Today we will talk about vinca major. The pretty blue-flowered ground cover that we loved when we lived on 133rd? Not so much any more. Want to get rid of that city-lot sized patch down by the barn?

Yes, because the stuff is wildly invasive, and it gets into the creek below, it can spread over the whole hundred acres. Right up there with tansey-ragwort and thistle.

We hop on the net to learn how to manage the stuff. By “manage” I mean “kill,” of course. First suggestion, we can dig it out. The roots can reach 2 feet into the soil, and if we were to attempt this huge excavation, and missed the slightest bit of root or stem, the thing would be right back. Nope. We’re going with Triclopyr. Larry is at this moment whacking the stuff down with the brush hog, and will fire up the back-pack sprayer as his second act.

“Hmm. Triclopyr sounds like some poison chemical. Thought you guys were all about habitat, nature, conservation.”

I know. Didn’t know, however, how big the problems were when we went about all uppity talking about saving the land, etc.
Triclopyr isn’t exactly Roundup, but it is close. So, there we are. Chagrined, but on it.

Now we’ll change the subject. Peter packed up some California sunshine and brought it to us last weekend. He and his dad got right to work building planter boxes for veggies and flowers inside the orchard:

That was just the first day. On Saturday morning Peter donned the power-saw chaps and the two drove the tractor and ATV out to the downed oak site for some additional manly entertainment. Several more loads of latent firewood have been deposited in the barn to await splitting, and while Larry collapsed with a much-deserved brewsky, Peter drove to Eugene to spend time with his sweet Amy girl.

Our rescue chair has been completed and we picked it up yesterday. It’s, well, adorable. No, really, that is just the right word, no matter how over-used. It was meant to go in the Chick Room, but it settled into the yellow room instead and it would be cruel to move it. Look at that little bird! See, it’s adorable:

I’ve been taking photos with my phone, mailing them to myself, and inserting them into the blog. But I just learned that you can’t click on the shots and enlarge them, as formerly. Maybe I’ll have to go back to downloading the photos onto my computer, then moving them. Maybe next time.

Meanwhile, I have one more photo for you. The completed, planted planter boxes, or at least one of the two:

I have to say, it looks way better in real life.

My job today was to hose down the porches. I have just noticed that the area I cleaned looks no better than the area not yet cleaned. Message? Right. I’m way too old to do unnecessary work like that, so I’m off, instead, to check on the vinca project. See you next time!

Spring also brings rain, this year, record-breaking rain. Enough! Please! But no-one is listening, and we are pinned inside for the duration, it seems.

Me: “Something’s wrong. I can’t get on line.” I have two default reactions when my computer fails me. Immediately call someone, or Give up and do something else.

Larry: “Yeah, I can’t get on, either. You connected to the Wood?” Larry has but the one reaction. Keep trying. Swear a little, maybe, punch buttons, or keys in this example.

He usually succeeds, but the process is painful to watch, and so I have wandered off and pay no attention when I hear him talking to someone on the phone. “Okay, you can get on now,” he calls down from his office.

Here’s what happened: Our new internet company, Alyrica, seems to think it’s okay to send the customer’s bill ’round on line. No paper, duh. Which would be fine, I guess, if they happened to have the correct on-line address for any given customer. Viehl has an “h” in it. Such a small oversight, but these Viels haven’t paid their bill for two months. Cut them off.

NOT OUR FAULT! Our kids just laugh. Sigh.

Several weeks ago I got an e-mail from a friend, Mary Crane, from Minnesota days in which she sent a photo of our first house. A sweet little two-bedroom with a finished attic where we tucked the boys when Jenny arrived. See, kids, this is where life began. Remember? I know Jenny won’t, but Peter and David should:

Thanks, Mary!

