The trees have finally turned color and the farm is lovely when the sun comes out. Or at least when it's not raining. It is oddly warm, however, and I worry that the plants will think it's spring and start growing, only to be zapped when a seasonally appropriate cold spell hits. But, for now, the colors are wonderful...
October is almost gone and I have not written a single blog post. It's harvest season. Johnny has made lots of cider. I've canned ugly tomatoes and lots of pears. Halloween approaches and here is what it looks like on the farm... and at Huddleston Pond...
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| A Giant Pacific Salamander appeared in the orchard one morning. It was about a foot long. |
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| Here's the salamander |
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| And here's the foot |
One fine day I birded Huddleston Pond in Willamina with a new birding friend...
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| Green Heron and fall colors |
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| Green Heron up close |
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| Pied-billed Grebe |
As Halloween approached, so did the local ghosts and bats...
The lawn llama dressed for the pumpkin and witch season....
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!
Well, we built a bayou and one swamp critter came. What's next, I wonder?
Our farm pond turned into a swamp, full of cattails and invasive yellow iris, among other things. What was missing this dry summer was water. So Johnny decided to do something about it, since we irrigate the garden from "the pond". Or try to.
Never to do anything halfway, he borrowed a friend's big excavator and persuaded his nephew to fly here from Illinois to operate it. Jeff is a jack of many trades, including an experienced big equipment operator, and has done many pond projects. And so he arrived August 24 and dug right in, so to speak.
Here is the dam and little pool that I irrigated from. The pipe you can see in the first photo ran all the way out of this pool through the swamp and dam and out the downstream side of the dam.
Two days after starting the project, Jeff was done with the pond. He spent the weekend at the music festival nearby. Then moved the equipment to the culvert under our driveway. The culvert was 3/4 full of sand and gravel. Johnny wanted it cleaned out before the rains arrive. So Jeff dug what he could with the big excavator and Johnny hauled off the leavings.
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| Happy with their completed project, Johnny and Jeff |
Jeff flew back to Illinois one week after arriving. Johnny spent the next two weeks trying to get the two-foot deep gunk inside the culvert, where the excavator could not reach, cleaned out. He had lots of work-saving ideas but what ultimately worked was lowly hand tools like hoe and shovel while lying on his belly on long boards laid from bank to bank. Once pulled out with hoe, he shoveled the sand/gravel/dirt mix onto the banks. He had to get creative to remove two big branches in the center of the 20 foot long culvert. The culvert still has sand/pebbles on the bottom third, and in the middle since his hoe couldn't reach that far, but hopefully more will wash out with a heavy rain now that it has an excavator dug hole to flow into.
Below is his work platform on the upstream end. The upstream section has a rock bottom so he could stand on the bottom and lay over the one board to clean out the culvert.
The water trickles slowly in from the narrow upstream section of the creek, on the right in the photo below..
After Johnny removed his drainage pipe, the pond filled, but not to overflowing, since the earth was very thirsty and soaked up the creek water, plus there is a leak beside the dam that lets water continue to flow into the creek below the dam. But I was again able to pump from the almost-full pond... with a brand new pump Johnny installed. And then we waited for the rains to arrive, fill the pond, and wash everything floating on the pond over the dam and downstream...
But the ground eventually soaked up all the water it wanted, apparently, as the dam began to overflow just a little, enough to wash downstream the gunk that had formed atop the water. It was beginning to look like a pond! There is still a huge area of cattails and sedges and, alas, parrot feather... making it look more like a southern bayou than a northern pond.
Who knows what critters may be attracted to this bayou of Oregon? Let the rains begin!
On Saturday, August 19, our hot water heater erupted. Our hot water heater is on a platform at the highest point of our two story house... for a reason. Johnny had it plumbed for solar originally and also for the hot water from the wood stove downstairs. Since hot water rises, the water warmed by the wood stove circulates upward to the tank, theoretically lowering our electric bill. The cooler water at the bottom of the tank circulates downward to be pre-heated by the wood stove. This time of year, that's a moot point.
