Nearly a year now, since I have written on this blog. My apologies for that. The Year the Plague Struck was challenging, in many strange ways. And it was a year of so many things, both personal and societal ... the Year of the Great Black Lives Matter Protests; the year we moved into our house, the Year of the Great Wildfires (four Oregon towns destroyed, 11 people killed); The Year of the Insurrection, the year, I am saddened to report, that our beloved, elderly little terrier died, last fall. We remain in mourning.
The fires spread smoke across the entire state for a week last September. Here's what it looked like on the hill:
Strange times. We were supposed to stay indoors not breathing the smoke, but we were frantically working on the house, so our lungs had some unfortunate exposure. We finally bought a couple of furnace filters and taped them to a box fan to try to at least get some clean air in the house. Everyone else had the same idea, and furnace filters joined the list of shortages.
Now it's May and the entire West is in drought, ranging from severe to exceptional, and so there are fears for another severe wildfire season. Possibly in perpetuity.
The February ice storms did not help with that issue.
The fires were so severe, in part, because of rare hot, dry east winds; the same winds that drove the great Tillamook Burn back in the day. One exceptional weather event being insufficient for the Interesting Times in which we live, in February, we had a rare series of severe ice storms that knocked out power to most of the Willamette Valley for a week.
Here's what it looked like on the hill:
They also knocked over trees and broke branches and generally left the state littered with debris that will be ripe for burning in the coming months. Our little forest is no exception; we lost some big cherry and oak trees, and suddenly there's a lot more light coming through. But it's hard to walk because the ground is quite a mess.
Just before the storms hit, my orders of bare root trees started coming in, and I spent a frantic few days planting my new little orchard.
I'm gradually working on putting in a hedgerow around it, to, I hope, keep out the deer. A work in progress.
We also put up a little greenhouse, and it is filled with starts. The garden, alas, is filled with weeds, grass, cover crops, and gophers.
Which brings me to the titular raptor pole.
As you know, rodent populations live in a perpetual boom and bust cycle. Lots of predators, few rodents. No food, predators die off, rodents boom, predators increase with all the food, etc.
We're in a rodent boom, and the gophers have decided they are entitled to the whole garden, not a mere tithe. (The mice also got into my greenhouse and helped themselves to my tender young starts, the furry little bastards. Hardware cloth boxtops made by R have helped with that problem).
We don't like killing creatures, but I'm fine with encouraging the natural order of things, so we hauled a dead tree up to the garden and installed it. (In point of fact, the same tree featured in the ice storm photo, above.) It was hair-raising and back-breaking — dead trees are heavy, who knew! — but now the hawks have a place to sit and watch for gophers in the garden. At least I hope they focus on the gophers, and not on snakes. I need the snakes to eat the slugs. And gophers.
R chainsawed a couple of large chunks from the end of the trunk, to lighten the weight, and shaved the sides down a bit. I used a post hole digger to excavate a hole to put it in. For some reason, I decided to post-hole dig a few tomato holes in the garden on the same day. My muscles are sore now.
Yesterday, we hauled the tree the 300 feet or so up to the garden by balancing the trunk on a barrel, which I sort of pushed along, holding the trunk up to take some of the weight off, while R walked ahead, carrying the narrow end. It took quite a long time and did not feel like quite as smooth a process as the description implies. But eventually, we got it up there. And left it overnight while R "cogitated" about how the dickens we were going to get it installed in its hole without killing ourselves in the process. As usual, he came up with a clever solution.
Here's how it went:
Two by fours nailed to the tree helped hold it up, and we "walked" them forward, a few inches at a time, while desperately keeping the tree from rolling to either side.
Taking an idea from a television show on theories about the building of Stonehenge, R dug a trench at the side of the hole, to guide the log in.
More walking it up. This part went on for a long time. R also nailed a cross piece onto the tree, to give large birds a place to perch.
Eventually, we had to add more two-by-fours.
Almost there!
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