Here’s what’s going on today at the present Viehl house:

Finally getting started on Larry’s fire pit. The area behind the arbor will be paved with stone, a wall eventually built, and an as-yet un-purchased steel barrel/pot/thing installed. The idea is to have a place to rest in the evening with a glass of wine, watch the stars, which are pretty spectacular here away from the city lights. Warm our feet by the fire. Maybe roast a pig from time to time? Catch some rays on a sunny day (what sunny day, you ask). The arbor will be planted with eating, as opposed to wine, grapes, and some herbs–I don’t know what all–set artistically around. Going to be room for a picnic table, too. All this is good because we’ll have no grass around the house for the foreseeable. Nice to have somewhere outside to park, mud being the only other option this year, looks like.

As it isn’t actually raining at this very moment, we’re heading out to do a little sawing. Everything else, conservation-wise is stalled until the ground dries out. I walk down to the barn every morning to greet the trees, the birds, the grass which is certainly getting too tall to be grazed now. Seems cows like tender, new grass, not the old, seedy stuff. Oh, farming. Not as easy as it looks. The ancient apple tree, entangled in years of blackberry vines stands forlorn in the rain. The banks of Little Sometimes Creek, crowded with vines, an old oil barrel, rusted farm fences, wait for rescue. Patience. But we are getting older each day and do not have the far vistas of time we once enjoyed. Patience is a virtue for the young, I think.

Oh for heaven’s sake. Go saw something and stop being maudlin. Check.

“There’s a perfect example of the difference between us,” Larry says. We’re walking to the car from the hardware store.
“What? My boots?”
“Yes. They have chickens on them. I would never wear something like that.”
“Of course not. You’re a guy.”
“Even if I were a woman I wouldn’t wear them.”

Okay, this is coming from outer space. I’ve been wanting simple rubber boots for mucking about in the mud and there they were. A nice lady helped me, and these yellow ones were the only pair in my size. Even with my new understanding of gender fluidity, I still maintain that he can’t know what he would or wouldn’t wear, as a woman. As a farm woman.

“I think they’re cute,” I say.
“You hate chickens.”
“These aren’t real chickens. They’re representations of chickens. Anyway, I don’t hate chickens any more.”
“We should have shopped at Home Depot. They’d have a better selection.”

Happily squabbling, we head for home.

So what else has been going on? First, the lovely Gordon Davis is back at work helping us. We plan to have a shelf in the dining room, and Gordon has a good idea. Which he’ll execute. This involves selecting a plank from the reclaimed lumber warehouse in Salem and turning it over to Denali, a furniture manufacturing place Gordon knows about in Portland. Larry and Gordon both love poking around in moldy old warehouses, apparently, so one Saturday morning they headed down and picked out three candidate planks for my approval. The following Thursday, Larry and I stopped and chose the best one:

This is not a photo of the best one, just an example to show you the sort of think we’re looking for. Gordon, meanwhile, has been manufacturing the brackets which will hold the plank onto the wall. I’ll post a photo when complete.

And spring has finally arrived in the valley. The wild flowers are carpeting the oak copse. These are fawn lilies. Don’t know the name of the little blue ones.

Spring has meant bulbs, these last few years, provided by Kate Bryant, who has turned our rooftop in Portland into a real garden. She phoned to say she’d deliver this year’s tulips and daffodils, except, oops. Our rooftop has become a demolition site, courtesy of a leak in the apartment below us. No place to put the spring flowers, so I asked if we could have the pots at the farm this year instead. Happened that she had a reason to be in Corvallis anyway, and would deliver the flowers in the following week. So when we arrived this Thursday, here’s what we saw:

Almost looking like someone lives here. Still only mud around the house, of course, but beyond the fence, the oats are at least an honest green.

Don’t think there’s enough for a cow to eat, so we probably won’t have the funny calves for another month, if at all. We have a new fence along Llewellyn, we have an engineer planning a watering system using the old well, so I suppose they’ll arrive in good time. If I’ve learned anything this year, it is how to wait for it!

March 1. More sunshine than rain, so Larry and I could get to work on the downed oak. See below:

Yeah, and that’s just one fallen tree of maybe 15 around the property. Larry mans the saw, of course,

while I more or less pick up sticks and toss them on the burn pile. We both scrape the moss off the firewood that results, pile the wood onto the Ranger and unload it in the barn:

Then the pile of firewood has to be split and stacked. We rent a splitter, and though it’s really a three-man job, we wear ourselves out managing it anyway. A splitter is a wondrous machine, and it’s great fun to watch the pressure split the wood into fourths or eights, to see the growth patterns as the tree adjusted to the wind, to its neighbors, to the sun, disease, pests, over the course of hundreds of years.

