Category: Farm

The wind finally died down over night, the sun is bright, the day still chilly, but doesn’t feel frigid with it calm and sunny. We took our walk, a bit longer than most days, just because it was nice, then came home to tackle “the dump.”

It takes a very inconsiderate a**wipe to dump discarded furniture on someone’s private property when one of the county convenience centers is only 2.5 miles from here and the other less than 5, both will huge dump trailers and assistance at the farther one.

We hauled the double hooked tow strap up to the tractor and on down the road to the creek edge. The chair was about 20 feet down an embankment, near the edge of the creek. With the tractor directed the way it looked like the chair would be easiest to drag up the embankment, I scrambled down and attached a hook to the metal framework, hubby attached the other end to the back of the tractor. The tractor pulled it up the hill until it got caught on a small tree. Hubby couldn’t free it, so we turned the tractor around and started pulling the opposite way, it freed from that tree but got caught near a larger tree. Another reverse of direction as the road is narrow and banked, shortening the strap by hooking both hooks on the frame and looped around the tractor blade frame and it popped up onto the road.

You can see the creek down the hill over the arm of the chair.

We loaded it into the bucket of the tractor, picked up bottles, styrofoam clam shell containers and plates, and loaded it back down to barn.

The convenience center isn’t open on Sunday, so it will have to wait until tomorrow to be loaded into the old CRV (I think it will fit in the back) and driven down to where it should have been taken in the first place.

By removing it, the cooler, and the trash, we hope to indicate that it isn’t a dump. In those first few years here, we removed a water heater, a stove, a washing machine, part of a vehicle, and dozens and dozens of tires, along with the bottles and cans that were impacting the creek and someone’s water supply, maybe ours.

I wish everyone felt the same way we do about treating the environment and other’s property with respect.

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.