I was watering in the greenhouse when I heard a thump which I assumed was Johnny doing something. He also heard it and thought a bird had hit a window. He went outside and saw water gushing out of the roof. He hollered. I went upstairs and saw water gushing out of the hot water heater, all over the floor and everything on it... which in my messy office is a lot of stuff.
So that began the Great Hot Water Heater saga. He hollered for me to turn off the hot water heater circuit breaker. He turned the water off and hooked up a hose to drain the tank safely out the upstairs window into the back yard. We mopped up the flood upstairs and rescued what was being soaked.
And Johnny investigated what had happened. He says the lower heating element had blown out of the tank. It was an 80 gallon tank so there was a lot of water... 80 gallons worth. We were lucky to be home and inside when it happened! If we'd been gone for the day our whole house would have been flooded and I dread to think what would have happened when the still plugged in tank ran out of water to heat. After some gratefulness time, and a lot of cleaning up, we tried to find another 80 gallon tank to replace this one, installed new in 2010.
After much searching on the internet and finding only horrendously expensive tanks, Johnny went to town... and learned that nobody sells 80 gallon tanks anymore because they are "dangerous". They are still made but are "boilers", not hot water heaters. And not for installation in homes. So he bought a 50 gallon tank.
And then commenced the Great Tank Remodeling Project. But first the old heater had to come out. Happily we have friends and neighbors who are big and strong and volunteered to help. I did not watch the proceedings so do not know how they managed except Johnny said they had no problem. He had built a wooden platform from ladder to tank cupboard to see what had happened to cause the tank eruption and also, when he deemed it was not repairable, to cut four pipes holding it in place and the electric wire. That wooden structure served as a platform to get the old heater out and to a place where the two big guys could get it down. We opened the big window at the foot of the stairs and put up a wooden ramp to slide the heater down.
Then Johnny went to work remodeling the new heater to accommodate the solar and wood stove connections.Those same strong friends returned to put the new tank into place. Photos show the scene...
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| It takes a lot of tools to perform surgery on a hot water heater |
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| the banished 80 gallon hot water heater |
Black Oystercatcher monitoring season is over. The Road's End nest successfully fledged their one chick. I was never able to find any BLOY at Cape Kiawanda so who knows if any nested there. My big toenails fell off and finally healed and have new nails growing in. My hips that were overworked with all this hiking steep trails have improved and only scream occasionally.
Meanwhile, back on the home front, Johnny finished putting up the high fences around our 4 fields, with gates we can open to let the wild things through. I put up a couple trail cameras to see what wild things we have. That has been exciting! Here's a sampling...
Well, I set one up first to catch whatever had been raiding our strawberry bed and eating all the strawberries, even though they were covered with mesh. Naturally, it was a raccoon.
We weighted the mesh down with firewood. That seemed to work. Then the strawberries ended and I moved the trail camera down to a path where we had been seeing little scats full of berries and suspected the gray foxes were back. We got horse and dog and deer... plus eye shine at night from something or other.
I moved the trail camera to the horse paddock which is unoccupied at night, has horse and dog during the day. Eureka! I like the fuzzy antlers on this young buck...
But there was the problem of where to aim the camera to get a low animal like a fox or a tall animal like a deer... and to avoid gates and railings and bushes...
The reason we love the gray foxes is because they eat rodents... and not chickens. They are pretty small and so eat small things. And they climb trees!
Success! Black tip to the tail tells me it's a Gray Fox
Then I found some bigger scat I could not identify in the arboretum. So I set up a second trail camera along the deer path behind our A field. And captured a spotted fawn. I have now moved that camera to the open gate behind the B field, since that's the only way the deer and everything else can get into that field, thanks to the new very high fences, and jump from there to the A or C fields, over lower fences.
Meanwhile, back in the horse paddock, the fox was still moving through...
And so were the deer...
I look forward to seeing what the trail cameras find in the future. In another month, the bears should start showing up...