To digress: my sister Mary introduced me to a small book called The Inner Life of Trees. Sounds a little new-agey, I agree, and you have to accept the premise that trees communicate with one another, but read the book and you’ll be transformed, or at least a little smarter than you were yesterday. The author writes about trees in his native Germany, and I’m not sure if German oaks and my Oregon White oaks share the behaviors he describes, but I am stunned to learn, for example, that the oaks in a wood communicate, in the ways they have, to determine when to start diverting energy to the generation of acorns. Which they all do in a single, given year. Not every year, see, because the foragers, deer, elk, and so on . . . well, I could go on, but the author is Peter Wohlleben, if you’re interested.

Back to my farm. FAQs:
1. Are you ever going to move down there permanently?
Not giving up our condo in Portland, if that’s what you mean.

2. But which place is, like, your home?
Both. We have two homes.

3. Do you consider yourself a farmer, then?
No. I consider myself a princess. (Apparently you don’t know me at all.)

4. Do you take food down there from Portland?
Sometimes, but there are actually grocery stores in Corvallis, and even in Philomath. Trader Joe’s. Market of Choice.
Safeway. We’re fine. Plus, there are even restaurants here and there. But no, we can’t walk to them.

5. Do you have any friends?
Well, we think we have pretty good friends in Portland, but we’ve met a neighbor or two here, and had an amusing
conversation with some people in line at the Post Office this morning.

6. Aren’t you out in the middle of nowhere? Isn’t the quiet a little eerie after the “urban texture” of Portland?
It’s not that quiet. There are thousands of geese flying up and down the valley each day, and they make plenty of
noise. Then, it’s spring now, or supposed to be, and look who we saw on our window sill this morning:

We call them peepers, or tree frogs, though I have no idea who they really are. There must be a million of them down
in the creek by the barn, and they sing us to sleep every night. There are also robins chirping about. Larry was surprised
to see them. Thought they few south for the winter, he observed. This IS south, we were told. Oh.

About the title of this piece, we drive up each time, hoping to see signs of growth in the oats we planted this fall. (By “we planted” I of course mean “Ryan, Cow-Guy, caused to be planted”) We congratulate ourselves on the green haze we believe we see.(Again, by “we” I mean “I”. Larry, whose color-blindness has never abated, has no idea if the fields are green, brown, or a sort of purplish gray.) We hope to see that the continuation of the fence along Llewellyn has been installed. We hope that Jason, Habitat-Guy will have come to burn the massive burn-piles, although I sure hope I can be here for that spectacle!
And in fact, Bill Peterson, the man whom we’ve hired to help with what we’ll call landscaping, is due here any minute, so what am I complaining about? This farming thing takes patience! One more Frequently Asked Question: Do you expect to see the fruition of your conservation, habitat restoration plans? This is a bit like another FAQ we hear: What did you do before you retired? How do they know we retired? They think we’re old or something? Same as that expectation, fruition question. Answer: Who knows? In the meantime, we are sure having a lot of fun watching the robins, the tree frogs, the geese and that oat-grass.

At the farm. What with all the snow in Portland, ice on the freeway, holiday stuff, we haven’t been able to visit. To see what winter looks like here. Probably not too much to do in the way of farm work in this strange stretch of sub-freezing weather, but we have a new little old desk for the chick-room to deliver. Books to read. Netflix discs to watch, now that we’ve learned how many gigs a simple streamed movie costs us down here.

On the way south on Tuesday, we stopped at The Whole Nine Yards to see about my Christmas present: a rescue chair (what we have instead of rescue pets) that Amy, a Portland artist, will transform into a cozy chair to accompany the above mentioned desk. Here’s the before shot:

We got to the farm to find that the wind had blown the tarp off the middle burn pile. Larry got right on it, as we see here:

Not much snow, but it’s pretty anyway.

