Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2008 11:26 pm Post subject: Hello, I'm Mary, Book 5
This is continued from Book 4.
Before and after pictures are always fun. We all love the look of a nice neat flower bed, but this is what several years of being too busy with riding, vegetable gardening and preserving, and just plain living did to a flower bed that once looked nice. When it started to look bad I kept thinking that I had to do something about it, but it was so bad I just kept putting it off. Did it get better? Certainly not!
The red leaves in the first photo are a somewhat out of control Virginia Creeper. A washtub on the right side has succulents and behind it are more tubs and various pots of hens and chicks and other succulents. The Virginia Creeper crept under and around them, and the quackgrass was everywhere! The assorted tubs were on the septic tank which had just a few inches of horrible soil and wouldn't have been a good place to put plants in the ground.
In this second picture, taken from about half way to the corner, you can see tall phlox which were already going dormant, tall quackgrass going to seed, wild rose bushes, and a big elm tree. Pretty sad, and I wouldn't show you this except to give you hope for anything you think is impossible to reclaim.
After about a month of working on it an hour or two every day, making it wider and establishing new edges, digging out the few good plants, hauling the weeds away, clipping out the roses and digging out their roots, chopping tree roots out, hauling in new dirt to cover the old soil to about 3 inches, digging out and replanting plants that were too crowded in other locations, planting some new bulbs and the bulbs I found while renovating the bed, and mulching it with bark chips from our firewood, it looks like this!
It measures 55 ft from where I was standing to the corner of the fence beyond the big tree. The narrow parts are about 4 ft wide, the wider ones are about 8 ft. You can see the clothesline pole, and just beyond it a big bulge which is where those tubs of succulents sat for so many years. I planted shallow rooted plants there that will not get very tall because the laundry often blows out over the area on windy days.
When the last shipment of pansys and snapdragons went on sale for 10 cents each, I bought 15 of them for making a bright spot just outside the back door. Between them I planted crocus and grape hyacinths, so there will be another bright spot in the spring before the pansys wake up. Snapdragons will not bloom until mid summer and will be taller, so I put them in a little group next to the fence for a backdrop.
Next summer when all of this is looking more mature and blooming, I will take more pictues to show you.
The temperature has dropped quite dramatically in the past 2 days and so has the snow level. New snow is just about 500 ft above us, and looked very pretty with the late afternoon sun shining on it. I took a couple of pictures but they are still hiding in my camera. We have had some rain in the past few days which has been good for the pastures and flower beds, and has softened up the garden soil for rototilling. The rototiller however, is having a problem and will not run, so we took it to a repair shop yesterday. I hope to have it back before snow covers the garden.
There was no point in leaving the winter squash out any longer to possibly ripen more, or to freeze tonight under wet blankets in a night that is forecast for about 20 degrees, so I spent a couple of hours this afternoon bringing them up the hill to the house. The large wheelbarrow was the right tool for the job. I folded a heavy wet blanket that had been covering the squash, cut several squash off the vines and laid them carefully on it, added another blanket and more squash. That load was less than half of them.
As I pushed the heavy wheelbarrow up the hill toward the house I wondered where I was going to put them all. I hadn't realized there were so many. When I put the blankets over them they were hidden by big green squash leaves.
Three trips later, the top of our large chest freezer is covered, and there are quite a few on a table. I baked a few of them to mash and put in bags in the freezer. They are not fully ripened so I doubt that they would keep for very long in the basement. Sweetness is also not what it should be, so the solution is to sweeten them with brown sugar and a little nutmeg. I'll do that when I mash them. When I take bags out of the freezer they will be ready to heat and eat.
I'd almost forgotten about the parsnips which are supposed to taste better after a frost. Originally there was a nice little row of them, but then the gophers discovered them and one by one, they wilted because their roots were eaten, or they just disappeared! The deer enjoyed the tops, eating almost all the leaves and some of the stems as well. I could only find 4 today, but two of them are about a foot long. Next year I will grow them in a big tub!
When you are a gardener, there's always next year!
Yesterday morning before I went out to feed the horses, I could tell that Breezy was not feeling good. He was pawing the ground, first with one front foot and then the other and looking around at his side. There are no flies now because of the colder temperatures so this was a sign of something going on in there that concerned him. He walked a few steps into some tall dry weeds and laid down.
I put some hay in his feeder and he walked slowly to it and nibbled. He is normally an enthusiastic eater. A few minutes later he was lying down again. Not good.
Our breakfast was put on hold while I walked him up and down hills in the pasture. After about an hour I remembered that I had some pain medicine in the referigerator. He got a shot of that and we walked for another hour. Breezy nibbled at some grass. I thought maybe he was feeling better, so put him back in the pasture. During our walks he had passed some manure several times, so I had hope that things were moving through his 100 ft long digestive system.
After several hours of watching him, lying down, then standing, then lying down again, I called the vet, then loaded him in the trailer for a trip to get treatment. Breezy was put into the pipe stock again, and was given a sedative. The vet removed all the manure he could reach, but determined that there was more material in his colon that was too dry to move easily. I had not seen Breezy drink any water all day.
