During the years my wife and I yearned for a simpler life in the country we pictured waking up to the sound of birds singing and cattle lowing while the sun rose majestically over a misty meadow. Then we moved beyond the sidewalks and reality smacked us in the face.
To be sure, the sunrises and sunsets were spectacular, but the peace and quiet we had anticipated was only a sometime thing. Farmers and ranchers get up early because they have a lot of work to do, often before going into town to their day jobs. So it was not at all unusual to wake up to the sound of mowers in the hayfield across the fence. Night time wasn't so quiet either. Coyotes use dry creeks as highways, so many nights they would wake us up by fighting over a kill in the creek bottom fifty feet from our bedroom window. When the coyotes weren't yapping and howling, the guard dogs in the neighboring fields were barking at them all night. So the peace and quiet didn't quite live up to our expectations.
Still, we got more comfortable as time went on, and we felt more secure after the entire property was fenced. It didn't take long, however, for us to realize that the fence just gave the illusion of security. By the time it was a month old we had coyotes and dogs walking through it like it wasn't there, deer jumping over it and cattle pushing through it from the outside.
The incident that finally made us understand that the fence didn't provide security involved some disappearing hay bales. In our state you can get a tax break if your land is used for agricultural purposes. So we had cut a deal to sell the hay from our fields to a local rancher who mowed, baled and hauled it away. There were several large round bales in our front hayfield waiting for pickup one morning when we left to run some errands in town, so we were careful to lock the gate behind us on our way out. When we returned that afternoon I got out of the truck to unlock the gate and noticed that the hay was gone. I checked the lock but it was just as we had left it. We were sure that someone had stolen the hay, but we couldn't understand how that had happened because the fence had not been cut and the lock wasn't damaged. We called the rancher who bought our hay to report the theft and he told us that he had picked it up while we were out. I asked him how he got in the gate and he told me that he just unbolted the hinges and put them back when he left. So much for security.
At least the barn was secure. All of the doors locked and they couldn't be removed from the outside. The barn was really a 30x50 metal pole building that was divided into five 10x30 bays. One of those had a concrete floor so I could use it for a shop. That was great because I finally had room to work on big projects as well as a place to store them out of sight until they were finished. The downside of the metal pole barn was that it leaked and water also condensed on the underside of the roof and dripped down on the equipment and tools stored below. So we had to cover everything with tarps to keep them dry. We had planned to use part of the barn as a garage, but that didn't work out well either. It turned out that the ten-foot doors we had installed were about three inches too short to accommodate our travel trailer. So we decided that we would park it in back of the barn and put the car and truck inside. Unfortunately, mice and other critters soon took up residence in the barn and gnawed the insulation off the pipes on the SUV engine, so we ended up just parking the cars in the drive.
The pole barn was great for storing equipment, though, and that was good because we began to accumulate a lot of it. We didn't have a hobby farm tractor, but we had a heavy duty riding mower for mowing the yard and some paths around the hayfields. We also had a DR field and brush mower, which is the only machine I have ever bought that more than lived up to its advertising hype. It was essential for clearing out the creek bottoms and the rough back part of the property. Without it we couldn't have used those areas. We also bought a large tiller for the acre and a half vegetable garden that I put in the first year on the land.
My wife loved to use the riding mower. That was a good thing because it took two days of mowing to do the yard and walking paths. We had to keep them clear because there are a lot of fire ants in our area and a fair number of rattlers and copperheads as well. We wanted to be able to spot them before stepping on them and you can't do that when the grass is high. The riding mower almost caused our first major accident though. My wife was mowing the newly planted orchard one day when the left front wheel dropped in a gopher hole and she nearly went over the hood and under the mowing deck. She managed to hold on, though, and just ended up with a strained back.