We settled in. Went grocery shopping. People, upon hearing that we have this place, will ask what we do about food. Shop in Portland and bring stuff down? No, people, we do have groceries in Corvallis, most importantly, Trader Joe’s. Market-of-Choice when we’re feeling upscale. (Yes, you’re right. I always feel upscale.)

“Do you smell that?” I ask. In the entry hall, but by the time we haul the stuff out of the car, we don’t notice anything. Dinner, and the first chapter of “Madam Secretary.” Whew! We’re hooked.

“No, I really smell something.”

“Smells like a dead animal,” Larry says.

“Yeah, but it kind-of smells like gas.”

We don’t have natural gas in the house, but there is propane for the fireplace and water heater. Does propane have that gas smell? Google will tell us. Bad idea. Seems those clever chemists, wanting us to be safe, have installed a warning aroma in their product. No idea how that would work, but it smells, Google tells me, like a dead animal.

Sweet. What to do? I research a little further, and the advice seems to be that we should immediately vacate. Okay, that is not going to happen. You know Larry, you know me. I panic, he asks if I mind if he goes to bed. Fair enough, but first he agrees to open windows in the affected areas. Upstairs, opening the windows in the bedrooms, we look out and see the light on a slope that looks like a search light from those pesky black helicopters. I swear someone is out there with truck lights illuminating the field of snow. Larry says I’m just not familiar with the luminous quality of snow at night time. Beautiful and eerie.

We go go bed, windows open. It’s 18 degrees out there and we pile on the blankets, burrow in. I lie awake, but morning comes anyway. We call Tyrone. How is it possible that we can smell propane in the house? It isn’t. It’s probably — you guessed it — a dead mouse. They can chew their way into the most impregnable home.

And on that subject, seems we have acquired a visiting cat. Who leaves poop on our porch. A hundred-acres and she has to use our porch as a litter box? All cats are female, according to Larry, so don’t bother asking.

Today we’re going to a meeting at Benton County to plan a time-line for the work on fencing that our grant will fund. The painters are here, repainting our bedroom. As Larry says, the room’s getting a little smaller with all the layers of paint, but we’re still making it work. And now it’s lunch time. Hmm.

This is the way we started our work week. What the heck? Just all stretched out in front of the shed, pretty dead but not eaten. Another one curled by the side, not shown. Don’t hawks eat their prey? Don’t cats? Maybe we’d better get those seeds over to the Finley storage, we’re thinking, but no evidence of mouse damage to the seed bags was found.

Oh well. Country life, I guess. So long as they stay out of my kitchen! This is Mike and his Mighty Machine. A graple over a bucket. Note the size of the spoonful it’s about to address:

A close-up:

Larry and I spent the day watching, astonished, as great swaths of berry canes, fallen logs, scrap metal, were collected and piled in what Mike calls “burn piles.”

How are we going to burn these behemoths? Just us and the Philomath Fire Department? Mike advised Larry to drape the piles with tarps, secured against the wind, so that the material will dry enough to ignite and burn. Done. Now we’ll wait until some cold day in February and have ourselves a wienie roast. Grandkids want to apply?

Seems like about time to throw in a selfie. I know, I don’t take selfies, don’t much like to be photographed at all, but its only fair, after all the Larry shots. So here I am:

My God, she looks just like her mother! True. Don’t laugh, children, look at your moms and see the future. Or your dads. Either way.

Here’s what the land looks like A.M. (After Mike) Practically a park! Don’t worry, Ryan says. I’ll graze anything you don’t want to mow.

When I look at these photos and see the property through your eyes, I get why you question our sanity. So try to see it through my eyes, with green meadows, wild flowers, bright, clear streams, the 300 year-old oaks who themselves have seen these things in the time of the Kalapooia and maybe before. I have a favorite oak I pass under on my walks down the road. Has ferns growing on the limbs and up the trunk, has mistletoe in the highest branches, a carpet of fallen leaves below, and today I saw that one of its branches had fallen against the fence newly built in its domain. Not to get all kumbaya, but it’s good to have a 300-year-old friend!

