magic is everywhere

Getting my horsey on

Meet Hudson:

John and I recently dragged Sam to an open house at a local horse rescue. The place is called Black Mountain View Farm Draft Horse Rescue and it’s absolutely amazing.

Currently, the rescue has about 25 horses. Most of them are draft horses like Hudson, who is no longer able to work because he lost an eye. Some of the horses are seniors and some have arthritis or other painful conditions that make them – how can I put this? – not useful for pulling plows or buggies.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who use draft horses and treat them well and then retire them to nice grassy pastures, but that’s not the story here.

Most of the horses at Black Mountain View Farm are saved from kill pens, which is as horrible as it sounds.

Imagine, you’ve spent your whole life doing your best to pull stuff for your humans, and when you just can’t take one more step, they sell you to exporters who take you to Mexico or Canada for slaughter.

Not that it matters one bit, but not all of the horses that are shipped off are older or disabled like Hudson. A lot of them are healthy, vibrant animals who just aren’t wanted anymore, for any number of reasons.

Including pregnant mares, y’all. Black Mountain View Farm has two mares who came to them pregnant. (Happy ending: the mares are no longer pregnant and there are two beautiful foals romping around at their sides.)

I really can’t say enough about this place.

The owner told me that she normally has about 50 horses on the farm, but the price of draft horses has exploded, and so she can’t afford to save as many. If you’re so inclined, please follow along on Facebook, where you can learn about the horses they’re working to save and chip in where you can.

If you have ever thought you might like to keep horses at home, many of these guys are adoptable, and rescues can always use volunteers to feed and groom horses, muck out stalls, etc.

Stay tuned for more photos of these gorgeous babies!

August 14, 2021

First toms of 2021

They’re going on a salad tout de suite!

August 7, 2021

Scarf

I’m determined to get serious about knitting.

It’s been a on-again/off-again thing for me. My last project was a huge Doctor Who scarf I made for my friend, Zach, but that took like 4 years.

There’s definitely not enough dopamine in a 4 year scarf project to keep me going.

So I’m making this new scarf out of rainbow yarn. Just a straight up garter stitch with some knitting on the sides to keep it from curling. This is attempt 14. Some of my previous attempts were decidedly un-scarf-life. But I’m sticking with it.

This is happening!

August 5, 2021

Veggie Update

The garden is going gangbusters! Here are my favorite shots:

You guys. There are plants and they’re growing! I’m so excited.

August 2, 2021

Love

My husband just spent 4 hours detangling this $4 skein of rainbow yarn I carelessly unraveled and I’ve never been more in love.

August 1, 2021

Prepping for seedlings

I am so excited about growing stuff. Like stupid excited.

About 10 days ago, I planted beans. What I mean is I actually put beans in the ground and covered them with dirt. Now they look like this:

Bean plants — Multi-colored beans grown from seeds

Take that, Jack!

(That was a Jack and the Beanstalk reference, in case you missed it.)

Filling the Pots

Anyway, John suggested that we use some of our 4 cubic yards of dirt to fill pots for next year’s seedlings. Brilliant! So I did it. Then I lined them up in trays and it looked so cool, I took a photo:

Seed pots — Pinterest-worthy shot of my seedling pots

Interlude

After I filled the pots, I left them on the grass and went back to working on the driveway.

La la la. Stuff happened. Here’s a cute photo of our dogs to pass the time:

The Horror

A little while later, the driveway was finished and John decided to park the truck on it.

Oh god. The humanity.

My screams could not penetrate the air conditioned comfort of the truck’s cab as he ran squarely over my pots.

Broken pots — Oh dear pots, my heart breaks for thee.

Squished!

Since eye-witness testimony is sketchy at best, I did a quick forensic evaluation, which I learned about from television. I submit that the tire tracks in this photo match the right front tire of the defendant’s RAM 1500 on all class characteristics. I also found 18 matching individual characteristics.

So basically, he’s dead.

No not really. I still love him, even though he squished the pots. He even suggested I take this photo to document the act for blogging purposes. You can see how weary and heartbroken I was by the coating of stone dust on my shoe.

I was able to salvage most of them, and even distributed the dirt from the tire-track pot to other pots that were mangled, but not fatally.

So here’s to future seedlings! You are the true survivors.

July 31, 2021

The driveway that almost killed me

We have a very cool, very large barn on our property. And there’s an asphalt driveway that connects it to the road. But there was one small problem. We couldn’t open the doors.

See, the asphalt driveway leads to the center sliding doors, which is fine, but on either side, there is a set of smaller doors that open outward. Annoyingly, the turf was graded all wrong and we couldn’t open the doors.

