Here in central Virginia, we are several hundred miles south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Somehow, when I imagined moving to the South, I envisioned cool and sunny winters with the occasional miserably rainy day.  Those of you who live in the area are laughing at me right now – that’s OK, I deserve it.  Right now, we are under a blizzard warning – we’ve already had about 6 inches of snow and we are expecting 24 more inches.  The wind is starting to pick up and within the next hour or so, sustained winds should be over 25 mph and they will continue until late tomorrow night.  Like I said, not exactly what I imagined when I moved to “the South.”  This is expected to be one for the record books, but I have to say, I’ve lived here almost 7 years and every year we seem to have at least a couple of substantial snow storms.

The weather forecasters deserve some credit on this one – they have been predicting this storm for the past several days and timed the snow right down to the hour.  The forecast called for partly cloudy skies early this morning.

It was hard to believe a sunrise like this would happen the morning of a snowstorm!  As I tracked the hour by hour forecast on my computer, it said that flurries should start by 11:00 so since I was between meetings, I headed out and moved the horses from the back pasture to the smaller pasture next to the barn.  They hate being stuck in stalls, so I made it a little easier on myself by not having to walk way out to the back field when it would be snowing hard.

Sure enough, by 11:15, the flurries started.

A downside to working from home is that I don’t get snow days but one of the benefits is that I can see the horses from my office!  Even in the snow, they were pretty content for most of the afternoon.

Finally about 4:00, I finished my last meeting and decided that it was time to bring them in and lock up the barn for the night.   It was coming down pretty hard by then and they were ready to come in anyhow.

Gator decided the driveway needed a pass with the tractor before it got too late, so about 7:00, he bundled up and headed out with the dogs.  After 10 minutes, the dogs came back.  Gator blew in 20 minutes later, cold and full of snow (and a little miffed that the dogs abandoned him!).  Not sure if it did any good to plow but hopefully he’ll be able to tell where they driveway is tomorrow!

Stay tuned for day 2 of the snowstorm!

In our usual style, Gator and I finished of 2015 with a bang – or should I say PROJECT?  We just couldn’t leave well enough alone, and since December was so mild here in Virginia, we decided to fence in a couple of fields.  Our single pasture was getting over grazed by the horses and it has always been part of the plan to add another field or two so that we can rotate and give them time to recover and regrow.  One of the fields is small – just about an acre, which will work well for one horse when I need to separate them.  The other one is about 5 acres and has lots of good grass.  These two new fields will just about triple our turnout area.  That means a lot of posts had to be set – but not before we got them painted.

The good news is that we were pretty much over the learning curve and we got 145 posts painted in one weekend.  Gator rigged our round bale spear for the tractor to carry the posts out to the field.  At the recommendation of our local Co-op agent, we decided to rent a post driver instead of using the auger on our tractor to drill post holes.  It pays to listen to people who know!  What a great decision – we were able to set about 120 posts in about 12 hours over two days.  After that, it took about 4 days to install the insulators, do the bracing, install the gates, string the wire and do trenching to bring the electricity over.  I can’t tell you how glad I am that we are done with that!  Hopefully we won’t be building any more fence for a long time.

That wasn’t the only project that got wrapped up to finish out the year.  I have been working on five different cross-stitch projects over the past 3 1/2 years for my daughter’s family and I just finished the last one!

Now everyone has a Christmas stocking and both grand kids have framed birth announcements.  I wish I had counted how many hundreds of hours I have spent working on them.  I think it will be a while before I do any more cross-stitching – I’m kind of burned out on that too…

It was a really good year – we were blessed in so many ways.  We got a lot of things accomplished and now maybe I will have more time to blog in the new year!

The last few years, I have come to appreciate fall more than I ever have before. Instead of a few short weeks between the heat of summer and the first cold blast of winter, autumn in Virginia is a long gradual transition alternating between soggy days filled with rain and crisp sunny days where I can’t imagine more perfect weather.

After a long hot summer where every evening and weekend was a sprint to get projects done around the farm, our focus has changed to smaller projects and just getting things in shape for winter.

Although we aren’t getting consistently freezing temperatures at night, we have had a couple of nights with frost. I got the last of the tomatoes and peppers picked and Gator helped me get the garden pulled out.

Wait, is it really November and I’m still getting tomatoes?? Yes, it’s true – and not only that, I  had intended to replant my begonias with pansies for fall but they still look so good, I don’t have the heart to tear them out.