Starting today with some photos taken by Alli Ederer, our Seattle granddaughter who, with her family, spent Thanksgiving with us. She had an assignment in her art class to take landscape photos. Talented girl! No description needed for the above. But next, the ATV tracks across the wet pasture looking back across the road:

Okay, backing up here. We weren’t going to have the whole family with us this holiday, but the Pasadena branch of the tribe made an impressive showing on the Tuesday before. Margie, my co-grandma with the Peter Viehl kids, came to visit that afternoon, along with a cast of Allison’s cousins, uncle, sister and brother-in law, with an assortment of kids as well. It was fun to have them all, and to get a chance to visit with Blair, Allison’s uncle. He has a nursery in Coos Bay and brought us two pots of bedding plants, our first, and will be a great source of advice when we get the “landscape” going next spring. Margie also brought a load of Amy’s laundry, and she and Angie loved playing mom again. “Is it okay to put Lulu Lemon in the dryer?” We decided that the answer is no. Amy wasn’t there to advise us, as she stayed in Eugene to study. Smart girl!

Jenny and family arrived Wednesday evening. Long drive from Seattle! We got up early to get the pies baked (only the one oven in the house, see) and grandson Will was a great sous chef for the pecan number. Which joined gravy as the menu feature requiring close supervision of over-use by family members. The turkey was a triumph, new technique involving dismemberment of the bird.

On Friday, Jenny, Alli and I went out and about to see what Corvallis looks like, and to get provisions for a batch of Grandma Viehl’s Christmas cookies, Melting Moments. Oops, forgot the corn starch, so Alli and I, determined to bake, went back into Philomath to pick it up. To find Bell Fountain flooded! We paused at the south end of the river flowing across the road, watched cars at the north end turn around. When one of them chanced passage, and succeeded, we chose to make the attempt. Alli, at the wheel, got us through. Adventure! On the way home, we tried another route and this time, were cautious enough to retreat, and finally got home the safe way. When we told the others how we had seen cars swept away, the helicopter rescuing motorists standing on their roofs, no one believed us. You shouldn’t either.

But speaking of floods: Another of Alli’s landscapes. Muddy Creek at flood stage: (I love the light in her photos)

Next day, we women went to Eugene to check that town out — found it a bit more interesting than downtown Corvallis. Also wandered around the campus and looked up Amy’s sorority. Amy, of course, was at home in Pasadena, but we did get a sense of what she’s experiencing.

And the men, meanwhile, were hard at work. Will and Larry built a firewood rack for the shed. Pictured below. Larry says Will did all the work while he supervised. Important to train a new generation in the skills a farmer will need.

Tom, meanwhile, mowed the “lawn” under the homestead tree, and I would like to give him credit for all the other stuff he did, but I don’t know what it was. Good job, Tom! There.

So it was a lovely inaugural holiday in the new house. Here’s to many more, here’s to family, here’s to home.

Question: What could we possibly do to repay the White/Davises for all their help, without which we’d still be sitting around our PDX living room dreaming about “a little house, etc.” Here’s a good idea! Let’s offer to deliver a load of our copious firewood supply to their cottage at the beach!

Okay, how are we going to make this happen. We have the wood, split, stacked in the barn, ready to go. Load up Bob and drive over to Manzanita with it? Ugh! No offense, but a trip over the mountains in smelly old Bob? Well, rent a U-Haul trailer? Hmm. No hitch on the car. Rent a whole truck?

Nope. Problem solved in a way you might expect. Gordon has a trailer, a hitch, and he can get it to the Corvallis, load it, and be on the way.

They came, with the trailer, to spend a couple of days with us at the farm. The house — I love this little house — somehow blossoms with warmth and color in the company of family and friends, and we learned that early when the Schefflers became our first overnight guests. (Excepting Peter and Andrew, of course, but we don’t think of them as “guests.” It just becomes their other house when they’re here.)

