No Jack in the Beanstalk this year

Damn! They were beautiful big green bean plants in the planter surrounding the dog kennel. They had beautiful lavender blossoms. I covered them one evening this week with a couple of tarps, only to have the tarps blow away in the night. Bill said that if the wind was blowing, there'd be no freezing.

I took that cue last night as the wind whooped up all over the Selle Valley. Wind blowing: no frost. Ha! The wind stopped blowing sometime during the night. This morning, the landscape is covered with a thin silver lining, and that means no wealth of green beans this year. Damn!

In other news, we put in our first segment of big-animal fence yesterday. Seems a deer came through pasture number two where I keep the horses at night and ripped out some of the non-electrified electric fence. I saw tufts of deer hair along the fenceline yesterday morning after removing the wire that had caught on Casey's back leg.

Apparently, he knew something was wrong with the fence. He went to investigate. When he backed up, his rear hoof got caught in the wire. Lucky I was there to help him out. Otherwise, we could have had disaster. So, Bill and I gathered fence materials and strung four strands of smooth wire along the cross fence.

We've got one section down, many more to go before all goat fence on this place has been replaced to keep the larger critters penned in. Usually the deer don't tear down conventional fencing. If a moose decides to come for a visit, that's a different story.

Speaking of fencing, I'd thought of cows here at the Lovestead, but I now have my doubts. Earlier this week, my neighbor Helen Baker stopped by to tell me that one of our neighbor's cows were out. She wasn't sure who owned them, but she did say they were visiting with Taylor's cows in the field north of Finneys. I promised to make some telephone calls and to go see if I could help.

I got on my bike, headed north and came up the hill north of Meserves in time to see two yearlings leaping across the road from Johnson's front lawn. Not far behind them were Mark and Janice Johnson. As they stood watching the critter run along the fenceline, I tried to get past them on my bike to herd them back down toward the gate to Taylor's pasture. Well, they outran me and my bike and made a quick right turn into the neighbor's pasture to the north.

They disappeared into the woods, and as I was riding back, the big Hereford bull who'd been pretty interested in these two wandering bovines decided to join them. With very little effort and not a lot of advance planning, the huge animal walked right through a barbwire fence running along the woods. Last time I drove by, he was still there. I told Bill that if a five-strand barbwire fence doesn't keep cows in, I might just stick to horses.

So, we've got new fence and frozen beans this morning. On one hand, safer horses; on the other, not much hope for the Lovestead freezer this winter.