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.

As you can see from my header photo, we live on acreage. The house sits in the midst of fields that in the past have been used for grazing, but mostly used to grow hay to be cut for local farmers use with their cattle. The upper part of the farm above the barn in an alluvial dump from the last ice age and is littered with rocks and boulders too large and too numerous to move and has been left alone since we bought the property. The prior owner had a herd of miniature horses and donkey’s here and they grazed down much of the brush and cedar trees. The area has a creek that is very dependent on rain across most of the width of the north edge of the property that joins with a creek that has never totally run dry since we moved here that serves as a water source for the house to the north of us and as it meanders back and forth under the fence line that divides us from the farm to the west, serves to water cattle before the two creeks merge and disappear into a sink hole below a rock face. The old creek bed runs just off the west edge of our farm and in heavy rain still carries the water that fills the lowest part of the sinkhole faster than it can disappear into the ground.

The first thing we did after the land was turned over to us and the horses and donkeys removed was to plant daylilies and River Birch trees along the top run off creek to help stabilize it’s path and keep it from running out into the road beyond our house, and about a half dozen trees in the alluvial field, though I am unsure any of them survived, the Birch trees are gorgeous. But by not having grazers on the land, the alluvial field has filled in with volunteer oaks, Tulip poplars, cedars, maples, and some less desirable scrub like Autumn Olive and blackberries.

The fields are hayed each spring and mowed or hayed each fall depending on the summer weather, but as hay fields, they harbor groundhogs, field mice, chipmunks, rabbits, squirrels that run from one rock pile to another as each rockpile has one or more trees growing in it.

The rodents except the mice stay clear of the house, because of having two large dogs in and out and a flock of chickens loose during all daylight hours. But the mice sometimes find their way into the house and evidence of them found usually in the cabinet under the utility sink in the laundry room, but very occasionally, one makes it into the main downstairs part of the house. This requires that they be removed. I am not putting out poison as I don’t want to kill the birds that might eat a poisoned mouse, nor will I use glue traps. If you have ever seen a mouse caught in a glue trap, you know that that is not humane at all. If I caught them in safe release traps they would just turn around and come right back in again. That leaves snap traps. Now PETA would have a fit, but a snap trap is quick and rids the house of the disease carrying rodents, but snap traps are tricky to load. I have never had one snap down fully on a finger, but have had them snap in my hand. Right now, there is a wily one that has gotten the bait off two traps without getting caught. This morning, rebaiting them I did catch the edge of finger on the nail. No permanent damage, but WOW, that stings a bit. I know PETA would say, serves you right. Let them live with mice in their houses, I won’t.

You might say, have a cat, but when daughter and her family lived with us for a couple of years with 2 cats, there was no change in the number entering the house, and when we had a barn cat that slept in a box on our front porch, her food seemed to attract more than she caught.