Wind Casualty

My work has been really busy lately, and I've been missing my regular bird and plant walks around the garden.  Today I decided to take one of those walks, even though I felt like I didn't have time.  I was pleased to be back from my trip and able to feed the chickadees again.  I noticed a lot of leaves and small branches on the ground as I began walking.  We had some extremely strong winds, and other parts of the Maritime provinces have been very badly damaged by the storm that was the tail end of Hurricane Matthew passing by.  There were record-breaking rainfall totals in several provinces and many power outages.  New Brunswick fared better than Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, but we still had the damaging winds and fairly heavy rain.  I wandered around to the front yard and discovered, much to my surprise, that we had a tree fall down during the night!

The tree was an old spruce that was positioned along the lower edge of our driveway.  When it fell, it broke with about 2 or 3 feet of stump left in the ground.

The tree fell outwards, towards the road, and spans between the road and the bottom curve of our driveway.  The wood doesn't look rotten, so I think it was just the heavy winds combined with the height of the tree.

It's probably a 75 foot long tree, or thereabouts.  These tall spruce have branches without many needles along most of their length, with the green and vibrant part right up at the top where it gets the sunlight.  I wonder if that also makes them a bit top-heavy.

I noticed that it also took down a large bough from a pine tree in its fall.  Here you can see the top (green) part of the spruce pointing to the left, and the pine bough underneath it.

When he came home after work, Marc was able to help me move the pine bough and the top part of the downed tree into the goat and sheep area, so that they could snack on the pine and spruce needles, which they love to eat!  They also eat the lichen on the branches.  Now there is a bit of an open patch where the sunlight comes through - no doubt it will lead to a new tree being able to grow up into the space that has been left.

I was sad to see that we'd lost this tree, but it's part of the natural cycle of woodlands, and many creatures will benefit from the old wood as it decays.   We will have to cut up some of the largest portions and move them, but some of the branches and smaller pieces will stay on the ground.  Here's a young spruce just starting out in the area that the old one was shading - maybe this one will be the next towering tree!

Goats! Trees! And an Impending Project!

The goats have been very happy for the past couple of days because they were given a special treat!  Or should I say treet?

The road on which I live had a large machine go by a few weeks ago that did some pretty major trimming along the side of the road.   Unfortunately, this trimming involved a lot of trees with pretty wide trunks, including a lovely old apple tree.  I don't know why the county felt a need to get quite so vigourous with their brush cutting, but the outcome was a massive mess of branches and lots of young spruce trees that were cut off at the base.

I gathered quite a few of these felled trees and dragged them up to the barn, because the goats love spruce, so it was a free food source that was pre-cut for me to haul up to the hungry herd!  As you can see, they are very pleased.

Oh wait, no, I guess you can't see.  Word to the wise.  When you're trying to take pictures in a cold barn, you can't breathe out at the time time you snap the picture, otherwise all you take a picture of is a plume of breath that is making a little cloud in front of the lens!

Here we go - wee Westley to the left and Fezzik to the right, along with the sheep in the background, all having a good gnawing on a spruce!

Wee Fezzik has been doing well with his winter turtleneck-coat on and seems to be at least maintaining his weight despite the cold, which was what I had hoped for.  He still gets his special molasses oats treat every day to keep the weight on him as much as I can without giving him a case of the runs!

Moving on, you may recall, if you are a regular reader, that a while ago we bought cabinets to re-do the kitchen here.  We're not quite ready to do that project yet, but when we bought those cabinets, we bought a few extra units so that we could install some in my upstairs "studio" area, giving me places to store yarn, spinning fibre, dye materials, and other goodies.  It is with much excitement that I can tell you that the project to install these cabinets is set for Sunday!  Woohoo!!

Here are the cabinets that we have moved upstairs in preparation for the project!  There are two like the cabinet facing the camera on the left.  Nice big drawer and cupboard.  Then there is a smaller one (narrower) that is the same height.

 This is the sink cabinet unit.  Eventually we will get a nicer sink but one thing at a time!

Here is where they'll be installed (the chaos zone). We'll get rid of this grungy old half-baked plywood counter and put in the cabinets and a nice piece of second hand countertop (which already had a sink hole!) that we were able to get.  It is a nice dark greenish looking laminate.  Easy to clean.

All those bottles under the sink are my fibre dyes and detergents, etc.  The microwave is for dyeing also.  All our bathroom stuff is also there because our bathroom doesn't have a sink yet, so we have to use this one for that too.  Anyway, I can't wait to do the project and get things put away in their proper, organized places.  I'll be sure to show some pictures after our work!