Cleaning up the Jungle

Some folks may not know that there are jungles in southwest Missouri but there are. I have spent several days in the last two weeks cleaning up a jungle right here at Way Haven. Truth be told, I have several days’ work still ahead to complete the project.

We sold our last pigs abut 20 years ago. Since then a jungle has been growing up in our hog lots. Wild grape vines, poison ivy, berry brambles and locust trees took over; slowly at first and then with amazing speed. I had thought that I would just put some feeder pigs in the lots and let them clean things up but “The best-laid plans of mice and men oft times go astray”.

Late in the summer of 2006, I thought to cut down a BIG red oak tree about 25 feet away from the smaller hog pen adjacent to the barn. I have cut down lots of trees without a hitch but this time something went wrong and the tree went east not west. The good news is it missed the barn. The bad news is it crushed parts of the fence on two sides of the aforementioned pen. That meant I couldn’t turn pigs in to clean up the jungle so, two years later, I have finally gotten around to cleaning it up.

The picture below is taken from the stump of the fallen tree looking toward the barn. By the way, I owe a big thank you to former First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson for my barn but that’s another story.

Above is a picture of the blocks cut from the tree just above the main split in the trunk. You can see where the trunk splits in the photograph below.


When I was finally able to get the downed tree off of the hog panel fence, I found the damages were not as extensive as I had feared. On the end closest to the stump a complete hog panel was pretty much toast. Maybe I can cut a small gate out of it which would be great because on the other side of the pen, where the top of the tree hit the fence, it hit just about two feet from the end of a panel. It looks like I can put a gate cut from the other panel there. If you look closely at the picture below you can see the gap. You can sure see the jungle that remains.



I spoke to the man from whom we hope to buy feeder pigs. He projected they would be available in mid-February. So, I need to stay with this project to have the pen ready by then. By the way, if I were to re-take these pictures today, everything would be covered with snow and ice. That is winter in southwest Missouri!

An Alternative Heat Source for Your Home

Okay, so heating costs are way up this winter AGAIN! We knew it was coming but some of us are still in a bind trying to keep warm in our homes.

There are many good alternative methods to warm your home available. We use a wood stove in our living room to augment our propane furnace. Believe me, any time we can cut down on propane we do. The wood stove certainly helps.

I have thought about adding some other alternatives. If I were to build again I would want to have one of the systems that put the fire box outside the home. Just the hot air or hot water is moved into the home. Some of these systems say that you can burn anything in them (hay bales, railroad ties, etc.) Others boast the ability to store heat so that a fire is required only every other day or so.

Last month we became aware of another alternative means of warming a home while visiting the home of some dear friends. Their youngest son had become engaged to marry a lovely young lady at age 31. It was cause for great celebration!

The celebration took place on a cloudy afternoon when the outside temperature was in the low forties. A brisk wind made it feel much cooler. There was no fire in the big wood stove and the ground-source heat pump was not operating.

At one point in the afternoon, our hostess asked her husband to open some of the windows as it was getting too warm. Since she is in her late fifties, some others teased that only she felt too warm. The fact is the house was getting quite warm. This home was being heated very effectively with an alternative source of heat.

My wife and I were two of probably seventy people who had come to commemorate the occasion. Most of the folks gathered there had known either the young man or young lady for years. We had known his parents for years before he was born, attending church with them for nearly two decades. We had shared many life experiences, some precious and some difficult, with them. We and so many of the others there were like family to our host family and to each other.

You see the alternative heat source that we were all benefiting from on that blustery afternoon was the crowd of people who had gathered to celebrate with, to share with, and to encourage one another.

I recommend you give it a try at your home. One day soon, when the weatherman says it’s going to be cold, dreary, and blustery invite over several friends. Keep the food simple, the conversation lively, and the thermostat turned down. Be warmed!

An opossum in the chicken house

The calendar says yesterday was January 3, 2009, but the thermometer showed that the high was 73 degrees. Here where we live that is not normal. But sometimes not normal can seem pretty nice.

What a beautiful day we had! The sky was bright and clear most all day. True the wind blew hard but not too hard.

Our son-in-law brought two of our granddaughters out to the country to play. They rode in the wagon, swung on the swings, went down the slide, and marveled at how far the wind blew the soap bubbles their Daddy was making.

When I was putting the chicken feed I had just brought from town into the storage bin the little girls and their Daddy came out to see the chickens. They checked the nest boxes and found six fresh brown eggs. They clucked at the chickens inside the pen, the littlest girl toddling and the bigger girl running along the fence.

They stopped short when they saw the opossum.

One evening a couple weeks ago, I had been late getting out to close up the hen house. When I got out there the birds were all out in the run. That was weird so I knew something was wrong. Inside, in the back corner, sat Ms. Opossum enjoying a fresh egg. I dispatched her with my .22 and tossed her over the fence without ceremony. She landed in some tall grass. The birds spent that night out in the run, too spooked to go in the house. By the next evening they had forgotten about the intruder and settled on the roost as usual.

Well, I had pretty much forgotten about the dead critter; guess I figured something would have dragged it off. But no! There it was in all its grizzly splendor. Actually, it was well preserved as we had been having “regular” cold weather.

By this time, Grandma had joined us out at the chicken house. She quickly got the little girls away from the opossum and interested in something else. I went to the barn and got a shovel.

Of course, I dug the hole in which to plant the erstwhile chicken house raider in the chicken run. I was pleasantly surprised to find absolutely no frost in the ground. Not only was it not frozen, there were large wiggly earth worms living and working in the top eight inched of it.

The chicken run is part of the garden spot we have been using for many years except when we quit using it because of the deer. You can read about that in an earlier post. The ground is quite fertile so I would expect to find worms there in the warmer months. I was surprised to find them in January.

The take away point of this for gardeners is that ground left mostly bare in the winter months, like a chicken run, will warm more quickly than mulched ground. I’ll bet if I had tried to dig in other parts of the garden where there is still a thick cover of mulch, I would have found the ground frozen.

It sure is fun to live and learn in the country.