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.

Naming My Non-Virtual Domain

The first summer that I moved to my acreage above the river, I could not get down to the water. Poison ivy stood between me and the shore.

The elderly couple who lived here before me didn't venture outside the house. He had emphysema and she had a bad knee. For years, they had let the neighbor graze his cows all over their land. They had a fenced yard and the cows had the rest. Down at the river was a fence above the high water level. Between the fence and the steep bank was a fairly flat spot that had become Poison Ivy Heaven.

It was the scariest poison ivy I'd ever come across. I gasped when I saw it. It grew four feet high, standing like sapling trees. Where there were trees for it to climb, the stuff snaked up the trunks, branching out on the way to the treetops. The hairy vines were two or three inches thick; quite formidable.

When I lived at the farm, I raised dairy goats. They followed me on long walks, where they ate quantities of poison ivy. It was a delicacy for them, since they are browsers and prefer leaves to grass. Then I drank the goats' milk and became immune to the itchy stuff.

Since then, however, I have not emerged the victor in encounters with poison ivy. So, I was held back at the fence, as if I were one of the herd and not the new owner.

After the frost had killed all foliage, I ventured forth to claim my waterfront property. I was armed with the bolt cutter for the barbed wire and pruners for the poison ivy. I recognized the dormant growth by the wavy stem topped by what looked like a creepy hand. Being careful not to touch them, even with my leather gloves, I cut them down at the base.

Past the undergrowth was the steep river bank. I made a zigzag path down the muddy bank, using the sapling sycamore and willow trees to brace my feet against, stopping their downhill slide.

When I finally stood on the rocky shore, I couldn't have been more proud of myself had I been Lewis or Clark coming at last to the Pacific Ocean. In true explorer style, I named the smallish spot Fishing Beach. Out in the middle of the river was a black rock that looked vaguely like a whale, even though it was only about two feet long. Whale Rock is a good gauge of the water level. Both the rock and the beach are fequently not to be seen.

Upriver was another rocky beach, much bigger. The steep muddy bank made walking to it from Fishing Beach impossible. I scrambled up through the woods to reach it. There I found beautiful freshwater clam shells, iridescent pink inside. That became Clam Beach.

While all this sounds vast, the two beaches are close enough that I could throw a rock from one to the other, if only I weren't such a hopeless pitcher.

At that time, I didn't name my place Hickory Acres. The reason was that I didn't know what a hickory tree looked like or that I had so many of them. It was the nuts that finally were a giveaway. Once I got on my naming spree, even they were to get monikers as I claimed them for my very own.