It’s project time!

I mentioned in my Dirt post that we had 47,000 pounds (one ton) of gravel delivered to our driveway.

Yes, I know one ton is actually 2,000 pounds, but that math is meaningless when you have literally one ton of gravel on your driveway that needs to go somewhere else on your driveway and you only have one shovel.

Anyway, we used some of the gravel to line the bottom of the raised beds and to fill the bottom of the holes we made (by hand with a post-hole digger) for the garden fence. After that horror was complete, we turned to fixing the driveway.

Step 1: Dig a hole

I’m getting pretty good at digging holes. So good, in fact, that I kind of look forward to starting a new one. For this reason I was excited about this project for about 5 seconds.

Here’s the thing: grass is evil. Its roots get all in there and tangle together and it takes a crowbar to rip it out.

That’s not a joke. Here’s what it looks like:

That’s 69 inches of forged steel that weighs more than a 40″ television. The weight is useful when you slam the bar into the ground because it gets low and helps you rip out roots and rocks and stuff. It’s not so useful when you’re pulling the bar back out of the ground, which you will be doing about 6,000 times during this project.

But wait, there’s more!

After you break up the dirt with the giant crow bar, you get to dig it out. I immediately discovered that the giant crowbar didn’t really get the job done, so I had to break the dirt up even more with a spade.

And what did we do with all this precious, nutrient-dense dirt once we got it out of the ground? We threw it in the flowerbed, of course.

Step 2: Weedblock, or “Nature Weighs In”

At last we had a big hole in the ground. John build a little frame around it with some scrap landscape ties and then got down on all fours to tack down the weed block. That’s when it started to rain.

Raining Happy GIF from Raining GIFs

(We were actually under a tornado warning, but don’t tell my Dad.)

We decided to seek shelter until the rain eased up, then we were back at it, flexing our baby muscles in the less menacing but still very wet rain. John laid the weed block while I began the neverending process of shoveling gravel into the cart.

Step 3: Gravel

Gravel Did Someone Say Gravel GIF from Gravel GIFs

So much shoveling.

We have one real shovel, plus the spade, and somehow, working side by side, John and I managed to load it all up and drag it over to the hole we made, which was more like a small pond with all the rain.

Project Complete!

And here we are, with a cool little driveway extension that not only makes a cool crunching sound when you walk on it, but lets us open the barn doors and gives us more room to park the truck.

And the best part is, there’s no more gravel on the driveway. Win!

July 31, 2021

Dirt

So my husband ordered dirt.

A lot of dirt.

I’m told it’s “four cubic yards” of dirt. Which is much more than you think it is. Here’s a video I found that proves that:

A dump truck just like this dumped this amount of dirt on my driveway (but this is not my driveway).

He also ordered one ton of gravel. I always thought one ton was the same as 2,000 pounds but turns out it’s actually more like 47,000 pounds. I know because John and I personally moved all of it from one place to another with a shovel. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Space

Last fall, John and I pulled a Green Acres and moved to the country. At last we would have space for all the belongings that two people can possibly accumulate before finding each other later in life. (Our stuff had exceeded the capacity of our two-bedroom apartment and filled, not one, but two large storage spaces.)

Our new home is a 1930 Craftsman with full, unfinished basement and attic. It sits on about half an acre, with a large barn in back. Half an acre may not seem like much, but to former apartment dwellers like us, it’s expansive.

More important than the physical space, though, is the mental space. We’re both creative, introverted people and we needed a place for our energy to spread out without bumping into other people on all sides.

So we moved to the country. And we had plans. So many plans. We envisioned our large lot as a kind of practice farm, where we could hone our farming skills before buying a bigger, even more remote piece of property in about five years.

Why the dirt?

It started with a garden.

My parents had a big vegetable garden, and John had one for a time as well. We wanted to set aside part of the space to grow our own veggies. We decided to build some raised beds and plant with abandon. This, of course, required that we shovel the dirt into a cart and drag it halfway across the yard, load by load, to fill the beds.

Next, we wanted a wildflower garden. I’m a sucker for wildflowers. And of course I’m going to raise bees. Obviously. So we need pollen. This meant dragging even more carts of dirt to another spot in the yard. There’s progress on that (at least in the dragging dirt department):

These two projects, along with a few smaller planting beds and some pots for seedlings, made 4 cubic yards of dirt seem like a good idea. And it was! Not only did we get all these projects off to a grand start, but we grew new muscles in the process.

We couldn’t be more excited about our shiny new farming skills. And the beans. (Especially the beans!)

And the gravel? Well that’s a subject for another post.

July 31, 2021