3600 bicycle miles so far this year

I know I had earlier said I planned to ride my bicycle less this year.  And I have ridden less miles than last year.  But not by a whole lot.  I rode 3930 miles by the end of June last year, and this year I rode 3600 miles exactly.  So I am again above average.  Especially since my average annual mileage total for the year is 3546 miles.

Why again so many miles?  When the arteritis in my right hip is acting up, riding my bicycle makes the pain go away. So then I don't need to take a pain pill.  But mainly I am sleeping more hours each day.  And when I up and around I still feel a little tired.  I have found that if I go for a bicycle ride I wake up.  And then I will mainly be awake and not tired the rest of the day.  I don't drink coffee so that doesn't help me wake up like it apparently does for other people.   One would think that riding 20+ miles would make me tired.  But I have lots more energy after riding 20 miles than when I start riding my bicycle.  It must be a mental reason because it doesn't make sense that putting in such effort invigorates a person.

27 miles today.  Again it was 100 degrees outside.  But I wasn't hot until I stopped riding.  Today I brought a bottle of water along with me.  Later in the bicycle ride the water was hot to drink.

Trees, flowers, etc.

101 degrees here today.  Hot.   This afternoon I rode my bicycle to the John Deere dealership south of town.  12 miles away.   For over two weeks I have my tractor there to be fixed.  No news from them about it.  No answered or returned phone calls.  In person they talked to me.  They are still waiting on a new console and have no idea when it will be shipped or arrive. They haven't gotten an answer from the John Deere headquarters/warehouse.   Apparently these days parts with electrical components are not being made/shipped/whatever.  I want to cut my hayfield and I have no tractor right now.

Even though it was hot outside I wasn't hot when riding my bicycle.  So I rode extra places to ride more miles.  38 miles in total.  I've discovered that in addition to losing my sense of appetite after my head injury, and having to eat even if I am not hungry, I now learned I had also lost my sense of thirst.  I was south of town and my mouth and lips started to feel really dry.  Between the heat and time I hadn't drank water in a while.  I wasn't thirsty but it turns out I needed to drink water.  Fortunately Donna's sister Jane and her husband live south of town so I stopped at their place to ask for a glass of water.   I hadn't talked to them in a long time, so many hours later I rode my bicycle home in the evening.  Well... it was too hot to do any work outside.  Why not talk?

So what to post about tonight?   How about a few odd-and-end photos.

Time passes. Some trees were shorter back then.  Around 15 years ago I pastured a few horses.  One of the horses would walk over an evergreen tree, and going forward and backwards over and over, bend the tree and use it to rub the horse's belly.  Can you guess which tree that was?

I would like to prune the dead branches.  But next to the house you can see how tall that tree is.  No way I can climb up that high in the tree.  Going a quarter to a third up the tree seems very high off the ground.

Last year's backyard fence rebuild. Even a few weeks ago the hay was tall enough to be cut, and the lilac bush still had blossoms on it.

My annual photo of my poppy flowers.  The cattle were able to reach the other poppy flower and eat it.

Sticks and stones

Okay... another photo from my recent tree, tree stump, side roots, etc. work.

And, why not, here are a couple photos of rocks that recently caught my attention.

What am I going to do with all of this?  I have no idea.

Tree stump 17 for the year

Hopefully this will be the last tree stump I work on this year.  I hadn't planned on working on this stump but after I mowed the lawn I decided now was the time to get rid of some of the stump's side roots.  Otherwise I have to be careful when mowing so as not to have the lawn mower blade hit one of the side roots that are at ground level.

I've removed other tree stump side roots this year, and this stump only has three, so how hard could this be?  Of course harder than I thought.

As you can see in the photos one of the side roots was massive.  It was the size of a tree trunk in itself.

The tree stump will remain for now.  I don't need it this year for firewood and don't need more work or time spent removing it.

This tree became a tree stump back in June of 2012.

https://tallpinesranch.blogspot.com/2012/06/sudden-bad-storm.html

Here is how the tree stump looks now, 9 years later.

Rascal spent some time with me while I worked on the removing the side roots.  See his blog for photos of him.

Cattle into the north pasture

This evening I let the cattle into the north pasture as part of their pasture rotation.  Earlier several cows mooed at me to tell me they were ready for their pasture rotation.  Yup.  "Diva" is their middle name.

First I had to do some work.  Back in August of 2015 the willow tree between the house and garage blew over.  I took many of the branches and stuck them in the ground along the river bank.  Some grew into trees.  Then the beavers started eating the willow trees.  I had to put wire and small fences around the trees still alive in order to save them.  It was touch and go for a few years as I had to figure out how to do it right and make it secure against the beavers.  And I think I finally did last year.  Though I see that I need to make one barrier higher as it appears the beavers are eating that tree from the top.

Once the trees started to grow taller then I had to come up with another barrier to protect the trees from the cattle.  Cattle LOVE willow leaves and branches.  I redid the fence in that area.  Then I had to add field fence to the fence to stop the cows from putting their head through the fence to reach the trees.  This Spring I had to straighten and pull up the fencing as last Fall the cattle pushed the fence down when they could to reach the willow trees.  Half of some trees were short where the cattle could reach, and the far half of the trees were taller where the cattle could not reach.

I had some extra pieces of the wire sections I had cut to use on some of the corral fencing and the fencing I rebuild last year.  I took three sections and some 8 foot tall steel posts and put them up to protect the trees.  Now to see if I finally figured out a way to protect these willow trees from the animals.

Here are a few photos of some of the willow trees.  Due to the beavers gnawing on them previous years the trees now look more like bushes at this stage.

