Always Something

Water continues to be the theme in Western Montana, which is good, because it is the most important thing.  The grass is tall in the fields and the weeds high in the ditch.  Some of the sow thistle between Silver Sage and here is over seven feet.  I would have thought the mosquitoes would be worse, but so far they have hardly appeared at all.

The fire season has been nonexistent, which should translate into more free time, but it hasn’t.  Most of the projects I had thought to accomplish haven’t even been started, let alone finished.  We should get the rest of the dog yard fenced this Friday and that will be nice.  The irrigation is flowing and just keeping up with the lawn using a borrowed reel mower is about all we can manage.

We had Melissa from the Ravalli County Weed District come by and identify all our succession vegetation for us.  Mostly we got mustard.  She did point out some Canada thistle, which we knew about, but she also noted that we had some field bindweed growing amongst the landscaping on the south side of the house.  Everyone, even brother Jeb, makes an ugly face when I mention the field bindweed, so I tend to believe it will be hard to get rid of.  Fortunately we haven’t seen it in the pasture yet, and I can only hope we don’t.  The grass is relatively well established in there and healthy, always the best defense against invasion.

Melissa recommended we use Roundup on the mustard patch around the stable, on the two potentially harmful gigantor nightshade plants we discovered, and on the area where we found the field bindweed.  I don’t much like the idea of using that stuff but I don’t know much about it.  I asked around a bit and word on the street is that it is has no adverse effects on humans, nonetheless I’m rather hesitant.  After a little Wikipedia indoctrination, I’m even more so.

I don’t see mustard as much of a threat, and the nightshade we may be able to beat back with a pair of trimmers.  Our neighbor Rod down the road has offered to help us to spot spray the Canada thistle with some Milestone.  Brandi dug up most of the sow thistle and a couple more seasons of that should take care of it.  She also has been cutting seed heads off the Canada and I’ve been pulling the bindweed before it flowers in some attempt at control.

Getting out of the weeds a bit, the big news in our world is that Brandi has accepted a permanent position at Rocky Mountain Laboratory.  That means we’ll be sticking around the Bitterroot for awhile, and I like the feel of it.  It gives us the confidence to really invest ourselves in the smallholding and the community for the long term and allows us freedom to consider a greater range of possibilities.  Now I can imagine working this place over the course of ten or twenty years.  It’s exciting.

In the mean time I’ll just try to keep up with Keegan and the lawn mowing, which may have just got easier since the irrigation has quit again.  Guess I shouldn’t have opened those valves in the pasture.     

Ah, Peace & Quiet

It’s pretty quiet around our place.  Not literally, of course, but in the sense that not much has happened as of late.  In literal terms, it’s anything but quiet.  Howling huskies, squalling pups, clucking hens, and a babbling baby all conspire to ensure that silence only occurs for short periods in the dead of night.

It’s winter, so our world revolves primarily around … dogs!  A return to more seasonal weather had us headed up the West Fork again, where we found the recent cold snap and snowfall had vastly improved trail conditions.  The dogs all ran well and little Icy got her first taste of the trace.  Paluk’s pups are four weeks old and as cute as ever.  I get endless enjoyment from asking Brandi which one of them she is going to keep.

“So, we can keep a puppy?”

“No.  It’s just a thought experiment.”

“Oh.”

The chickens we got from our smokejumper bro Rogers haven’t been producing any eggs.  They got a little traumatized by the inevitable dog v. chicken encounter which occurred the very first day we had them on the property, but they still offered up an egg a day for a week or so.  Now they aren’t producing at all.  I’ve asked around a bit and it seems they aren’t unique in this.  My buddy Sells’ urban flock in Missoula isn’t producing either.  He is running heat lamps and we aren’t, so that doesn’t seem to be a significant factor.  I should do some more research online, but I will probably just wait until spring when the days get longer and things warm up and see what happens then.

Despite my best efforts, I have more or less come to grips with the fact that the dogs are going to take up a lot more space than I had originally imagined and that their presence is going to seriously hinder our ability to host other livestock.  I’m really none too stoked to come walking out the back door to find four of them hanging from the neck of a shrieking sheep, so abstinence is the best policy there.  I still maintain hope for a couple of weaner pigs and a cow, but I've finally accepted that flora may be more the focus than fauna in the near term.

