Beside the Stream

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Lots of work

Published by Alice on July 21, 2010 in small town life. 2 Comments

The greenhouse needed water, electricity and natural gas, so we had to trench the utilities from the house. Trenches are tough–it’s expensive to get a machine on-site, and it’s hard to find someone to do such heavy work.

So we had the Navajos back for a few days. Bob called Lani, who dug the trench with his friend Russ. Russ had rarely been off the reservation, and it was his first trip to Durango. It was the same drill as before: they don’t have cars so Bob picked them up early and dropped them back in the afternoon, and I’d feed them breakfast and big lunch. Russ taught me to say hozhoni habene, beautiful morning (the zh is a jh sound with a buzz to it).

He liked Gracie a lot, and she was very helpful during their digging.

He said in a helpful tone, I’ll take one of her puppies.

The next day he said, My mom would take one of her puppies, too. She’d like this dog. We’ll take a male and a female.

A clever dog

Published by Alice on July 5, 2010 in dogs. 9 Comments

Gracie has a full set of new teeth, so her chewing is abating. She still collects, though, and has become more methodical about it.

Here is an unposed picture of Gracie with her bone collection. She has been given these bones, one by one, over the last two or three weeks, and she keeps them all together.

And it’s not her only bone collection: she has a collection of old bones from wild animals nearby (also unposed). There aren’t any fresh bones in this collection, and there aren’t any old bones in her other pile. The dog is sorting her bones.

Clever dogs like to show off, so Gracie needs more tricks. One couple we know taught their dog to turn the lights on (which he liked to do all the time); he could open the fridge but wasn’t excellent at closing it; he could take off your socks, and he could roll over.

For us, the light switches and the fridge is a no go, but we’re working on “roll over” and Gracie loves to carefully take off your socks. She starts at the ankle, works it over the heel until she triumphantly peels it off the sole and toes.

(If you know of any fun or useful dog tricks, let me know.)

A turkey vulture

Published by Alice on July 2, 2010 in birds. 4 Comments

At first we thought that a golden eagle was perched on the debris pile near the ditch,

but instead it was a turkey vulture, or buzzard. Wikipedia says that, like storks, these birds often defecate on their own legs to cool themselves through the evaporation of the water in the feces and/or urine, a process known as urohidrosis. See those white streaks on his feet? It’s uric acid! Eeeeeew!

It looks like part of a rat is hanging from its beak. I didn’t get a clear shot, but

it looks as though this giant bird took its rat along when he flew down the creek.

The turkey vulture isn’t the only scavenger that patrols this debris pile: Gracie finds dead animals here as well. In the last three days, she has brought home a duck dripping with maggots, a squirrel missing most (but not all) of its guts, and 3/4 of a magpie. She has many charming traits, but her affection for rotting corpses is not one of them.

Mothers and Daughters

Published by Alice on June 23, 2010 in birds. 7 Comments

This flicker was so pretty that I took a picture of her on the feeder. I assumed that this highly colored bird was a male, but learned later that male red-shafted flickers have a red, teardrop-shaped mustache, while the females have a less distinct brown mustache.

She hopped onto a nearby boulder, and another flicker flew over and sat next to her. Quick as can be, Mom started regurgitating seed into her grown daughter’s beak.

Here the grown nestling has her eyes shut in bliss, remembering back to the days she didn’t have to take care of herself.

Here she’s wide-eyed,

and here you can actually see the flow of birdseed from mother to daughter.

Thanks, Mom, that was great.

Hops

Published by Alice on June 21, 2010 in gardening. 4 Comments

Bob tilled the fenceline before the fence went in; two weeks later, Anna and I raked the dead sods into piles, and the Navajos barrowed them away. Mulching the cleared ground took a total of six truckloads, forkful by forkful. It was a lot of work,

and when it was done the fenceline still needed to be planted. We put forsythias at two corners, and I planted 31 hops along the first hundred feet (the fenceline shown in this picture). (We’re placing fruit trees on the lawn for a kitchen orchard of semi dwarf trees.)

This is a photo of a hop field, and now I see that planting one side of the fence is no more than a good start: I need to plant both sides for the full effect. Hops are perennials, and although they are often called vines, hops are technically a bine (unlike vines, which attach themselves to a support with tendrils or suckers, bines have stout stems with stiff hairs to aid in climbing).

I bought hop rhizomes on Ebay–including shipping, they were about $4 each–and for now they’re just wee creatures.

But give them a season or two and they’ll be a green wall.

Here’s the fun part: The genus Hops, humulus , is a member of the small family of Cannabaceae , which includes the genus cannabis, or Marijuana. Hops and hemp are close cousins, and both have male and female plants. The female flowers of cannabis are used for recreational and medical purposes; the female flowers of hops are used to flavor and stabilize beer. Cannabaceae is a family with flowers that try harder.

Beauty

Published by Alice on June 18, 2010 in insects. 4 Comments

Here’s a tiger swallowtail eating chive flower nectar.

These chive plants might be the same ones their parents enjoyed, so this is workaday for them; I am filled with wonder at their visit.

A dog update

Published by Alice on June 16, 2010 in dogs. 5 Comments

Gracie is over 50 pounds now.