We have a fig tree that has been damaged from the cold winters the past two years, but it has survived and we have figs that are ready to pick.  I don’t really know what I’m going to do with them – I don’t have many (any) recipes for figs.

The tree has gotten pretty unruly – somehow I need to figure out how to prune it to get it back to looking like a tree again without killing it.  The main trunk is dead and it has sent off shoots that have come up from the ground.  Just one more thing to add to the list!

The two things I really don’t like about fall are the dealing with all of the leaves and the time change.  The downside to having all of these lovely trees is that when the leaves fall, it creates a huge mess.  There is no way I’m raking leaves out of the yard – the lawnmower does a great job of mulching them up.  The patio and the driveway are something else, though.  Those leaves have to be cleaned up.  It got to the point that I couldn’t even go out the patio door without stepping in a big pile of leaves.  And of course, they somehow attach to the dogs and end up in the house.

I finally ended up raking up all of the leaves from the driveway and patio and loaded them into the back of the truck  and took them down to the compost pile – four times!  Yep, four truckloads of leaves.

Nothing ever seems to be a small task around here.

Now lets talk about this whole time change thing.  I mourn the loss of daylight savings.  I understand that standard time is the “real” time and that daylight savings was Ben Franklin’s idea of a joke.  I don’t care.  I would happily give up that hour of daylight in the morning to get it back in the evening.  As I get older, I notice I don’t make the transition as easily anymore either.  It’s only an hour, it shouldn’t be such a big deal. Tell that to my animals.  They sure don’t appreciate having to wait an extra hour to get fed!

Oh well, we are all managing to get used to standard time again and frankly, now that we are making the turn toward winter, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to wrap things up an hour earlier.

Happy Thanksgiving!

One of Gator’s many projects this summer and fall has been to do some clearing.  It is amazing how fast weeds and trees will grow up in any areas that aren’t continually mowed or plowed.  Late this summer as he was pulling out old bushes and volunteer trees that had grown up and out of control at the edge of the yard, Gator found some of these burrs.

Let me say, those little spines are sharp!  Eventually we found some burrs that had dried out and opened up and we were thrilled to see that we have a chestnut tree!

We were particularly excited about this discovery because one of the interesting things about our house is that our kitchen cabinets and flooring in our family room is made from wormy chestnut wood.

Never heard of it? Neither had we, but after doing some research, we learned that a blight wiped out nearly all of the American Chestnut trees in the early 1900’s leaving the wood damaged by scarring and worm holes.  Wormy chestnut wood has not been harvested since the 1920’s or so when virtually all of the chestnut trees east of the Mississippi were cut down to stop the spread of the blight.  Now the only remaining wood from those trees available is reclaimed from old houses or barns.  Our cabinets and flooring came from an old cabin that the former owners of our house had bought and disassembled.

But I digress.  After reading up about our wormy chestnut cabinets, we knew American Chestnut trees haven’t been able to make a comeback here in the East because they are usually killed by the blight before they are 10 years old.  As it turns out, there are currently fewer than 100 American Chestnuts that have reached maturity in the natural range in the Eastern US.

This tree isn’t just mature – it’s OLD.

I was suspicious.  The trees on our property haven’t been really well cared for and I knew that the odds were against a tree like that surviving without a lot of care and maintenance.  This tree had been ignored for years.  It had dead limbs, shoots growing out of the base – and when we opened some of the nuts, they were full of weevils.  More research.  What we have is not an American Chestnut tree, but a Chinese Chestnut tree.  Not rare but still kind of unusual.  There aren’t a lot of them around, yet they are much hardier than the American Chestnut and are resistant to the blight.  I also found out that the weevils come out of the chestnuts once they open up and go into the ground only to reemerge as beetles in the spring which lay eggs into the developing burrs.  That problem can be solved by picking up all of the burrs as soon as they fall and burning them to stop the life cycle of the weevils.  It may take a couple of years, but with some care and maintenance hopefully our chestnut tree will be thriving once again!

Although it seems as though I’ve moved around a lot throughout my adult life, most of the places I’ve lived have been for relatively long periods of time – 10 years or more.  I’ve been lucky enough to develop a few really good friendships in each of those places and thanks to social media, I’ve been able to reconnect with many of the friends that I had lost touch with along the way.