The plan was that we’d rent a wood splitter for the day, and the men would work on the latest pile of sawn oak on the barn floor. Wasn’t supposed to be an all day job, but with Gordon, there’s no stopping when there’s still work to be done. (I know. One doesn’t usually pay someone back by putting them to work in a cold barn for 8 hours.)

Meanwhile, Vik and I would spend the day on one of our cooking projects. Formerly, we’ve made tamales, kimchi, pickles-of-course, what else? This time, fruit cake. Stop! I know what you’re thinking. Aunt Edith’s block of Christmas cheer she pulled out of the closet from back in ’08 when she visited Harry and David’s in Medford on her bus tour of the West Coast. No. Ours are elegant, dark and rich with molasses, citrus, spices. Maybe our best project ever. So far.

Then there was the Good Will tutorial. Vik asserts that the secret to a successful GW gleaning is to open one’s mind to the universe of the possible. Do not go to an outlet determined to find the pink blouse, the set of Norwegian Christmas plates, the music box you seek. Corvallis has a reasonable outlet, though perhaps not the demographic to assure a rich selection. Too many college students, not enough aging people-of-means to create a good donation base. But we did our best. Me, I was looking for a vintage rocking chair for the yellow bedroom upstairs. Mistake. Don’t go looking for something specific, remember? I did find a pair of yummy warm leggings, still in the original package. Unopened. Score!

Meanwhile, Larry and Gordon busied themselves adding rheostats to the various light switches around the house, and, most important, hanging the huge iron V in the front hall, and Rodeo Girl, a Gregory Grennon painting, in the dining room. Not at all easy, requiring much manly knowledge about push screws, levels, and, ultimately, velcro.

While standing in the kitchen, we noticed an ATV working the land in front of the house. The seeds were being planted! Not the heritage seeds you learned of earlier, but a cover crop of oats. We would graze these this spring, then disc them in. Harrow, lime, then in the fall, plant the real crop of wild flowers. It’s still pretty muddy, and this was perhaps the only opportunity to get the seeds in the ground. The ATV did get bogged down at one point, and we thought he’d need a tractor rescue (a little treat for Larry and Gordon), but Ryan or his employee managed to maneuver the little rig out of trouble. Should have known — these are true farm boys, know what they’re doing.

The next morning, while we were celebrating the success of the seeding operation, a flock of starlings arrived for breakfast. Wait. I just Googled starlings, and learned that a flock is a murmuration. Nice word, but. Invasive. Destructive. And they’re eating all our seeds! Larry tried his erstwhile successful strategy of barking at unwelcome visitors of the animal kingdom. (No, he doesn’t bark at crowds of people or folks he doesn’t admire, so just relax.) The barking didn’t work, nor did shouting, hand-clapping. Slamming the door did cause the birds to rise, circle, then reform into a carpet of black frustration. Ryan said he planted a hundred pounds of seed per acre, and really, how many birds would it take to eat a fourteen hundred pounds of seed? And what will we do when it comes time to plant the expensive heritage seed? A problem for Fish and Wildlife, I guess.

So here’s a toast to Vik and Gordon, with thanks for so much help, advice, inspiration. Cheers!

Here are the missing photos from this morning’s post. Apparently my devices have consented to work together. “We’re Stronger Together.” Heard that anywhere? Click on the photos to enlarge.

This is the fairy circle. The witches don’t come out in the daylight, but tomorrow night? Watch out!

Here you see nine thousand dollars worth of heritage seeds. Later this month, they’ll be taken to the Finley Refuge for storage over the winter.

I rather like this old pitchfork relic. One of the nicer bits of our archaeological dig.

The bike we worked so hard to free from the mud and weeds.

You remember Peter’s woodpile? As you see, he still has some work to do.

I love to wander the property, go to Muddy Creek and watch it rise in this month of record rainfall.

An example of the little streams OWEB will try to protect. This is in the riparian forest, and you can imagine thousand pound calves tiptoe-ing through the downed branches to get a drink of water.

What do you do down there when it rains like that?

Good question. One fun activity is going to the dump. Here’s how that goes: You take the ATV down to the barn where Bob the Truck lives. For months, maybe years, we’ve been conducting what could be called an archaeological dig on the property, starting with the demolition of the original house, and storing our finds. Easy to toss most of the stuff into the pickup bed for disposition when the rainy day comes.