Where did July go?? The highlights of the month seem to have revolved around grandchildren. No, they did not visit nor did we... but technology is a wonderful thing and we enjoyed a Zoom concert by Kestrel singing and playing guitar and Cedrus accompanying him on the piano... his new piano. The occasion was a request from me for Grandmother's Day (a fictitious holiday I made up). Kestrel sang "Imagine" at my request. He also sang a Portuguese song that he has sung locally at an open mike. Cedrus is simply amazing on the piano and gets more amazing every time we hear him. There must be some incredibly fortuitous combination of musical genes on all sides of the family... generations removed. Those genes skipped right over Johnny and me.
Those same two kids then spent weeks in the Boston area at camps. These were not your ordinary summer camps. Kestrel's was a young writer's workshop at Bard College at Simon's Rock.
https://simons-rock.edu/academics/beyond-the-classroom/young-writers-workshop/
Kestrel has been writing novels since he was a little kid. This camp was like a coming out party for 16-year-old Kestrel. The introvert became extroverted and now has many long distance friends from camp and a whole new way of looking at story writing. Plus, he spent every weekend at nearby theaters with others from his camp watching incredibly well-acted plays. One of the plays was the best acted play Kestrel said he has ever seen... the seldom performed Shakespeare play, Henry VI Part 2. He was so inspired that he is now writing "Clyde V" -- in iambic pentameter!
Plus, on a less happy note, he got Covid. That gave him another set of friends since all the Covid kids (there were 15 of them) were isolated from the rest of the camp for the last week of the three week camp. And Kestrel became friends with all of them. Thanks to modern technology and smart phones, Kestrel is keeping in touch with his new found friends.
Meanwhile Cedrus was at an arts camp, Snow Farm, for two of those same weeks, taking ceramics plus painting and drawing.
https://www.snowfarm.org/
Cedrus, 14, whom I have considered to be an extrovert since birth, tells me that he is an ambivert... and his mother agrees. (I had to look up ambivert.) Whatever, he is extraordinarily good with people and now has a pile of 14-18 year old friends, all of whom were as excited about the arts as is he. I think that was one thing both mostly home-schooled boys were amazed at... how many young people share their passions. Although Cedrus has been drawing and painting forever, he had never done ceramics and was thrilled to learn. And in the drawing and painting side, he said he learned how to create the same thing he has before but in a different way.
Plus he did a metal smithing workshop where he got to make rings from a sheet of copper with a blowtorch. What young teen wouldn't love that?
Cedrus is very happy that one of the friends he made at camp lives just 20 minutes away from where he lives in California. (Most of the others were from the Boston and Springfield areas of Massachusetts.) Serendipity!
Munazza had found and arranged for these incredible camps and accompanied the kids to Boston at the beginning of Kestrel's camp, then hung out with Cedrus for that first week exploring Boston. When Cedrus started camp a week after Kestrel, she flew home. Two weeks later, Steve flew to Boston to accompany the kids back to California. What a busy summer!
Our grandson in Washington is having a busy summer, too. Kevin and Jessica's son has been working all summer for a CPA (and part time during the school year). Ian is a business student at a Univ. of Wash. business school. Just this week he flew to a convention in Las Vegas for an honorary organization he belongs to:
Ian found time (while driving) to phone us when he returned and tell us a bit about his Las Vegas adventure. His chapter of this Accounting Honor Society is from Univ. of Wash. Bothell. Ian is vice president of that chapter. To join a student has to have 3.0 GPA, be in a certain selection of majors, plus have a certain number of community service hours and professional hours. Ian has all of that.
This convention focused on professional development, chapter development, and networking. The University paid for it. Ian graduates in June and will take the CPA exam right after graduation. It is a four part exam that has to be taken all at once... and, he was told, there is a 98% chance that everyone who takes it will fail one part. Whew.
Ian is my usual partner on treks to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. However he is so busy now that I've asked him to just find a weekend to come to the farm and hang out with us. Hopefully, he'll be able to squeeze that in before school starts again. In the best of all worlds, Kevin's partner Kellin will be able to come with him. Kellin is an artist and an animal person, especially dogs, something that is much more like me than art or music or business sense!
Grandkids, my father once told me, stretch us to learn about worlds we never knew existed. How right he was.
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