My friend Sherri is a perfect example.  We met way back when we were in our 20’s.  As young working moms, we had a lot in common.  We shared the same sitter (Sherri’s mother-in-law), we worked at companies that did business together and we were bound and determined to figure out a way to have it all. This was back in the 80’s and working moms didn’t have a lot of role models so we spent a lot of time figuring out how to get it all done – work, laundry, grocery shopping, preschool, all of it.  We would manage to get together for lunch during the week, and on weekends we’d pack our kids up and head to the mall or a park or whatever event that was going on.

That’s not all of it though.  During those years, I was going through a very difficult time personally.  It was a time when I had very low self esteem and didn’t think I was deserving of love or even friendship.  Yet Sherri was always there.  She refused to give up on me.  She never criticized me and always seemed to be there when I needed help.  Looking back, I’m not at all sure I ever would have made it through that time of my life if it hadn’t been for her.

Eventually, I did pull myself together and I moved away and started a new life in a different state.  Sherri and I kept in touch, but as the years went by, we let life take over.  Our kids were growing up, work, as always, was taking up so much of our time, and now we had aging parents that needed our help.  Before I knew it, several years had gone by.   When Gator and I moved to Virginia, I once again found myself in a new place with no family around and no friends.

Enter Facebook.  Facebook had already been around for a couple of years but I hadn’t really figured it out.  I remember the day – I thought, here I am, working from home now, in a new state where I don’t know anyone.  This could be very isolating.  The kids are all using Facebook to stay connected with friends, maybe I should too.  I spent a couple of weeks hunting down (I think they call if Facebook stalking) old friends and family.  Then I found Sherri.  I have to admit, it was with some trepidation that I sent her a friend request.  The old feelings of being undeserving of her friendship had come back.  I never felt  like I had been the friend she deserved, yet once again, Sherri was there.  She immediately accepted my friend request and we were able to catch up on those lost years like they had never happened.

Our kids are grown now.  We are both grandparents.  This isn’t the end of the story though.  Sherri’s youngest son (my Godson) was in a terrible car wreck almost two weeks ago.  He’s in critical condition and is still in ICU.  I am almost 2,000 miles away and I can’t tell you what a helpless feeling it is waiting for the latest update and wishing there was something I could do to help.  Her son is constantly in my thoughts and prayers – I am sending all the positive energy possible.  There is one more thing I can do.  Now I can be the friend to Sherri that she was to me.  I am going to give her the support that she gave me all those years ago and I will help her get through this.

I hope you are lucky enough to have a Sherri in your life!

I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed these days.  This summer has been crazy busy and I’m in a panic because it’s almost over and I feel like I didn’t get to do half the things I wanted to.  So I’m going to slow down for a couple of minutes and try to appreciate the good things (and maybe not so good things) that are going on in my life right now.

The garden is doing well.  We’ve had enough rain that I haven’t had to water it all summer.  The cucumbers got overrun by the pumpkins, but I did get enough to make a few jars of pickles.

I’m not going to grow pumpkins next year.  The vines took over everything and I only got three little cooking pumpkins out of it.  That’s plenty, but not worth it for the havoc it wreaked on my garden! I’ve got more cherry tomatoes than I know what to do with.  I think I’ll try roasting some and using them in a sauce.  I’ve almost got enough full sized tomatoes to can a batch of salsa.  The peppers are a little behind, though.  I think it will be another week or two before most of them will be ready to pick.

The peaches were a flop.  The one weekend we were gone this summer, critters came in and ate EVERY SINGLE peach on the tree.  Peach pits were laying on the ground everywhere – whoever did it, I hope they got a bellyache from eating all of those peaches!

I got another reminder that we are not alone….

UGH!!!  Nothing like a 4 foot snake skin to get your attention in the morning!

We had some wonderful visits with family this summer.  My sister and her kids came to visit for a week.  I must say, sometimes I forget how much fun teenage and almost teenage kids can be!  They live in the city, so it was a big change from their usual life but I think they went back home with a lot of good memories.  On their last day with us, my niece said “I really like this life.”  I told her I did too, but it’s a lot of work and she responded “Yes, but it’s good work!”  Wow, out of the mouths of babes…

We also got to visit with the grandkids for a weekend (when our peach tree got robbed).  They are little – but once again, I was reminded how much fun kids are.  Exhausting, but fun.  I am amazed at how well their parents manage everything.  I wish they were closer – I can’t wait until those kids are old enough to come and spend summers at Glenmore!

