Just to add a bit of variety for you southerners, we had a foot of snow his week. It’s going now, a nice melt today, and we WILL get an actual autumn for a month or so. We’d better, or else I am lodging a complaint.
My gardening is mostly limited to a large veggie garden, and a large potato patch near my barn. Recycled horse manure made the potato patch, from what was previously willow swamp and beaver dam. Amazing what horse manure, time and a rototiller can accomplish. The “potato king” so far this fall weighs 2.25 lbs. Still lots of potatoes to harvest, there may yet be a bigger one than this. Usually about 2000 lbs of potatoes go into winter storage and for sale locally.
I have a small flower garden near the front door of the house, lilies and iris, one little rose that struggles, but did well this year. Early spring, a few tulips and crocus come up in there before the lilies. I like to grow things that are “hard to kill”- we get winter here. It is now protected by a chicken wire fence, since otherwise the deer eat everything. The veggie garden as well, a 7 foot fence around it- otherwise the deer eat it all. The deer get onto our sundeck, and lick the living room windows, look in at us, sniff noses with the house cat. “Bucky-Boy”, who has two points on his antlers (one with a curve in it) and is semi tame, gives me the stink-eye when he is relaxing in the indoor arena in the heat of the summer, and doesn’t even get up when we come in. Sometimes up to 10 deer reposed in the arena, sleeping and farting and not wanting to get up and leave. They eat my fake flower brush boxes, or try to, much to my dismay. Deer, like unicorns, eat flowers. The arena has to be “de-deered” before riding. That is a form of “cutting”, but done with deer instead of cows. Hunters and Jumpers get good at it, with practice, while the rider shouts, “Everyone who is a deer, get up, and get OUT”. Once de-deered, riding may commence. Just hope that they don’t come galloping back to the gate, turn and jump back into the ring before you are finished riding. Can be interesting… horse and airborne deer meet head to head. That has happened once. Everyone survived. We are hoping that no hunter shoots Bucky this fall. Would be a bit like blowing Bambi’s head off. But they probably will.
My horses mow my barn/arena area, and do a very nice job with this. They are my “lawn boys”, and take their job seriously. They go out to work at night, and waddle back into the paddocks and sleep during the daytime. I ride in the late afternoon, when they wake up again. My own pasture work involves making burn piles, picking up enough burnable crap on the never cleared pastures to be able to run the tractor over it all with the brush hog. I’ve built a new pasture this summer, out of an area that was previously unpassable with downed trees, brush etc. Finished it this summer, started it several years ago. Looks like a golf course now, and grew a ton of grass, naturally subirrigated. Several more burn piles to go in this area, soon, to get rid of the last of the detritus. I’m very pleased with it. So were my two mares, who helped with the project.