Many of the shards we collected were on the surface, albeit under tangles of ivy, vinca major, blackberry canes, mullein, thistle, am I forgetting anything? Kid toys, broken bowls, an autographed baseball, and many, many broken bottles strewn about. Broken glass has been a speciality of mine, and I’ve filled several wash buckets with beer bottle fragments, window glass, etc., along with a nice side collection of beer cans. Probably pre-dated the 5c return law, but too filled with mud and yuck to be worth the recycling attempt.

Old tires! Don’t know if the collection out on the back 40 are courtesy of a previous owner, or an opportunistic neighbor. We were reluctant to drive out to the far corner where there are maybe a dozen, fifteen, rounds mouldering away, but today we did have one lovely specimen still wrapped around its wheel to deliver.

The focus of this day was the excavation of a bike that lay buried beside a tree of undetermined specie — maybe a hawthorne. Larry thought he could chain up the derelict and haul it of the mud or clay with the power of the tractor. It would be my job to drive while Larry managed the chains. (Real women don’t mind getting soaked while steering a tractor.) After several failed attempts, we had to go to Plan B and scoop the thing out with the bucket. At this point, Larry took over command of the Deere. See photo.

This artifact joined another dismembered bike in the truck, and along with the side piece from some unknown farm equipment and all the debris we’d collected, was on the way to Powell Butte, the city land fill.

You drive your vehicle onto a ramp and are weighed. Your load is examined, and when a tire is discovered, you will learn that there is a tariff of $8.00 to dispose of it. And furthermore, you will be required to separate the tire from the rim in order that the metal can be disposed of in the metal bin. You think about those other tires in the back forty and realize that it will cost a hundred fifty bucks or so to get rid of them. Ah. This is why someone else chose to use our land as a dump. No cost to them.

Once again, site won’t let me upload photos! Damn! Try again later? I wanted to show you the fairy ring that bloomed under one of our trees. A perfect circle of white mushrooms (edible? wish I knew) caused, myth would have it, by shooting stars, lightning strikes, or, my favorite, wandering witches. Not supposed to enter the ring lest you be transported to the other world, from which there is no escape.

But back to the rainy day: this past week, a gang of Peter and Allison’s friends, parents of U O students all, came for a farm visit. (Why do so many Pasadena kids choose to attend U O? Why not OSU?) This day, it wasn’t raining! Blue sky! Gorgeous. Reinforcing the idea that it really doesn’t rain in Oregon, another myth to dissuade the hordes of Californians who would immigrate if they knew the sunny truth about our climate. In any case, the men all had ATV tours of the property, the women laughed and told stories, Amy, a little refuge from dorm life, took a long hot shower. It was nice to see the house come alive in this way. Lots of photos, so I won’t be visiting FaceBook any time soon to see what I really look like.

Conservation note: Two weeks ago, a woman from NRCS visited the property to survey the creeks to establish sites for “water breaks.” We had a long conversation with Ryan to help determine his views on the best water disposition for the cattle he’ll graze here. It has been decided to hold off on planting our precious heritage seeds until spring, and plant a cover crop of feed oats instead, which Ryan will graze before discing the land again, before planting the wild flower seeds. A little disappointing, though a field of green will look beautiful even if the butterflies have to wait another season.

Lunch with our accountant to discuss the creation of a separate entity for the farm. He’s opposed. Why? Thinks we can just fold conservation expenses into our family taxing. Okay, over my head, but I didn’t hear his response to my assertion that we aren’t grazing cattle as a money producing scheme. They are a conservation tool: we either graze our land, mow it, or burn it. Of the options, grazing seems the most eco sensible. He, the accountant simply responded that I’d make a terrible tax attorney. What does that mean?

I want to get this posted, though I’m bummed that I can’t add photos at this time. I’ll try to edit the post later and see if my new iPhone 7, my Seagate photo storage device, and my computer can play nicely together. Ha. Talk about a fairy circle and witches!