We use videoconferencing for our weekly staff calls because everyone in our group works in a different state.  On today’s call, someone made a comment that it would be so cool to see a horse walk by in the background behind me.  My desk and computer are situated so that doesn’t happen, but here is a picture from my study window.

Thanks – this is just what I needed!  I have a pretty good life – sometimes I just need to sit down and share it.

Although we have been spending the majority of our time concentrating on getting the horses home this summer, life has continued to carry on at breakneck pace.  I just need to sit down and get you updated on everything that is going on!

We are starting to reap the benefits of some of the projects that we started this spring.

The chickens are doing great. They have become so friendly and are now laying eggs.

We get about 2 dozen eggs a week which is a lot more than we can eat, so we have started giving them away.  I’m really surprised how easy the chickens are to care for.  I got them because I wanted the eggs but they are such a joy – I’ve really gotten attached to them!

Wild raspberry season is only a few weeks long and we all but missed it due to our travels.  However, our neighbor had been spotting all the best raspberry patches on her horseback rides through the neighborhood.  One day, she and her cousin were out on their horses picking raspberries in the pouring rain so they could make pies (now that’s dedication!).  They had more raspberries than they needed and we had more eggs than we needed so we were able to trade raspberries for eggs.  You just can’t beat a deal like that.

The garden is going gangbusters.  I wasn’t too sure how it would work out because it doesn’t get full sun all day.  There is not one spot in our yard where it is flat, gets full sun and I can get water to it.  So I settled for morning sun, close to the water supply and Gator solved the problem of being on a hill.  I went a little overboard with the pumpkins and tomatoes and the garden went from this

to this

in just a few weeks.  I’ve also got cantaloupe, and several kinds of herbs and peppers.  I haven’t had time to even walk out there, so I sure was surprised to see a jungle!  Next year, I’m either going to plan on fewer plants or more garden.  I’m going with more garden…

We’ve also got a volunteer peach tree, which legend has it goes back to the 1960’s.  According to the story, the grandmother who lived in the house at the time, would eat peaches and throw the pits out the kitchen window.  This is the last of four trees that grew up from those pits.

Frankly, I believe the story because nobody in their right mind would plant a peach tree 6 inches away from a maple tree on purpose!

Speaking of volunteers, this is our sole cornstalk.

This showed up in my flower bed this spring and since the farmer who leases our land planted soybeans this year, Gator thought we ought to let it grow.  Who says men aren’t sentimental?  It’s field corn, so maybe the chickens will like it.

Add to all of this the walnuts that we will have this fall and it looks like we are going to be eating pretty well!

I was beginning to think this day would never come. After postponing bringing the horses home for two months, they are here at last!

We finally set a hard deadline and committed to it.  We just had to make some decisions about what was critical to get done before they could come home and what could wait until after they were here.  Once we did that, it was a little easier to focus on what needed to be finished.  Of course, it still came down to the wire – I had a full blown panic attack the night before I went to get them because we didn’t have power hooked up to the fence yet.  Gator was his usual, laid-back self  and not only calmed me down, but guaranteed he would have the fence hot before I got home with the horses.  And he came through!

The day didn’t go exactly as planned – I don’t know why I expected it to be any different than any other day.  I had big plans to go to the barn on Friday morning, ride both horses, bathe them, get everything packed up and be home by early afternoon.  Hah!  I must have forgotten I have a job, because that tied me up until the middle of the afternoon.  By the time I got to the barn it was in the mid 90’s and was almost feeding time.  So instead of the nice leisurely morning making memories with my horses that I intended, it ended up being a race to get things slung into the trailer and get them loaded up and home before we cooked.  Oh well, some day I will look back on this time and laugh – possibly.

It  took them a few days to settle in and it has taken me a few days to develop a routine as well.  Instead of getting up at 5:30 to go work out, I now get up at 4:30.  I know it sounds crazy, but by the time I get up, get out the door and drive to the gym which is 20 minutes away, work out, drive back home, feed the horses, chickens and dogs, shower, eat breakfast and get my computer fired up for work, it’s 8:30!  Gator had to travel the whole first week the horses were home, so it was up to me to get everything done.  Now that he is home a couple of days a week, we are getting a shared routine figured out.

