What You See

 

This is the photo I posted yesterday but it was cropped a little from this original.  Have you wondered what things are in a photo from someone else, things besides the obvious?  Well, here's your chance to find out what is in this photo.

I hope I have it large enough for you to read the green writing on the photo...if not you will have to click on it to make it larger in another window.

Let's get started on the obvious....the moon in the sky.  As I told you before this was at 7:30 in the morning and it was just beautiful.  This photo is looking west of our house.  To give you an idea of distance find the red X on the left side of the photo.  From that red X to our place is 1/2 mile.  The neighbor farms you can see in the distance are 1 1/2 mile to 2 1/2 miles from here.  Even though we live where the terrain is fairly flat we can see a long distance because of the lack of trees.  Most of the ground is devoted to farming and this time of year there are no standing crops to interfere with the view.  The golden colored field is the harvested corn stalks laying on the ground.  You can see the rows on the left where the snow is laying between them.

The row of tall poles along the highway hold the electric power lines.  I don't know if you can see or not but the one closest with the "Electric Power Pole" label on it is where the overhead wires end.  (Power to our neighbors 1 mile east get their power from the east so this line ended at our place.)  We got permission from the owner of the field west of our building site to have the power line buried from there into our yard and this saved us from having our driveway ripped up to bury the line.  It comes into a main breaker box out by the shop building.  From there we have underground lines to the house, barn, shop and grain bins.  It is nice not to have overhead lines criss-crossing the farm, especially when we get freezing rain as that can bring the lines down.

We put up the fence just behind the trees to help keep any livestock (cattle or horses) from running through and across the lawn.  It works if they are on the west side of that fence but we don't have a gate between the fence and the west side of the garage so guess what?   When the cows got out last spring they just ran in, tromped around sinking into the lawn and deposited....for a better word I will say "cow pies", if you get my drift.  

We planted the Blue Spruce and Douglas Fir trees for a wind break when we first started working on the place, before we remodeled and moved over here.  The firs were supposed to grow faster than the spruce so put them on the outside row but the opposite has been true so far and they are skinnier and shorter than the spruce.  The trees were only about 2 feet tall 7 years ago when they were planted and now some of them are 7" tall or more.  They help stop the wind and snow but there are still gaps between them that will take a few more years to fill in.

The two ugly tall trees are old, old black walnut trees that I want to have removed and have wanted to have removed since we took out some other old trees.  John thinks they look fine and that the place would look bare without them and another UGLY black walnut tree that is only about 6 feet from our bedroom wall.  The trouble with these trees is that quite a few of the large branches are dead plus the one on lawn by our bedroom drops the walnuts on the lawn in late summer and fall every year.  What a pain to pick them all up!  If you don't get them right away after they fall the outside husk gets mushy and will stain your hands.  Of course John thinks they are fine if left on the ground but I don't want to hit them with the lawn mower, they sprout in spring and they kill the grass where they lay so I pick them up.  Last fall John paid the grandkids to pick them up as I couldn't bend due to the healing ankle.  The 4 grandkids thought that was easy money but they each picked up a 5 gal. bucket full which is a lot of nuts.  We hate the taste of black walnut nuts so the buckets got dumped in the trash.  Black walnut trees are toxic to many plants and that includes it's bark, roots, husks and leaves.   Enough about how I hate those trees.

Coming closer to the house you see the garden hose reel on the left...love those reels as it sure saves rolling up the hose every time you use it by hand.  At the very bottom of this photo is the base of a bird bath.  Last year's snow broke the actual basin the birds used as the snow drift was piled about 4 feet above it and the weight just broke it into pie shaped pieces.  I was going to shop for a new bird bath this summer but you know after I broke my ankle in June I didn't do a lot of things I had planned on but watch out this summer.  I hope to play catch up on the flowers and yard.

The pale golden vegetation is my asparagus bed....I can't wait each spring for it to come up so I can start eating it.  I didn't like asparagus as a child but can't get enough of it now.   The Knock Out Rose was given to me by my quilt guild when I finished being president one year.  I love it as it blooms all summer and really doesn't take much care.  The other flower stems still standing are the old fashioned light purple phlox and the remains of the daises.   I love the daisies but have to be vicious about thinning them each year as they really want to take over.  They seed down easily and some will sprout during the summer and those plants will green up in the spring so there are always lots and lots of daisies.

That is pretty much it for this photo....you didn't know you were looking at so much did you?

Lynn