[Homestead] Life in Elbonia

EarthNSky erthnsky at bellsouth.net
Tue Feb 9 20:54:59 EST 2010


Same here James.  It used to take 3" of rain in a 24-36 hour period to 
make our dry creek run.  Now, after a half an inch the thing is ready to 
flood.  I walked across the front yard the other night to gather some 
twigs for a fire and was amazed that the soil was holding at all.  The 
front yard is sloping, and as I walked, the soil/mud moved away under my 
feet, like a mini-mudslide.  There are creeks where I've never seen 
creeks before.  I worry what will happen in the windy thunderstorms of 
Spring.  I can't even think it..
It might be a good year to plant more trees in the pasture.

Bev

Clansgian at wmconnect.com wrote:
> Elbonia, you know, that country that appears in the Dilbert comic strip 
> where all the citizens are always up to their waist in mud.
> 
> After those years of drought the water table is back in spades.  Rain on 
> top of melting snow ... the TVA lake that us usually lowered by 40 feet in the 
> winter is within 8 feet of being full.  Flatlanders my have a hard time 
> visualizing this, but with extreme saturation of the ground, water will appear 
> to stand in pools on steep hillsides.
> 
> The biggest homestead news for us here in the Elbonian winter is that we 
> got a new cow two days ago, Jersey bred to Jersey and due in June.  She's 
> still lactating about a gallon a day and so we will dry her off completely in 
> six or eight weeks.
> 
> In order to rearrange pastures and pens to accomodate Ushi (the girls are 
> learning Japanese so all the farm animals now have Japanese names, ushi = 
> 'cow'), I needed to move a dozen or so T-posts.  These are in hard clay ground 
> and I was not looking forward to it.  I'd had in mind to move some of them 
> late last summer, but a ten foot pole used as a second class lever would not 
> lift them out of the ground.
> 
> But the ground is so saturated with water that I lifed each t-post out of 
> the ground with one hand and almost no effort.
> 
> James</HTML>
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-- 
Many of our greatest American thinkers, men of the caliber of Thomas 
Jefferson, Henry Thoreau, Mark Twain, William James, and John Muir, have 
found the forest an effective stimulus to original thought.
Bob Marshall



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