I can’t complain though – this is what we’ve been working toward for years.  I just love being able to look out my office or  kitchen window and see them out in the field!

The last couple of months have been grueling.  In April, the weather was so cold and rainy that we couldn’t really work outside.  We were able to take advantage of that time to get the interior of the barn finished.  May rolled in, it dried out and we went from temperatures in the 50’s right up to the high 80’s.  It was time to get out and get things finished up outside!    I have been out of town two of the past three weeks (OK, one of those weeks I was on vacation) and every daylight hour that I’ve been home has been heads down, working.  I’ve taken on new responsibilities at work (when it rains, it pours!) and trying to get the barn finished up for the horses has been overwhelming.  Actually, the barn hasn’t been that hard – the fencing, on the other hand has been brutal (see my previous post on the Sucking Vortex!).

Things are starting to come together, though.  Gator and I spent a couple of long days setting fence posts.

There was definitely a learning curve that took place, but once we got everything laid out and we figured out a process, we got into a  rhythm and things started to move along pretty quickly.

From there, we got the corner bracing done, the gates in, the wiring up and had stone dust delivered for the dry lot.

A few finishing touches and we’re ready for horses!

I recently read an article about how people on social media have a tendency to brag (ad nauseum) about all the positive things in their lives and never mention the negatives.  I have certainly seen that, so lest you think it has been all fun and games here at Glenmore,  we do have our struggles.  There are many different terms to use for what I am about to describe but here at Glenmore, we like to call it the “sucking vortex.” A sucking vortex occurs when you start a project and realize you can’t proceed any further because you have to do something else first, which can’t get done until you do something else first, and so on.  Pretty soon, you are so far down the chain, you can’t remember what the original project was.  We seem to be encountering the sucking vortex an awful lot here lately, so I thought I would share the latest example.

Virginia is known for its beautiful horse farms with rolling  pastures surrounded by 3 or 4 board oak fences.

Fencing is incredibly expensive, and for horses it’s even worse.  As we started to price out having oak board fencing put in, we quickly realized that this project could easily end up costing as much as building the barn.  So, being the kind of people who are never afraid to tackle a project, Gator suggested we build it ourselves.  We knew we were taking on a lot and I will admit, this was strictly a financial decision – we really didn’t need another project. Knowing the high expense and maintenance of board fencing, we decided to look for alternatives and found a great coated wire system that is cheaper, safer for horses and easier to install.  OK, we were making progress!

Next we had to figure out how to drill the post holes.  Most fencing contractors use either a skid steer with an auger or a pole driver.  We could rent either one but  if we did that, we would need to be able to drive all the posts in one day.  Hmm,  this could get expensive quickly.  And if we did rent, we wouldn’t have what we needed to add posts later on.  We do however have a tractor – and you can get auger attachments that work very well for less than it costs to rent equipment for a day.  So off the to equipment auctions we went to find an auger for the tractor.  Do you see where this is going?  After several weeks of shopping for a used auger and finding only overpriced junk, Gator finally went down to the farm store and bought a new one.

Back in business – we ordered the posts and had them delivered.

The next discussion was about painting.  Do we paint the posts before or after we set them?  I have done my fair share of  fence painting and I voted to paint the posts before we set them.  They would last longer if the part that is in the ground is painted and we could lay them across a couple of saw horses and knock them out in no time.  Here comes the sucking vortex again!  Although we don’t need nearly as many posts as we would if we were going to do board fencing, they do need to be bigger.  I was shocked to learn how heavy an 8 ft long 5-6″ diameter post is.  I can’t even pick one up.  Gator can, but if we were going to move very many, it would definitely take two of us.  No wonder why the delivery truck had a lift and just dumped the posts all over the  ground!  Somehow we had to get the posts stacked and figure out a way to get them up off the ground to paint them.

Gator to the rescue!  Let me just say right now – I married a process genius.  Here is the plan he devised.

There was no way around it, we were going to have to stack all the posts once.  We laid two posts lengthwise on the ground and then stacked posts crosswise on top and then made another layer on top of that.  Then Gator found an old piece of pipe and cut it in half to fit on the bottom forks of the hay spear attachment on the tractor.  He got on one end of each post and I got on the other and we painted and rolled the post as we went.  When we finished, we rolled each post right on to the newly rigged hay spear.  When we had a load, he took them over and stacked them where they could dry.

The fence posts are now ready to be set.  One more sucking vortex conquered!