Her sides are still puppy velvet, but she has grown-up curls on her back–she is a rough-coated Berner–

and her chest is transitioning to adult hair as well. For now, she’s a perpetual motion machine. She’s best when she walks four or five miles a day, so Bob and I usually take her on separate walks. She’s impeccable with the leash–never the tiniest tug–and now she mostly walks off-leash. We’re working on road training: she sits at my feet whenever a car goes by, she’s getting good with ”out of the road”, and she definitely gets the fact that dogs belong beside the road, not in it; on trails, she goes off on independent tangents and comes barrelling back at a two-note whistle.

Her teething is at a zenith, and she gets a new frozen bone most every day. Gnawing on that fresh lamb neckbone is one of her favorite things.

She’s growing up, and breaking some rules. Last week she started spending some time across the road. She knows that our rules are that she has to stay on the property, but there was a dead beaver on the debris pile next to the ditch headgate. She couldn’t resist visiting it to smell and poke and roll in it, so the beaver had to go. I am lucky to live in a world where I don’t have to move my own rotting beaver; instead, Bob put on a mask and tossed it into Hermosa Creek with a pitchfork.

Gracie was waiting for him when he got back. She loved that beaver carcass, but (being a dog) she knows that there’s going to be something even better, possibly this very afternoon.

Living with wild beasts

Published by Alice on May 19, 2010 in dogs. 9 Comments

I thought it’d be nice to put a posey from my Dad’s death on Jessie’s grave.

Unfortunately, her grave was recently torn apart and her intestines were actually festooned around the undone site. I didn’t expect to see so much of my old dog,

so here’s a gratuitous picture of catnip and iris to get those guts cleared away.

Grace is now about forty pounds, growing well. She’s easy to mistake for a velvet-coated adult

until you see her naked puppy belly. Big as she is, she’s still a little girl.

She took her first 4-mile hike yesterday–I’ve been restricting her to a mile or so until now–and she did great. These big dogs are delicate when they’re little, and she’s had nothing but easy walks and kind words until recently.

But she’s bigger now, and getting into trouble.

Her new set of teeth come between 4 and 6 months, and her chewing is rising to a frenzy. She can shred a magazine in five minutes, a hardcover book in twenty. Training and her good will is the only thing that keeps the furniture, shoes, reading material and telephones intact, and the house and yard is littered with fresh bones.

She likes to chew, and she’s a collector. Grace sleeps in her cage with the door open, and when I went to bed last night she had a single lamb bone in it. By the time I got up, her collection included

my new summer sandal (she left its mate in the garden)
the current edition of the New Yorker
a used strand of dental floss
a nail file, and
a bra.

None of which were shredded… but they might have been. Day to day, it’s a little dicey around here. She hasn’t ruined anything yet, but it’s clearly just a matter of time.

She was yelled at for the first time from biting Bob’s hand too hard, and she sulked for several hours. She doesn’t take criticism well, and she’s a wild beast. Go figure.

Building a fence

Published by Alice on May 10, 2010 in Do It Yourself. 8 Comments

It took three years, but we finally decided to build a deer fence.

The first step was to move the raised beds inside our proposed fence line. Bob hauled them, while I said things like: Boy those are heavy. Careful!

Next, Bob and a friend built a foundation for the little greenhouse we’ve had in a box for five years. The foundation is made of 4×4s held into place with long bars drilled through the wood and driven into the ground at a 45 degree angle.

The greenhouse frame went up quickly,

and then Bob rented a tractor to till the fence line, and to break ground for some new beds.

Two Navajos and an Apache built the fence in four days. On the first day, they set the four corners. The corners are pegged together with ribar, and tied in an x with wire. Gracie had a very good time helping out.

The two older men have ranches on the reservation in New Mexico, and the three of them came north together for the job. They charge $13 an hour, so they can each take home $500 from the project. It’s a little complicated, though. They don’t have cars, so Bob picks them up at the supermarket at 8 every morning.

Since they’re far from home, I make them a nice breakfast every day–2 pots of coffee, lots of scrambled eggs and toast, hot sauce–and a solid lunch of big sandwiches and lots of fruit (Best sandwich I ever had, said Ernest). Their only request was that they like to drink Coke.

The second day they set the poles. It’s all handwork: they use post hole diggers to dig deep holes for the posts, and pack sand and soil down the holes with iron bars. At the corners, they use an electric drill to set the ribar and wire stretchers to make the wire crosses, and when the fence was done they used a handsaw to adjust the pole heights. I’ve rarely seen so much work done with so few tools, and it was a beautiful thing to see them coax the fence together so patiently. They are very nice, gentle men, and they often talk Navajo together.

On the third day, they put up the wire mesh, and on the fourth they finished the topwire and hung the gate. And done.

They made a beautiful fence, and I made them buffalo burgers for lunch the last day. The burgers were great–I had all the fixings and special rolls–and they said it was the first time they’d had buffalo.

They arrived with little day packs, and that’s how they left (the tools are all Bob’s). They each gave me a special thanks for the food, and a separate goodbye for the dog.

Here’s Lani after four days of good work, heading south with cash in his pocket and leaving a well-built fence behind.

Bob hung a birdfeeder the hour it was done, and this picture is from today, the first day the deer are penned out: