The colors of November

Around here, October is bright. But while it seems November should be subdued and gloomy, in fact it's quite beautiful. As I told Don, "October is brilliant. November glows." Here are some photos as proof.

In an otherwise cloudy sky...

...a last shaft of sunlight escaped just as the sun set, illuminating a row of trees on the hillside opposite.

The changing color of blackberry leaves contribute to this late-autumn glow.

The leaves transition to yellow and red.

On a distant hillside, where blackberries have taken over vast swathes of land, the leaves are red.

Wild roses also contribute to November's glow.

The rose hips are abundant this year.

Like blackberries, wild roses can take over whole fields.

Water drops amidst the brambles.

Where pine needles meet mossy granite.

The weeping willow in our yard had some bright yellow leaves.

They turned even brighter when the sun came out.

I'm doing some late-season garden cleanup, including trimming back the strawberry runners.

The strawberry leaves, too, contribute to November's glow.

A bit of sunlight broke through the clouds while I was raking leaves.

The sun made the leaves glow.

It made Mr. Darcy glow as well.

This time of year, the leaves have dropped from the wild apple trees, but in many cases the apples are still on the branches.

A sun halo, which by some accounts predicts rain or snow. Accurate (for rain) in this case.

And those are some of the colors of November. A blessed Thanksgiving to all.

Subdividing the pasture

A task we've been wanting to accomplish since getting the cows is to subdivide the larger pasture. With fairly small acreage compared to our last place, it's important that we don't let anything get overgrazed, and having subdivided pastures allows us to rotate the animals frequently.

With that in mind, we gathered everything we needed. Thankfully we weren't faced with anything nearly as complex and difficult as fencing in the sacrifice pasture. In fact, we could bring all the heavy items (T-posts, roll of fencing, pounders, etc.) in the bucket of the tractor.

We unloaded everything and got ready to run a string.

Because the pasture is sloped (everything on our property is sloped!), we hammered a stake just where the line of vision breaks between one end of the fence line and the other. Then we used the bright-pink string to mark the fence line.

(There's my handsome man on his iron steed!)

Then we dropped T-posts at 12-foot intervals and started pounding. The ground is still fairly soft, so it wasn't overly hard work. Don started at the top of the pasture, and I started at the bottom, the idea being to meet in the middle.

There was only one problem with this task: There's a ridge line of rock right where the fence line was passing through.

Don was frustrated by this impediment and started theorizing about building field-fence cages filled with rock to make gabions, which would be an enormous task. "Why not just make a jog in the fence line and go around the rocks?" I asked. Don laughed and said it goes against his thinking. "Men think linearly," he said, and admitted going around the outcrop hadn't even occurred to him.

So we jogged around the rocks. I did the T-post pounding in this section, and sometimes I had to reposition the posts irregularly whenever I hit a rock, but over all it wasn't bad. (You can see the still-unfenced garden in the center-left of the photo.)

Pounding that many T-posts was enough work for a couple of senior citizens for one day. The next day we commenced stretching the fencing. For obvious reasons we started at the top of the slope and worked downhill.

We unrolled the fencing until we got to the jog around the rock outcrop, and cut it. (Don pounded and wired some older and somewhat bent T-posts to the corners of the jog to make "king posts" for extra support. No photos, sorry.)

With the fencing unrolled, we needed to stretch it tight. We started by threading a metal bar through the fencing...

...and attached the bar to a chain. The bar threaded through the field fence allows us to impost more or less equal pressure on the entire stretch of fencing at the same time, without deforming individual squares of the field fence.

Then he attached the chain to the fence-puller, one of those extremely handy homestead tools.

The fence-puller straddles the gap between the fencing and an upright support (a T-post, in this case). By ratcheting the fence-puller, the fencing material is stretched until it's tight enough to wire the fencing in place to the T-posts all up the line.

Once the fencing was pulled tight, Don and I started wiring the fencing to the T-posts.

We fenced the jog as well, though we didn't use the fence-puller in this section for the task of pulling the fence tight.

This completed the bulk of the project. We still have some ancillary tasks (notably building strategically placed gates), but this subdivision should serve us well as we endeavor to rotate the cows through the summer grazing months.

(Bonus photos: Here's a rose bush we thankfully didn't have to work through when installing the fence.

Look at those horrible vicious thorns. Now you know why I postulated these were the thorns that surrounded Sleeping Beauty's castle.)

Going to seed

This time of year, everything is going to seed.

I was walking Mr. Darcy yesterday evening just as the sun was setting, and noticing just how many flowering plants were putting out their seeds.

The seeds of the Canadian thistle were so thick, they were getting trapped in some rose leaves.

This is salsify. The large seed heads look like dandelions on steroids.

A close-up of the seed head reveals why these "clocks" are so efficient at being caught and spread by the wind.

This mechanism spreads not just native seeds, of course, but also invasive seeds for such plants as Canadian thistle. Such is the blessing – and bane – of nature.