City to Gritty

Our first visit of 2023 was the weekend of spring break, the last weekend in March and mother nature was still frosty as ever. We ended up having to take a longer route to the property this time because of the snow over the Santiam Pass. This alternate route was beautiful and gave us a very different view filled with windmills and snowy mountain peaks.

When we got to the property it was perfect burning conditions which is great because our main objective on this trip was to clear and burn brush from what will one day be our garden and livestock area. Being in the high desert, incredibly rural, part of Oregon establishing a fire barrier is an absolute must. We are going to start in the center of our driveway loop and start working our way out and eventually have an 8ft barrier from any planned future structure.

Steve clear cut all the trees, I drug the brush into piles, and slowly burned it in a slightly larger than average camp fire size burn. We did look into whether we needed a permit for the burn, and we did not because it was not a large burn, but I did read on the website that we were not supposed to burn larger piles without a permit and no burning past a certain time because of the afternoon winds. We ended up with over a dozen large piles and were able to burn all but three of them by the end of the weekend.

It snowed off and on all weekend long and the temperatures got so low that our battery in the camper died both nights causing the moisture and the cold trapped inside the camper to give us all what felt like the beginning stages of pneumonia. When it was not snowing it was actually beautiful, blue skies and sunny.

In other great news our spring was already running again and our 550 gal tank didn’t freeze! Victory! From what we can gather the spring started running sometime that month, March, and last year it dried up around August. This means we have five months to collect as much as we can. Our plan began. We realized that some of our pipes that had not been glued in our spring collection system came apart, so we glue those. The 60 gallon barrels are blue so we noticed that there was algae coming out of the overflow pipes. These barrels need to be replaced by a black tank and something larger. We will plan to bring a 275 gal cube and paint it black, to replace these two 60 gal barrels.

Now that these burn piles have been mostly cleared and the center loop of the driveway is ready to have the soil tilled up, we will then fix our sights on installing the septic, clearing the homesite area, and further development of the spring to catch as much of the water as we can before August.

We also pulled some great winter images from our trail cameras. We got some great buck and doe pictures. We also go some great bird pictures, one bird in particular harassed our camera so much it left scratches and cracks on the screen. The star of the show was finally a shot of the bobcat we have been sure travels our property, it was equal parts exciting and terrifying.

In other news, and to be honest, the reason we have taken so long to publish our podcast episodes and blog posts is that our epic role swap is going great. Since I am the money maker of the family now and Steve is not the digital whiz I liken myself to be, things are taking a lot more time than they used to. My bookkeeping business has blown up and I am very excited to have about 9 clients and a full docket. It is very fulfilling to be doing what I love, watching my kids get to connect with their dad in a way they never have been able to, and to watch my husband/best friend be happy and relaxed all the time. I am free of the anxiety I was constantly cursed with knowing Steve was driving around downtown Portland around all that crime and traffic and he has the connection with his family that he deserves.

*Please note that this episode was recorded in May and posted in August but is focused on our trip in March. Yes, I am extremely behind, sorry!