Tag: rural living

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Electricity Wins

Over the last couple of days, we’ve been watching a battle between nature and electricity. Nature loses. Electricity wins.

Battle Causes

Plants want to grow. Trees grow tall anywhere they find a place with enough soil, light and water. Electric lines are not a problem to them.

Storms make the trees sway. Branches hit the lines. Treetops snap off and fall on the lines. Whole trees get uprooted and fall taking the lines down with them.

Electricity wins over this tree
This tall honey locust was a danger to the electricity lines. So the tree trimmers took it down.

Electricity Demands

When we lived up north in the Michigan Upper Peninsula, we had no electricity. We used gas lights in the evening. It was cold enough to not need a refrigerator. We brought jugs of water from town.

The wood cook stove had a tank for melting snow which was plentiful for six to seven months. It kept the room warm along with a wood heating stove. The radio ran on batteries.

After moving to Missouri, we got electricity. Running water in the house is so convenient. Lights coming on at the flip of a switch are luxury. Electric appliances are nice too. Add being able to watch movies in the evening.

Most people also have cell phones, internet, freezers. Some have electric cars, fans, heat and ranges. Electricity is the underpinning of our lives.

The Choice

When the electric company came by wanting to clear the trees out of the right of way, we agreed. It isn’t that we don’t value the trees, some of them old and beautiful. We do. It’s that we value electricity more.

If our electricity goes off, we do survive. We remember the old ways and adapt. But it is not something we enjoy doing.

nature loses
This machine has blades in the front roller. These pull in branches, up to six inch trunk trees and tall weeds. Shredded mulch is left behind.

Nature loses. Electricity wins.

Watching the large equipment was amazing. The long boom with a saw at the end sheared off branches fifty and sixty feet up. Chain saws were not needed.

Then there was the mulching machine. It ate its way through six inch trunks turning them into wood shreds. Smaller branches were pulverized.

The big boom carried a man up to trim a tall tree with a chainsaw.

With equipment like these machines, nature hasn’t a chance. Electricity wins every time.

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Averted Tragedy

Last night one of my new hens, one of my winter layers didn’t come in. All night I thought she was picked off by a fox or a hawk. This morning she was the lucky one that averted tragedy.

Accidents Happen

Rural living is an invitation to accidents. Machines don’t work as expected. Wire snaps. Wood or metal beams fall.

Livestock has its share of accidents too. Some end tragically. Some are averted tragedy.

Trapped Goats

As told in “For Love of Goats”, we had a young doe slip down into the crotch of a tree. My companion found her and lifted her out. Otherwise she was trapped, unable to get her hooves on anything to let her push out of the tree.

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper
Part of “For Love of Goats” is a series of memoirs taken from my many years raising dairy goats. Kids are often in trouble. They can get trapped, lost, hurt. The best account is averting tragedy for the kid in trouble.

There was another such incident. This time a doe was stepping over a fallen tree. It had two trunks. The ground was a hillside covered with gravel.

The doe slid down the tree trunk into the crotch and got stuck. When she didn’t come in that evening, I went looking. It took two of us to slide her up out of that trap.

The next morning that upper trunk became firewood.

Trapped Chicken

I have extra water buckets placed upside down along the fence into the goat barn lot. The buckets I’m using sit on top of these, easy to grab to fill at the hand pump.

This morning the bucket had fallen onto the ground. When I picked it up, my lost hen was under it. She was eager to get back in the chicken yard where she promptly grabbed the vole the flock was arguing over.

Avoiding Tragedy

No matter how careful I try to be, accidents happen. Some do end in tragedy. Most do not. There is reason for this.

When my flock goes back in their yard at night, I count them. Three of this kind, three of those, seven of the other, until all are accounted for.

The same is true for the goats. I make sure everyone goes out and everyone comes in.

The chickens are locked up at night. The goats are in their barn.

I much prefer taking precautions to having another averted tragedy tale to tell.

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A Country Year

Leonard Hall was a farmer. I am a homesteader. Yet his book “A Country Year” reminded me so many times why I chose and stayed in this life.

The difference between a farmer and a homesteader rests mostly on two things. One is the size of the operation. The other is profit. A farmer wants profit from his endeavors. A homesteader appreciates return on time and money, but it isn’t the main motivation.

Organizing Time

A year has twelve months. “A Country Year” goes month by month, but starts in March as that is when spring begins to creep into the Ozarks. The chores, tasks and more discussed are done from a time now passed and still present in some ways. Mostly the machinery and attitudes have changed.

The book is set in the late 1950s. So many things were different then. I was surprised the Ozarks had a five year drought as those I’m familiar with lasted only for the summer or, at most, a year.

Hall raised beef cattle, Hereford. Black Angus are all the rage now. His advice is good: putting out good pasture, good hay, not overgrazing and keeping track of the cattle apply for any livestock operation.

Oops.

A Country Year mentions planting multiflora roses
Multiflora roses are lovely in bloom. The flowers are white or pinkish white and have little scent. They normally have many thorns and the plants get large with canes growing ten feet up into trees or meshing with other rose plants. These flowers produce small hips and lots of them so the plants spread readily both by seed and from canes touching the ground and rooting.

Back then multiflora roses, the ‘living fence’ were being promoted. Sericea lespedeza was the pasture legume to grow. Both are considered alien invasives now. However, their widespread presence makes them permanent residents.

Multiflora roses spread quickly. They produce many small hips (seed pods) not as well liked as those of the native roses. These rose canes can grow up into trees and kill saplings.

Sericea lespedeza isn’t well liked by cattle. It seeds prolifically and can take over large areas. Roadsides, hillsides, good soil, poor soil make no difference to it. Goats and sheep relish it both fresh and as hay.

Why Homestead?

Along side the tales of history, people, hunting, fall butchering and monthly tasks, is a running commentary on the native plants and animals. Hall believed in conservation and practiced it. Over the years on his farm Possum Trot, the land healed from years of misuse. It became productive and brought back the native plants and animals as well as providing him a living.

Hall hints at then states in “A Country Year” why he loves living rural. For the author as for me, the biggest reason for living this life with all its work, problems, joys and disappointments is just that. There is time to look out at the hills or down a pasture and admire the beauty, the quiet (lack of city noise) and think my own thoughts.