So much wind!

It has been very windy for 3 days. Thursday was warm and windy, Friday and today were cold and windy. Still we have walked. This winter, we have missed only a handful of days not doing our daily walk, in spite of the cold. The only days we missed were raining hard or the couple days we couldn’t get out of our driveway and road due to snow. We have walked the Huckleberry Rails to Trails when the 10 foot wide path was narrowed to a single person track because of ice, walked in light rain and snow flurries. But the wind makes it an uncomfortable event. No matter how many layers we wear or how fast we walk, a strong wind on a cold day is miserable.

After our walk today and egg delivery, I bundled up in the barn coat and a hat and got part of the pruning done, but not cleaned up. The rose, the grape vine, and the small plum tree were taken care of. You can see in the background, the chicken tractor that blew over and broke that still hasn’t been dealt with.

I might have to re visit the grape vine after I refresh my knowledge on how far back to cut the vines. When it starts leafing out this year, I am going to “fence” it in so the deer don’t decimate it again. The little plum is kind of sorry looking. The deer nibbled off the main trunk when it was very small so it has developed an alternate main trunk. All I did with it was remove the shoots growing inward. It too needs to be fenced in. I may just run the electric fence from the garden around both of them and retrain myself to go around the other side of the woodpile to get to the chicken coop. It was too windy to deal with the larger fruit trees that also need some serious pruning. I think I will just gather it all and put it in the burn barrel and let it dry out there until the late winter/spring annual burn ban is lifted, then run the hose down to the burn barrel to control and grass burning off around it.

After doing that and returning to the house, I was too restless on this cold but sunny day, so I bundled back up, put on my boots, and went up to survey the stuff that was dumped near the top of our creek. The cooler was brought back up the bank, the branches that were broken by the tumbling chair were removed, and the situation evaluated. We have a wide webbed auto tow strap with hooks on both ends and it appears that the chair is a rocking recliner on a round base that the strap can be wrapped around. When hooked up to the tractor, pulling it back up the bank shouldn’t be too difficult. Walking back up the road to the driveway, assorted trash that had been dumped or blown from elsewhere was gathered in the cooler to be taken to the dump along with the chair next week. It truly amazes me that people just toss trash out of their vehicle windows or put it in the back of a pick up truck where it blows out. We live on a gravel road less than a mile long with only 9 houses on it. There is a man we see many times each week cleaning up the trash that is dropped or blown across the road from the houses near the walking trail. Every couple of days, he picks up a garbage bag full of beer boxes, pizza boxes, cans, bottles, discarded masks, plastic bags, and other debris. We clean up our road from the edge of our property to the main road. Anything we pick up there has been discarded by someone who lives on this road as it doesn’t go through. And we have taken it upon ourselves to clean the ditches down the main road until the back of the car is full of bags.

The amount of time out in the wind today wore me out and contributed to a headache. I tried zooming with the spinning group, but ended up sitting in the dark and not contributing much, signing off before it was over.

Tomorrow is supposed to be about 10 degrees warmer and not as windy. We will tackle the chair removal then. And hope that whoever dumped it there, doesn’t decide that our property is their personal dumping ground.