The remnants of botany class this week

November Hill farm journal, 59

We’ve had 5+ inches of rain since August 1st and about that much the last two weeks in July, so it is a jungle here. The arena desperately needs harrowing, I’ve been too busy to do it, and now the pollinator beds need some work replacing mulch which has been displaced by all the water flowing.

On the plus side, I haven’t had to hand water anything in a month!

We’ve had a break from high heat until this week. Several days nearing the mid-90s have necessitated hosing the horses again. Yesterday evening I went out to the barn to find Keil Bay sweating and his nostrils were flaring a tiny bit. A good hosing and scraping cooled him down, and I got him set up in his double stall with hay and fresh water while the daily thunderstorm blew in.

A few signs of hope (ie autumn approaching): acorns starting to fall, horses shedding summer coat, muscadines still green but large enough to be visible.

Last weekend I had my first botany class and really enjoyed it. I brought home two new asters for the pollinator garden and three new books to read. I just realized I haven’t done my homework yet! The week has flown by, one of the busiest weeks of the summer. Tonight my son and his significant other arrive for a visit and we’ll be gathering with my family to send off a nephew to a brand new job in Denver. The young ones are growing up.

The pony is in daily work still, with a marked change in his weight and muscling. The (not that huge) fat pads at his shoulders are gone and his withers is now much more prominent. His muscling has developed again and he has that sleek barrel curve that indicates fitness. I need to get a photo of him and wish we had thought to do a before photo as well. The important thing is he is looking good and seems to be feeling good too. He loves the work and I suspect especially the attention from his girl.

Keil looks older to me this week. I won’t put him back into work until September but as fall nears I hope to get him into an easy work schedule and to get Cody back into work as well. I miss riding. My body misses riding! I’m back in massage therapy after a long summer without it, and have a chiro appointment next week.

In other news, which I don’t think I’ve shared here, we purchased back in April a small cottage in town for my mother-in-law. Honeysuckle Cottage is a cute home on a very large lot, and it has huge potential to be something really special. We’re renovating it bit by bit, starting with a few necessary updates/repairs, and then on to things that will make it beautiful. As if I need another list of things to do! But thankfully it’s being a good home already and will only get better as we go. The first improvement was repairing some soft sub-flooring in the laundry room and installing beautiful tile in the laundry room and kitchen. Now we’re working on furnace/AC repair. Seems it’s the summer for that here AND there.

The next project here on November Hill is not a fun one but has to be done. The drainage ditch that runs from the top of our lane on our strip of property needs to be cleared. With all this rain, much of it coming very quickly, we’ve had some road damage. Nothing too bad but it will help to clear the ditch, and that’s on the docket for next week.

A friend posted a photo of her barn aisle recently on Facebook, and that got me thinking about our own barn aisle. Anyone have thoughts about using pavers in sand instead of mortar? Hers looks so good and so elegantly classic, I am tempted to do it here. Once the horses can stay out some during the days without being savaged by biting insects, we can move on with some barn maintenance.

I’m resisting the urge here to list the next things on my list. Right now I just want to focus on this cooler morning, the sun shining, and the hummingbird outside the front porch. And these two keeping me company.

Notes on miniature donkey nutrition

Over the past few years I have had Rafer and Redford on the same balanced diet I feed the horses. They get a very small amount of Ontario Dehy Timothy Balance Cubes (these are totally balanced nutritionally and can be used as a complete feed if necessary) and I balance our hay to insure that copper and zinc are in correct proportion to iron. The diet has been really good for the horses, and the donkeys too look super healthy.

To this I have a custom formulated mix that adds in other things horses are known to need. My seniors get special supplements, as does the PSSM Quarter Horse.

All get loose salt, freshly ground flax, and vitamin E gelcaps added to their feed tubs.

Earlier this year I read a post on an equine nutrition group I’ve been part of since 2008. Someone’s very overweight miniature donkey had blood work done and they found that many of the levels of vitamins and minerals were too high. This donkey had been on a similarly balanced diet as my two.

The donkey’s human took him off all supplements with the intention of starting from a clean slate with blood work to guide her. The donkey lost weight and blood levels returned to normal.

This got me and a few other folks thinking. We know donkeys are extremely thrifty animals. They browse on more than just grass and hay, and sometimes it feels like they don’t need to be fed at all. Maybe we are overdoing it with them, treating them like horses, providing much more than what they really need.

So I put Rafer and Redford on a clean slate diet. Just their bit of soaked cubes AM and PM, and much less hay than what they were getting. We have decent pasture this time of year and they have 24/7 access to it. I decided to see what happened if they were in charge of foraging for almost all of their food.

Remarkably, Rafer (the heavier of the two, with some fat pads evident) lost weight quickly. He trimmed down to a very lovely shape. Redford is very muscular and not as prone to gaining weight as is Rafer, and he too trimmed down, just not as much. I felt awful that I’d been over-supplementing them. They just didn’t need it!

Meanwhile, midsummer, the outsides of their front legs got itchy and formed scabs. At first Redford, then Rafer, and we treated them daily for several weeks getting things under control. Then it occurred to me that the fresh ground flax, salt, and vitamin E were all things that might help the skin thing, so we put them back on those items, carefully measuring the small amount of flax they get each day. Legs cleared right up and we’re back on track.

