Roundup Time

Yesterday, on my mowed path above the river, I found big tracks.  Deer and even herons use my path.  Ruling out an enormous elk, I deduced that there is a breach in the fence that ought to be fixed before the entire herd comes calling.

I back-tracked and found the cow had come from upriver, around the fallen tree.  It was rather a brushy course for a cow to navigate.  The tracks didn't cross the mud at the intermittent stream between the river and the house.  She'd gone up the overgrown path to the farthest field.

It wasn't the Far Side Cow, who mysteriously went missing from the herd last year.  She probably wandered up to Iowa, jumping fences as she went.


Unfortunately, the direction the tracks came from indicated this was was not the cow I encountered a few days ago.  Nor was it the cow and two calves  I wrote about a few days before that.  That cow  showed up at the birdbath a few days ago, while I was kneeling in the flower bed there, praying for better fencing for whoever is supposed to be pasturing those bovines.


Beau chased her.  She ran across the front yard, around the side, across the back and up the hills toward the pond.  She is now fenced out of the cow pond and can't reach the river on account of steep banks.  But from these fresh tracks she may have company.

When the grand-kids were here on Saturday, I gave the two youngest ones the game of following the tracks left in the soft ground.  Too easy, they said.

Other entertainment that I offered during their overnight stay was to help bait the trap with a banana to catch the big possum.

Instead, we caught a big raccoon, which was just as fun.  They all went with me in the car to release the critter.  There is no end to nature activities at Grammie's.

More Roundup!

Just before a nice gentle rain, I got these tomato plants and three pepper plants settled in at the remote garden.  The poison ivy wants to grow along the fence there, where it was so happily established until I showed up with my spray bottle and a nasty glint in my eye.

My ongoing campaign to keep the poison ivy from taking over the entire place continues.  Even though the scary stuff will keep me out of the woods until a hard frost,  am determined to not have it grow up my lawn chair.

In the patches were it is standing alone, it is already over five feet tall.  It offers delicate white berries for birds, who then obligingly drop the seeds along fences.  Never eradicated, it can be kept somewhat in check by repeated applications of Roundup.

Towering high over the path to the river is this mostly dead willow tree.  Those are not tree leaves, they are poison ivy.

So far this season, I haven't gotten any outbreaks of poison ivy, but just looking at it gives me an itchy trigger finger.