Gophers were a big problem at our place. They dug holes in the hayfields, garden and yard. We tried everything to get rid of them including gopher traps loaned to us by Lester and Twila and gopher poison, which we were reluctant to use at first, but tried as a last resort. Finally one of our neighbors, who was having similar problems, told us that he was going to borrow a gopher machine from his son and would treat our hayfield for twenty-five dollars. We gladly said yes. A gopher machine, by the way, is something that is pulled behind a tractor like a corn drill except that instead of putting corn seeds in the ground, it inserts pellets of gopher poison about six inches below the surface. While the neighbor started an initial pass with the machine just inside the front hayfield fence out by the road, I went down to the orchard to water the trees. I turned on the valve and was surprised to see that no water came out. About that time I heard the neighbor shouting to me from across the field. It seems that our water line, which was just pvc, was less than six inches under the surface out by the road fence and the gopher machine had broken the line. We shut off the water at the meter out by the road and set to work repairing the line. After two hours and a twenty-five mile round trip to the closest hardware store for supplies, we got it fixed. Then we had to flush the entire water system for two hours to make sure that we got all the contamination out. We never did get the hayfield treated for gophers. We just learned to live with them.
Gophers weren't the only varmints we had to deal with though. The snakes and coyotes caused some problems too, but I think the worst pests were the grasshoppers. Every summer they hit the property in droves of biblical proportions. There must have been five or six different varieties and they were all huge, voracious and evil to the core. When we walked across the fields they jumped up and hit us in the face so hard it almost knocked us down. They got in the tops of our boots when we walked up the lane to get the mail or newspaper. But the worst thing of all was that they devoured anything that was green and growing. They ate the silk out of the corn so that the ears only had about half as many kernels as they should. They ate the tops off of all the onions and garlic. They even ate the bark off the apple trees. We tried everything to get rid of them. We made sure to cut all the grass back from fence lines so they wouldn't have a place to breed. We used grasshopper-specific bacteria to try to kill the little munchers organically. We even resorted to using pesticides on the garden and ornamental plants. None of that really worked. One day, after I had replanted a photina hedge for the third time in as many years, and after I had dug out the one remaining tree in the orchard, I sat on the back porch and cracked open a beer to drown my sorrows and damn if there wasn't a pair of grasshoppers fornicating on our back porch railing! I guess I lost it about that time because I picked up a BB gun that was leaning against the wall and shot the damn grasshoppers with it. That felt so good that I spent the next hour drinking beer and shooting grasshoppers off the porch railing. It didn't save any plants, but it kept a new generation of grasshoppers from being made.
Dealing with varmints was a learning experience, but we learned lots of other things when we moved out beyond the burbs. One of them was that trips into town are usually an all day affair. That can be a problem if you have inside pets. By the time we had been in the country about a year and a half we had lost both of the old labs that had moved there from the suburbs with us. Before they were gone, however, we acquired a hand-me-up mongrel that had been our daughter's dog before she was married but wasn't able to get along with the grandkids when they got old enough to toddle after her. The mongrel had only been with us about six months when my wife bought me a brand new lab puppy for my birthday. The puppy and the old dog got along well when we were home with them, but they wreaked havoc on the house when we were gone. The mongrel had separation anxiety and the lab puppy was ... well, it was a lab puppy. Enough said. We weren't comfortable about leaving either of the dogs outside when we were gone because the mongrel was really a house dog and the puppy was too young to leave in the yard by himself. So we decided to build a kennel to keep them in when we were away from the property.
We needed something that would be strong enough to keep the dogs in and predators out and we wanted to build it such that we could separate the dogs because the puppy pestered the older dog to death. Also, since the older dog was a house dog, we decided that the kennel needed to be heated and air conditioned. In addition, I wanted to be able to clean the dog's facilities without crawling inside of a doghouse to do it. We ended up building a 10x10 building with a covered 10x5 porch on a 10x15 concrete slab. The building was so large that my wife insisted that it match the house. So we made it out of rough-sawn cedar siding with a metal roof. The run was 20x30 with a divider that gave each dog its own 10x30 foot run, if we chose to close the gate between them. We located the kennel next to the barn so that we could run electricity from there to the kennel building. The first time we left the dogs alone in the kennel we opened the gate between the runs so they could be together. We were only gone an hour but by the time we got back the mongrel had injured herself trying to get through the chain link fence and the lab had torn off a $75 dog door and had dug a hole in the soft sand next to the fence so deep that we couldn't see him at first when we drove up to the barn. So we added an electrified fence both inside and outside the kennel and buried chain link under the fence to keep the dogs from digging out and the coyotes from digging in. The kennel started out as a small project but the cost kept going up. By the time it was finished it had ballooned into a $6000 money pit that had all the neighbors shaking their heads. Of course, they did that a lot.