Before

After

Before

After

Here is a 39 second video of the cattle entering the north pasture.  https://youtu.be/bd6WggdxKVg

They are looking good. Even Mama - the last brown cow to enter - looks sleek and not her normal thin look. And the last calf to enter is called "Lightning Picasso" Gee... I wonder how he got that name.

Once they were in the north pasture, Beulah, Maria, Diamond, and their calves all came to their gate to greet the cattle in the north pasture.  Diamond still has not had her calf, so they won't be joined together as one group until Diamond has her calf.

Toby doing his test to see if Maria needs his "loving".

Today I also took the boards out of the wooden feeder and flipped the feeder on its side so the legs can completely dry.

Tree stump 16 for the year

I didn't remove this tree stump, but I worked on it.

My first effort was way back just before I harrowed the pasture.  North of the stump and fence, in the middle pasture, the stump had a number of side roots right at ground level.  Other years I had to avoid this area so as not to break my harrow teeth.  This year I decided to remove this side roots so I could pull my harrow through here.  I removed enough side roots to be able to get my harrow through this area.

After harrowing the pastures I then turned my attention to removing tree stumps.  You know how long that took.  When I later needed more branches for one of the last tree stump bonfires I took a few wheelbarrow loads from here.  Then I noticed I hadn't completely removed all of the side roots that were north of the stump and fence.  So I removed the rest of these side roots all the way to the stump and fence.

In the meantime I also would spend some time cutting up - using a handsaw - some of the branches into short sections I can fit into my wood stove this Winter.  Even after I was done with tree stump removal I decided I had cut enough of these branches that I may as well spend more time and cut all the rest of them near this tree stump.  Why not?  It isn't like I have anything else I could be doing.

So the branches worth burning in the stove are all cut.  Sometime later this year I will haul the rest of the branches somewhere else out of the way and where I can burn them to get rid of them.  And sometime later I will use my chainsaw and cut the tree trunk down low to become a tree stump.  And some other year I will dig and remove the stump.  Since it is right next to my irrigation mainline a bonfire to remove the stump is out of the question.  Since the stump is right next to my fence no hurry to get rid of the stump as the location shouldn't slow my harrowing down.

The tree broke off and blew over Labor Day weekend back in 2013.  This was when Tammy and I were visiting our relatives out in Washington State.  https://tallpinesranch.blogspot.com/2013/09/fallen-tree.html

Now this is how the tree looked earlier this year.

Now if the cattle don't knock over the pile of cut branches before I can load them into my pickup and haul them close to the house.

Tree stumps 14 and 15 for the year

I worked on tree stump 17 for the year today. I thought I was done with tree stumps for the year - but I guess not.   But first let me try to catch up on the former tree stumps I worked on this year.

Tree stump 14.

When I was leveling the dirt where I had dug the side roots around tree stump 13, and stacking the boards, I discovered tree stump 14.  Seriously!  When am I going to stop finding more tree stumps?! 

After doing a quick test of digging around the tree stump, I decided not to dig around this tree stump and remove it this year.  I have a feeling it will be a somewhat big stump even if the top of the stump looks to be decaying slightly.  I've seen that before and then found that stump was large and solid underneath.  I had a feeling that could happen to this stump too.  I worked on a lot of stumps this year and I want to be over with working on tree stumps for the year.  So, next year for this stump.

This photo of stump 14 was taken weeks later.  Yup.  The stump is still there after all that rain and after the grass started to grow.

Tree stump 15.

I found this stump - though not much left of it - a few weeks after finding stump 14. (I forgot to take a photo before starting to dig around this stump.)   This is what I hope to find when finding a stump starting to pop out of the ground.  I hope to find not much of a stump.  Something that is not hard to dig and get rid of.

The dry circle was what was coming out of the ground when I found the stump.

Here are a few photos of  a couple of prior stump locations.  I took these photos June 12 - the same day I took the third photo of stump 14 - and you can see how the grass is starting to grow back.

The former location of stump 2.

The former location of stump 5.

Moving cattle and mowing the lawn

This afternoon I finished mowing the grass in the fruit tree area.  I had planned on going for a bicycle ride but a mile from home my front tire went flat.  So I switched gears and mowed the grass.

Last year I never got the entire fruit tree area mowed as I ran out of gas and then got onto another project before getting more gas.  That is why this Spring I burnt the grass in part of the fruit tree area.  Earlier I mentioned how the fire knocked back some of the younger buffaloberry trees.  Today I learned the fire had also knocked back my serviceberry tree/bush.  The bush is re-growing from the roots as the blackened wood never completed issuing leaves.  I also think our cold Spring had something to do with the tree/bush not surviving as the tree/bush tried to put out leaves but stopped partway out.  They may have froze.

This afternoon I let the cattle go from the south pasture to the middle pasture.  Time to rotate the cattle to another pasture.   The cows knew something was up when I walked up to the gate.  They came to the gate and ran through it once I opened it.  Toby was back in the pasture as he had stood and watched what was going on.  Once the cows ran through the gate Toby came running so he wouldn't miss out too.

A 26 second video of Toby running.    https://youtu.be/iS_L6peEB2A

Now in the middle pasture.

Once I let the cows into the middle pasture, the three cows in the NE pasture saw what had happened and they came to the corral to get as close as they could to the other cows. They started mooing which then led the cows in the middle pasture to moo back. I am still waiting for Diamond to have her calf, that is why all the cows aren't in the same pasture.

The calves are growing nicely.

Here is a 27 second video of the cows mooing at each other: https://youtu.be/eoF_jevU6hM