A tube was passed up through his nostril and down into the stomach. Mineral oil and water were put down the tube. The vet also gave him a painkiller, the same one that I had used several hours earlier, but mine apparently was too old and had lost potency, so had not been effective. This may have also been a heavier dose.
We were back home after dark, actually around 8pm. I put a winter blanket on Breezy and lead him down the hill to the corral. All he got was a bucket of water. The vet said no food until morning. I checked him at 10pm and he was lying down again when he should have been comfortable and standing.
Where to put a horse that wants to lie down when he needs to be standing, a place with some shelter from the wind? The stock trailer! After a walk up the hill to the level where the house, shop, hay shed and other buildings are, we continued up the hill to the road and back down, to try to relieve some gas. My knees were complaining about the downhills, they had done too much of that hill work earlier in the day.
Breezy was put into the trailer and I cleaned the floor around his feet so that when something came out I would be able to tell how much. I checked him again at midnight and took him for another walk, then got some sleep and repeated the drill at 2am. He was very hungry and got a few bites of green grass along the driveway. We went down the hill to the water tank but he was not interested in water.
Since he was comfortable I decided I could sleep through the 4am check. At 6:30 it was light outside and I went out in the rain and snow to check on my patient. He was glad to see me, glad to get out of the trailer, glad to eat more grass. I put him back in the corral with a small amount of hay that had been rained on so was moist and soft. While we had our breakfast I kept walking outside to where I could see him. He was still on his feet and appeared to be ok.
Later I took him some hay which I put in a plastic tub and wet down with water. I want to be sure that he gets enough moisture in his system to go with the hay. So far, several hours later, he is still comfortable. The plan is to let him out in his pasture to clean up the hay that is in the feeder, then take his blanket off and put him in the upper pasture with Patch for the night. It will be easier to monitor him there, and he won't need the blanket anymore because his system should be full of hay that is digesting and producing heat. Hopefully, after a final check at bedtime, I will be able to sleep all night.
I am thankful to have my happy horse buddy acting normally again. Yesterday he spent most of the day in the corral, and my plan was to let him out to finish up the wet hay in his feeder, then put him in another pasture with Patch. Well, how did he know that? I looked out the window about mid afternoon and there he was at his feeder, eating hay with a wide open gate beside him. Apparently he has figured out how to open the corral gate! If he had gone out through the pasture gate he wouldn't have gone anywhere, there is plenty of grass to eat and Patch was nearby for company. He never has been the type of horse who would take off to see what's down the road, he's been there, seen it and likes to stay home.
There was a break in the weather right after I discovered him, so I took his blanket off and put him in with Patch. They have been buddies for about 9 years. I dunked their flakes of hay in the water tank to add some moisture. OOO instant cold hands! I decided to get out the stock tank heater. That requires a heavy extension cord to run from the corner of the house through the flower bed, through the fence and over the edge of the tank. Then to keep them from playing with the cord, I put plywood over half the tank. They will drink more water when it is a few degrees warmer.
I checked him before I went to bed and once during the night. They wondered what I was doing out in the yard in the middle of the night in my bathrobe and slippers, and came walking over to the fence to check on me. This morning I gave them hay that had been sitting on the ground getting rained on, but then soaked some grain and beet pulp for Breezy to get some extra moisture into him. He has some green grass to nibble, but it is so short I think that is more of a mental treat than anything.
He came trotting toward me for his dinner, and again when I went out at 8pm with the apple and carrot peelings I had saved for him. Patch got some too of course. It's a blessing to have him feeling good again. Several years ago we lost his mother to colic, and the memory of that is still fresh.
This has been a strange week with the animals. About 4 days ago our full time in the house kitty, AmandaPanda started throwing up. Some cats barf a lot, she just never has. Hairball seemed to be the problem, so I reduced her food and gave her some butter a couple of hours before each meal and now that problem is solved too. How strange is it that the cat and the horse both have digestive blockages in the same week!
In other news, as the newscasters of old used to say after they hit us with the headlines, I did get a little bit of yard work done today since the weather was nice. I'm cleaning up the mess from the flower bed renovation which involves moving a lot of rocks. They are flat rocks, so we are saving them for other uses. I'm moving them a few at a time in the wheelbarrow. There were quite a few iris left over from moving things around, and I hate to throw them on the trash pile, so I am making another new little bed to give some of them a home. It will be a quick project, a few weeds to dig out, move in some good soil, and I'll be ready to plant them.
We made a quick trip to town today to take care of some bank business, and while we were there I took the plunge into chemical gardening. The discount store had tubs of Preen on sale for about 25% off. I had been thinking that I need to get some help with all the weed seeds that germinate every year, so I'm going to try it. I have always done things organically and tried to handle the weeds by pulling or digging them, but it is more work to do it that way and it's not been possible to keep up. I don't need more work, I need more flowers! None of it will ever go in my vegie garden.
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