Arion rufus

The fields are brown with Queen Anne’s lace and dried grass. I guess winter is on its way.

I feel like I need a machete to get through parts of the field.

It makes me feel bad that we don’t have a use for all this grass yet.

There is a thicket of Hazel nut trees on the back part of our property. It is so dense that light doesn’t get through and the ground is mostly bare.

This last picture scares me, as it shows a lot of the Himalayan blackberries that are trying to take over. If we didn’t mow and try to control the invasive blackberry mess, I imagine that in 10 years most of our fields would be covered in them and the grass would be gone.

In parallel with our other summer projects, Lee and I have been working on getting in better shape. We have been doing a lot of hiking and exploring new places. There are some pretty amazing vistas within a few miles of our house, but today’s hike really raised the bar for sheer beauty and left us astounded.

The Little Cowhorn Mountain hike was suggested by a couple new friends and they thankfully handled navigation to the trailhead, located up 15 miles of winding logging roads. The hike was a mile long and went 850′ uphill for a final elevation of 4250′. Just a little steep.

At the summit there was a fire lookout on a rocky outcrop. It was built in the 1960s to observe wildfires in the lower Cascades, but has been abandoned for many years.

Once we made it up to the top, the view was just glorious.

You could see from the coastal ranges to central Oregon.

Basically there was a 360° panoramic view of mountains as far as you could see. I really wanted to spend the night in the fire lookout and watch the sunset and sunrise.

I was out hanging laundry, feeling proud of myself for getting three loads done today, when someone pulled up. As I walk over to see what they wanted, a lady got out of the truck cradling an inverted hard hat.

“We were visiting B & C, and they said you might know what do with this. It’s injured. We found it wandering around.”

I looked in the hard hat and saw a duck with a slice in its head.

I could sense their hopefulness that I would take the injured duck off their hands.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking, “Oh boy, what do I do with an injured duck”. I’ve never had a duck before. B & C are an older couple who live three houses down. Lee and I are the only ones on our street that have chickens. Almost everyone else is retired, with manicured yards straight out of a fertilizer ad. Definitely not the sort of houses that accept stray waterfowl. To make matters worse, I know this is a wild duck because B & C live on the river side of the street.

“Sure,” I say as I picked up the soft squishy duck body. It cuddles into my hand and doesn’t seem to realize there is a chunk missing out of it’s head. They thank me profusely and make their escape before I can change my mind–their guilt assuaged and their good deed done for the day.

I walk into the house holding the duck.

“Um, Lee, we have a duck. Or half a duck, rather.” I tell him the story I was told and he starts muttering about “darn suburbanites” and they “should have just let nature take its course” … and “where in the world are we going to put a duck.” He goes out looking for a cardboard box to put the poor fuzzy ball in while still muttering. The thing is, when someone brings you an injured animal you can’t say no without looking like a heartless sod. And when it’s a baby that darn nurturing instinct takes over. Lee sends me off to the farm store for some duck feed, a heat lamp, and some wood shavings.

Yeah, so just call us Farm Folly: Home For Invalid Animals.

So what in the world do you do with a wild duck? I was thinking about calling it Lucky if it survives. Or Unlucky if it doesn’t. ‘Brain Damage Duck’ is a bit of a mouthful, but B.D.D. or Bud for short could work. Hmm … Halfwit?

Even with half a head, the silly little duck is sooooo cute. I’ve spent about 30 minutes holding it, and it’s very sweet and cuddly. Why are we raising chickens?

It’s that time of year when we are running out of firewood. We’ve burned through the cedar and oak stacked under cover and the house remodeling scraps stored in our barn. At this point we are left attacking those “ugly pieces” of oak that troubled the hydraulic splitter. The piece below went in the fire a few days ago. It’s the sort of grain pattern that could only be loved by someone who’s never swung a splitting maul.

It’s that time of year when the grass is growing explosively from the combination of downpours and sunlight. While the tractor sits waiting for an oil change, a grease job, and drier soil, the grass is racing toward knee high on much of our property.

I had a feeling revisit me that I haven’t had since last year. It was the feeling of, “I’m going to beat up some bozo deer” anger. It’s a valid feeling, really! The herd of deer that seems to hang out here in the summer time decided to get brave, come up to our house, and do a midnight munching on my aronia berry start. I was so happy with how much it had grown as I had bought it as a seedling last year.

I planted some cosmo’s in my garden this year. They are so bright and cheery that I always smile when I look at them.

There is this section near our house that is solid 12 foot high wild blackberry vines. A fence runs through it, along with some random trees, so driving a tractor with a brush hog through it isn’t possible at the moment. We do want to put a fence there eventually, so we have to get it cleared out. The nice thing about when this section in cleaned out is we will be able to see out into our back fields. In between whacking the berry vines Lee has to stop to collect barb wire, some of it thrown on the ground, some of it on newly found fence posts.

We didn’t even know that there was an old corner post back in that mess.

When Lee finishes clearing out spaces he then drives his tractor with the brush hog through it. He has been working at this job here and there for small amounts of time in the evening. I must say that I think he has made an amazing amount of progress compared to me working on it with hand trimmers.