I’ve been doing some reading about food forests and garden design and I’m pretty excited about planting some fruit trees and berry bushes this coming spring or fall.  I’m thinking about taking a pretty loose approach to gardening this year and basically just throwing seeds wherever there is some bare dirt.  I would really like to put some bulbs and native shrubs in as well, and I’m really interested in starting some hops on the fence around the dog yard.  But as with everything, how much I can accomplish will largely depend on the availability of those two scarcities, time and money.

Keegan turned one last month and has become upwardly mobile.  His favorite thing in the world is taking hold of a pair of fingers and marching back to the bathroom to fetch his toothbrush.  He can crawl, pull himself up on the furniture, and stand no-handed for a half second, but he has a terrible habit of not going all the way to the ball and is always pulling up short and having to reach in.  We’ve been working on fixing that.

A glorious thing about one year old Keegan is that he speaks.  Not English, but a language that is entirely his own.  He often sits there and rattles on to himself for minutes on end.  You can’t understand a word of it, but he knows what he's saying.  I don’t know where he got it but he’s quite the orator.  He loves to spout off some longwinded tale and then finish with Keegan’s patented “I Approve” salute, which is always worthy of a laugh.

So that’s what I mean when I say it has been pretty quiet.  No sonic booms or explosions.  Just a dull roar.

Do They Not Teach Physics in School Anymore?

There is something that has been bothering me, and it isn’t the eight puppies that we need to find homes for, the hitch that I’ve noticed in Isis’ gait, the lack of snow in the Bitterroot, or the fact that JFK, Bobby, MLK, and Malcolm X were assassinated, all in a relatively short time span and all by men with rather dubious motives, simply for trying to, as Spike Lee put it, do the right thing.

In truth, all those things are bothering me, especially the concerns I have about the dogs, in whom I have a vetted interest and over which I have at least some influence, but this is something else.  It’s a simple thing, one that has been a recurrent theme of late, an underlying thread linking a multitude of topics.  I found it in a book on permaculture I’ve been reading, and it bubbles to mind whenever I endure another news story about our faltering economy.  It has to do with attitude, and, when it comes to human endeavor, attitude is everything.

The instance in the book was a passage about capturing rainwater.  The author’s message:  Utilize it.  Otherwise, it simply goes to waste.

Now wait a minute.  If I don’t intercept it, it goes where?  Well, someplace.  And it does what when it gets there?  Well, something.

Likewise, the economy.  According to most, it has gone on hiatus.  Retreated, like a turtle into its shell.  Consumers, the primary drivers of the economy, are no longer spending.  So they must be saving, right?  Actually, no.  Lending?  Nope.  Investing?  No, that isn’t happening either.

Has everyone forgotten that, sunlight and the occasional meteor/spaceflight aside, we live in a closed system?  No matter whether we are talking hydrology or economics, the first law of thermodynamics still applies.  Money and water can neither be created nor destroyed.  They can only be moved around the planet. 

Granted, that isn’t exactly true, especially about the money, but for the purpose of this argument it is.  Those resources are somewhere, and they are doing something.  The real crux of the matter is that, with both sides of the equation being equal, what we do in one place will have a profound influence on things in another.  The question is whether it has a positive net effect (for humanity at least) or whether it sets off a cascade of events the consequence of which we cannot even begin to comprehend.

In the case of the economy, it’s pretty obvious.  Take away the rainwater and the earth becomes a desert. 

Or does it?

According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2009 the gross domestic product of America shrunk at a rate of minus 2.633%.  China’s GDP, on the other hand, grew at a rate of 9.096%.  That same year, the GDP of Afghanistan and Iraq increased by 22.545% and 4.5% respectively.

On second thought, maybe I should start collecting rainwater.  Better than just letting it run off the roof, down the Bitterroot, and across the Pacific to do God knows what.

I wonder, if they could do it over again, whether the Kennedys would keep their mouths shut about Vietnam.  And would anything be different if they did.