I thought I was doing the very best for them, only to realize I was doing far too much. Lesson learned. I think it’s worthwhile to revisit what we’re doing diet-wise at least once a year. A friend in the nutrition group takes her horses off all supplements for a month each year in the fall and then carefully monitors to see which horse needs what before carefully adding only what they need back in to their diets. I think this is a good practice!

The busiest place on November Hill: native pollinator garden!

Loving the pollinator garden! All the activity is exactly why I planted it. Here’s a shot from yesterday. There were so many critters flying around me, each finding their favorite native plants to visit.

I’m also excited to report that I’ve enrolled in the NC Botanical Garden’s Native Plant Studies certificate program. I’ll be taking 9 core courses plus a slew of electives over the next couple of years to complete the requirements, and at that point work with an advisor on a capstone project that I’ll implement and present with poster to receive my certificate. 

Watch for updates and more photos as I start this new journey on November Hill. 

November Hill farm journal, 58

I took this photo several weeks ago while waiting for Duke Energy tree crews to arrive and begin the cutting of the trees we negotiated allowing them to take down at the back of our property. What I was aiming to focus in on was the woodpecker who appears as the black thing mid-photo. I had mistakenly done the alarm call for birds thinking it would send them away, but as daughter reminded me later it BRINGS them, so I was suddenly surrounded by birds including two of these huge and gorgeous woodpeckers.

What I now see in the photo is the huge X. In runic tradition, X is Gebo, and generally represents a gift. It’s interesting that I didn’t see this that day as I looked up, but it is so prominent now.

The first day of cutting proceeded. The local Duke supervisor was there and the crews, employees of Burford Tree Services, were contracted by Duke to do the job. There was a bucket truck crew and a tree crew. With the known to us by now Duke supervisor on site I felt things were well in hand, and I told him I’d leave them to do their work. The first day went pretty well. The crews arrived much later than expected and they closed up shop by 4 p.m. so not that much actually got done. (I later learned they supposedly work 4 10-hour days but this is not what we experienced that week)

On the second day around 11 a.m. (they showed up for work around 9:30) I heard yelling, not work-related but like someone was having a party on the back of our farm. The single chainsaw was revving repeatedly, and when I got down to the back to see what was going on, I found huge branches  laying on the fence, the f-word being hurled in all directions, one guy in our tree while four stood on the ground doing nothing. Across the way in two bucket trucks were another five or so workers doing nothing.

I asked where the supervisor was and no one spoke. All the yelling and cursing stopped and even when I repeatedly asked who was in charge, silence. I told the tree crew to get the branches off the fence. No response. At that point I got louder and more commanding and finally one guy got the branches off the fence and another guy, who identified himself as the foreman, walked over. He was surly and unhelpful. I wanted to know why they were making so much noise, why they were not working, and why they thought bellowing the f-word so loud I could hear hear it on my back porch was professional, appropriate work behavior.

Again, no response from the foreman. I called the Duke supervisor who told me his truck was being repaired which was why he wasn’t on site. I told him what was going on and he said he was on the way. I was so upset I called my husband, who came home from work and supervised the back of the farm for the rest of the day, along with the area and regional supervisors from Duke, who later told me there were too many men on the job site with not enough work to do.

We also found trash dumped all over the place by the crews. Duke employees cleaned it up.

On Thursday the supervisor told me the tree crew had been sent home and told if they wanted to come back the following Monday, they would need to come prepared to behave like professionals. The bucket crew worked about a 7-hour day that Thursday, getting most of the trees outside our property line (but adjacent to a section of our fencing) down.

They have never come back. We’ve had rain and I’m not sure if that has made it impossible for them to work but none of what they had planned to do is complete. On one hand, it’s a relief not to have them here, but on another, it’s just dragging this out. We have timber that needs to be stacked and dried for the sawmill guy.

I’m not sure what the gift in all this is, but at the end of the third and final work day that week, the Duke supervisors asked if I could leave the back gate open because there was a very young fawn inside our back fence. With all the chaos back there I’m not sure why or how the fawn ended up there, but at least it was safe! We checked on it after dark and it was still there, so we left the gate open and made a hay trail leading out hoping its mother would come back for it. In the morning it was gone.

Since that week we’ve had peace and quiet and a lot of rain on November Hill. Yesterday we had such a deluge I was out at the barn with shovel and rake shifting water flow by trenching the rain away from the barn. We’re in the midst of doing some work back there anyway to redo some old French drains and put in grids in the barn and shelters, but this was stop-gap work to keep things from flooding near the barn.

The rain is a gift for sure but sometimes when it rains, it pours!

The herd is happy to have a break from the high heat. Yesterday, as the storm blew in, Keil left his double stall and stood in the doorway of the barn, looking out, watching the rain fall. It was peaceful in the barn and one of my favorite places to be when the weather gets a little crazy. For the horses the barn is shelter from the storm and the heat and the biting insects. For me, it’s a different kind of shelter, one that empties my mind of all that’s crazy in the world.

I suppose that is the big gift, right there.