And That's Why They Call it Fall

Your blogger has been deathly sick for two and a half days.

Beauty all Around Us

The leaves are especially beautiful this week here in Leavenworth County.  We had a hint of rain this morning... while I crossed the yard in the dark, there was a single flash of lightening, and then a very soft rumble of thunder, and then it sprinkled.  It sprinkled all the way to the office, rained a short time there, and then cleared up.  We have not had a measureable amount of rain since August 20th, before my birthday.

Here is what our pasture looks like  - and it's a pleasure to be in it in the evening.

See the birds flying by?  That's looking north into the Spehar's calf pasture.  Their land forms an "L" around ours.

And this is the wonderful view looking east, into the Spehar's back acreage.  See the gorgeous tree across their second pond?  It is the first thing we see coming down our drive in the evening... like a fiery beacon.  You can JUST see the beehive sitting near it to the left. 

What a great time of year this is!

Strange Phenomenon

I don't know what this means, but if any of you do, please tell us all.

Hereabouts, in Kansas, the black walnut trees are the last to leaf out in spring.  All the other trees have leaves blowing in the wind by the time the walnut's are growing and grown. 

I grew up with them in the yard of my parent's house. 

Here we have several black walnut trees.  One has stopped producing, the Century Tree:

As you can see, it's dying.  The trunk has even started shifting. We upgraded our insurance on the outbuildings, just in case.

This one shelters and shades the big henhouse:

But I noticed in the last few days that these trees... the last to leaf out in April of all the trees... .

are dropping their leaves already!

This is a random example.  As I cut grass tonight (doing 90%  of the mowing since it's supposed to get stifling hot this weekend)... I noticed along the north fence line that many of the trees there have been dropping leaves.  It's only July 8th for pete's sake! We have had a normal rain year, and only a few days of very bad heat, though we have about four coming up here starting tomorrow.  I do not remember leaves dropping this early, ever... at least ever that I paid attention to!
I noticed that there are many leaves down from the dying tree, as well.  Many years ago, wood companies would come in and take down walnut trees for free, but it will cost us about $1000.00 to take this one safely down, and send the wood away to be used somewhere. 
I wonder if the leaves falling so early is a prediction of weather to come?

More Projects

Another project we have been working on is composting, and improving our garden beds.  This spring our neighbor Troy was kind enough to drive his tractor over and plow our garden plot.  Then, several weeks later, he came over and went back and forth over it with his rear-tine tiller.  He left a great bed for us to plant in, and then it rained.  And rained.  The yard was squelching.  We did not get the plants in until mid-April, and did not have a bounty of peas, but we DID have a productive garden.  However, we are planning even more improvements for next year.  Because of the success of this bed....

we have changed the way we garden.  Keith has been studying Lasagna Bed gardening, where many layers are put on the ground without tilling or breaking it.  This is basically what we did with this flower bed, laying straw from the horseshed full of manure... dirt from bagged dirt (the hard and expensive way to go), grass clippings, and more straw.  Then we covered it with wood chips (also expensive).  We planted the perennials in this deep bed, and they ran riot all summer and fall.  The three boxes of wood you see above are the three original beds.  And by early summer, it looked like this....

So now, Keith has spent considerable time the last few weekends working on the compost bins.  Thanks to a friend at work, we have bags and bags of leaves and yard cleaning composting.  He was kind enough to give them to us in paper sacks, and we put them inside plastic bags to cause them to compost in the bags.  We'll add these to our beds in the spring, because now we have four more beds! Keith also strengthened and repaired our original compost bins.

The bags are some of the leaf bags... we have more laying in the vegetable garden.

This is a new bin that Keith bought and set up, it is full of layers of dirt and leaves and other things (chicken house cleanings)

And this will be set up for kitchen garbage, and all the other refuse that goes to make good clean compost. 

(llama poop)