against the horse barn and make it fairly high, lowering the height of each subsequent bed. I haven't decided if I should make a walkway between each one, although that would make the most sense as far as gardening goes, or if I would jam them all together, creating a bit of a sloped effect. If I did that, I would have to make sure that I make a walkway of some sort between each bed, but perhaps the beams themselves, because they are so large, would serve that purpose just fine.

I also started reading some old Organic Gardening mags that I found in the road house and found a great issue on building ponds. I still have the old tub from the house and it could definitely be used as part of a pond. It would be quite excellent, actually, because I would be able to drain it easily. I could bury it in the first bed, and use the shower back of the tub to grow some climbing plants. (The tub is quite ugly to look at it, so I would probably have to paint it as well.)So that's one option.

The other option would be to create a pond on the north side of the sauna building. There are a mess of untameable lilacs that I want to dig up, and the pond would fit perfectly there. I would actually extend the pond by making a plastiv liner section as well. The tub alone would be quite small and am not sure it would be worth it. I guess it is easier to keep a bigger pond clean than a small one. But what would be cool about having the pond by the sauna is that it would be a way for me to begin to change the structure of the driveway. I don't like the driveway coming up so close to the house, and the pond would really help to close that off. I could make a brick pathway from the pond to the house. I think it would be quite welcoming.

I am excited about this project now and would prefer to be working on that then on the goat barn, but I really do need to continue to focus on that.