Evidently, the best way to get rid of them (as in most effective, not most fun) is to pull them by hand when they are just about to bloom, as the roots have given most of their energy to the flowering and are at their weakest ebb of the season.  So, all five of us donned leather gloves and systematically walked though 1/3 of the pasture and yanked them all.  My hope is, we will have to do this only one more time when the grow back again to weaken them enough to say uncle and find some other place to live.  Like good fences, no blooming patches of thistles makes good neighbors!

one year ago…”First Celery”

Martin ready with some buckets of water, backpack sprayer, and shovels to snuff out fires.

Here, Linda spreads the backfire, moving the fire against the wind.

Once the backfires were lit, we could let the wind take the fire to the backfires.

Martin and Linda on patrol to make sure the fire doesn’t creep upwind to the pine trees.  The mowed path nest to the trees does the most to stop the flames.

The final result.  It’s great to have an excuse to play with fire.

one year ago…”Landscape Architecture Class Visit”

Martin and I went on a surveying mission in the back pasture yesterday.  The day before this photo, he walked through the back “pond” through many feet of snow.  When we came back the next day, we saw his footprints led to nowhere, for if you look in the center of the photo you can see the dark remains of footprints that were implanted in deep snow the day before are now under water.

It’s a good time of year to get out and move around a bit.  Water needs to be channeled and drained, trees need to be  checked on for winter rabbit damage, and boots need to get wet.

The foreground of this photo shows some of the willow cuttings I just stuck in the ground in this low area and didn’t mow or graze the last year. They were able to compete with the dense sod just fine.  So, I will continue this spring with their advance down this drainage.  Goats will be very happy to have browse!

one year ago…”Feeding Chickens in Winter”

This shows a view below the tanks and the house in the background (the drain field behind us).  Last week I seeded the path up to the pasture in regular lawn grass and lightly covered it with straw – the pasture part in this photo, I bought some  grass and legume seeds.  Getting the seeds is the easy part – first, I needed to get out the old disc we bought with the farmall cub.  It had sat for maybe five years – finally got it extricated from it’s last resting place, then disced up the area, spread the seeds, raked over them, then retrieved the electric netting and solar charger to keep the chickens out, who would find the grass a legume seeds a treat to dig out of the ground.  Now all it has to do is rain every few days until the seed gets established.

You may also notice a new watermark on the photos.  I’ve discovered that blog photos have a life of their own on the internet.  Many times people have asked me to use a photo and I’ve always granted permission.  So I’m going to start putting the high hopes logo watermark on them, so if they do reappear, they will at least have a visual link back to the source without the authors having to necessarily interrupt their text with an acknowledgement.

one year ago…”Another Skystream Meets the Wind”

So, off we go getting some samples.

one year ago…”Garlic Up!”

Here’s a curly willow before pruning.

Here’s what it looks like after it’s pruned or “coppiced.”

I use the prunings to start more willows.  I put 88 in the ground. They seem to grow by just sticking them into the ground – we experimented last year just sticking them in a low spot and they survived without weeding, or even mowing.  So, I will move the patch down the lowland.  If nothing else, the goats will love the browse.

one year ago…”Claire at Mock Trial”

As soon as the ground unfreezes, we’ll cut these down and plant many more in the back pasture.  The test plantings we did last year, just into deep pasture grasses survived year one, and the willows offer great food for the animals, so we’ll try doing more this spring.

one year ago…”InBIO Park”

A bit later, he was helping mulch some trees and ran out of things to do, so he asked if he could go look at the swamp, as he refers to it.  I watched from a distance as he first climbed part way up the fence, peering in.  I made a bet with myself that it wouldn’t be long before he crawled over the fence and went inside to look.  Sure enough, the pull was too strong and he crawled over the fence. 

A few minutes later he came running at full speed towards me, face red with heat in the 90 degree day “Dad, there’s a turtle in the swamp!”  He shaped his hands about as big as a dinner plate and retold the story of the turtle siting.  As I went back to see if I could spy the turtle he turned to me and said “Dad, the farm is getting a lot bigger now.”  I asked him what he meant and he said “Now we have a swamp, we have a baby forest, and a wind turbine.”  Even though you can’t buy that comment with MasterCard, I still thought it was priceless.

one year ago…”Neil Smith Wildlife Refuge”

This is what it looked like in the spring of 2005.  Martin can’t float his boat.  I got the idea for fencing this area off from the summer camp I worked at in northern Minnesota.  Naturalist and nature photographer Les Blacklock suggested that an area near the center of camp be fenced off from regular foot traffic and be called the “exclosure.”  The idea was that a different group of plants might grow up just by leaving it alone.  As no part of the farm is left undisturbed, I thought this small section could be spared.

So this mudhole was fenced off, I ordered some marsh and wet (mesic) prairie seeds from Ion Exchange and waited.  The area is hard to manage as it gets runoff from the surrounding crop fields and a few times a year water rushed through like a small rapid stream, but most of the time it is dry or muddy.  I thought if I could establish a canopy of marsh plants, the water might stick around longer in the shade of the plants.

Here’s a peek at one of the plants to pioneer along the edge of the mudhole – Prairie Cordgrass.  It’s been a wet year (5 more inches of rain this week) and the exclosure has had continuous water since snowmelt.

Butterfly milkweed has also been successful in addition to many other plants.  It is full of tadpoles, different kinds of dragonflies and butterflies, and many other things I’m sure I don’t see.

one year ago…”Thingamajig Thursday #70″

One of these items is this fence. We’ll call it the “Leaning Fence of Melbourne.” It’s a bit of a pain to tear out the old, but this one is way past its prime.

Tearing out woven wire fence involves pulling out fencing staples from old posts, pulling the old posts out of the ground and ripping the old wire away. The wire is usually the hardest part as commonly there is of soil and grass above the bottom wire of the fence that makes is hard to pull up. Here’s some detritus from the old fencing – the salvageable woven wire will be turned into tomato cages, the rest to the recycling at the landfill.

A section of new fence, standing tall and proud.

one year ago…”Not in Our House”