Sunday, October 18, 2009

News from the Country Estate 10/18/09

Greetings from the Country Estate!

A cold rain falls outside, soaking everything. Its a good night to be inside in a warm dry house.

Autumn is in full swing here in Maine at the Country Estate. We've been spending a good bit of time walking among the leaves painted by the Great Artist. Our search for land on which to start our own country estate has yielded two front runners both around 25 acres, one in Alna and one in Dresden. So we've been following orange survey ribbons marking boundaries and looking at trees quite a bit.

On the work front, I've been subcontracting for a growing company called Sustainable Structures while I plan my next long term move in my building and woodworking career. So many aspects to it and such a short life to master all of them!

I've decided that I want to raise some oxen. An Ox is simply a steer (a neutered bull bovine) which has attained the age of four years and, presumably, is trained to work. Oxen require a lot of work to care for them, but can work in situations a tractor couldn't dream of (yes, tractors do dream. they even have psychoanalysts to interpret their dreams). Some of the land we've looked at presents challenges as to how best to harvest timber, and a team of oxen would meet some of those challenges. Don't get me wrong, I still want a tractor. KT says I will NEED a tractor, but Oxen will help too.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

oxen?

Адам said...

I'm on your side in regards to the oxen. Two points for the beast.

Christopher Gerald Wagner said...

to log parts of the parcel of land.

Адам said...

We've been having a good deal of rain here lately as of well.. I'm planning to hit a hardware store soon and give a crack at making a rain/snow trap to cut back on water usage. Seems enough of it is coming from the sky; less need for that from pipes (considering that the building is centrally heated and some old pensioner-babka is wasting enough water through the radiators and jacking up the price for everyone else). You have any sort of collector there?