Landscaping with Manure Spreaders

Landscaping with Manure Spreaders

Friends and relatives who live in metropolitan areas may ask, “What is a manure spreader?” The answer is pretty self-evident. Before chemical fertilizers, farmers cleaned their barns and chicken houses into a wagon with a chain-driven rotary fan on back scattering manure over fields and gardens. Rarely used today, this equipment is sometimes placed in a yard and filled with pots of flowering plants.

Our neighbors have one of these rural treasures which they decorate for the seasons. . .pumpkins at Halloween and Santa Claus at Christmas. Their little farmstead has horses and a variety of poultry. I wake to the joyous sound of roosters crowing. On sunny days, the chickens wander up through the thicket and scratch for bugs in the leaves in front of my house. A recent article in a contemporary gardening magazine suggested that chickens, raised as a hobby, are interesting garden ornaments. Free-range chickens do provide true country ambience.

Using what we find back in back of the barn has become a passion. The spidery silhouette of a horse drawn side-delivery hay rake on a hillside is a connection to the past. The antique walk-behind plow is converted into a mailbox post. An art form has developed from welded gears and broken machinery parts sculpted into animals and human figures. Now and then, you will see a skeletal metal man holding a mailbox at the end of a gravel drive near the road. We are partial, though, to green John Deere mailboxes. Many find it best to go low-key in mailbox décor, however, as jazzy designs attract teen-agers who cruise on Saturday night playing a game of bashing mailboxes with baseball bats.

We love rusted-out wheelbarrows, old washtubs on four legs, leaking tin coffee pots, abandoned hog troughs or aged tractor scoops packed with colorful bedding plants in the spring. Not the clipped green carpet of lawns in suburbia, we possess a distinctive regional style which is uniquely our own in rural America!

The Phillipians 4:8 Principle

May 23, 2008
I try to adhere to the Phillipians 4:8 principle. But sometimes I find it difficult to focus on the good. In the middle of the night when I have been sick, I have actually worried about my husband's future second wife
and how she will treat my adult children. No doubt he would marry shortly after I am deceased as he is one of the better men around and women would pursue him. This is hardly a reasonable subject for me to mull over. . .

Believing as I do that imagination is one of the greatest gifts God gives us, I have invented a back door in my mind. I sweep unreasonable worrying out the back door into dump trucks which take it away for disposal. With practice, I can get control of my obsessive thinking.

Of course, serious problems require repeated processing, and healing after losing a loved one only comes after going over and over the loss in one's mind. But worrying over things totally out of our control is
fruitless; let God take charge.

Summing it all up, friends, I'd say you'll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious--the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse. Phillipians 4:8 The Message

My Profile

May 19, 2008 I have been asked why my profile is blank. Haven't gotten to that yet. My family and friends know who I am. Perhaps I am shy about communicating with people I don't know very well. But, welcome strangers, eventually I will get around to filling it in. (I just figured out how to disable the transliteration of my postings into Hindi!)
Or maybe there is a streak of my dear friend Emily in me.
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us--don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog! (Dickinson)

Corrected edition of first blog

I dwell in a dense thicket with wild, tangled undergrowth in a Midwestern lodge, remote but close to small-town life. I watch seasons change, leaves fall and grass grow.

I am from the rich black soil of Saline County
I am from the one-room school and the “church in the wildwood”
I am from “The Lord helps those who help themselves” and
“Pretty is as pretty does”
I am from planting and harvesting and the frustration of broken equipment
I am from the song of the meadowlark and the cry of the killdeer
I am from hedgerows, fragrant backyard lilacs,and hollyhocks
I am from black cows standing in shallow ponds in summer and
frosted with snow sprinkles in winter
I am from droughts and floods and unpredictable Fahrenheits
I am from the scent of leather saddles and sweaty horses
I am from silky summer dust between bare toes and sloppy spring mud that sucks rubber boots from cold feet
I am from the crackle of khaki cornstalks in September and the indescribable perfume of fresh clover hay in June
I am from the voices of chickens and the rumble of grain trucks
I am from colossal haylofts and the pungent smell of cattle barns
I am from “What chew doin’on my road yestiday night?” and
“Call me if you need anything. . .”

I am from the “roo-al rout” (rural route) and the hum of grain dryers in fall
I am from daily talk of weather and crops and warm-hearted gossip in office break rooms and morning coffee groups
I am from stacks of books and carefully kept yearly journals
I am from barely repressed giggling with best-friend-daughters and the rowdy playfulness of children,
I am from friends of the soul who linger over long lunches and shared lives
I am from house calls, late dinners, phones that ring in the night
I am from listening, listening, listening to tales of broken relationships, and searches for repair
I am from friendly nods of greeting from drivers of pick-ups with gun racks behind their seats and border collies riding in the truck bed.
I am from sweet-natured men who work hard and care deeply
I am from love and laughter with a gentle cowboy from the Old West
I am from the hushed benediction of the prairie sunset
I am from answered prayers and God’s grace above, below, and all around my world