a Janus view

January, so aptly named for Janus, the god with two faces
From time to time it's valuable to look back and see how far I've come. When it seems as if the "to do" list is longer than ever, and little or no progress is being made. That's when I need to open iPhoto and look back (a good incentive for taking even more photos, don't you agree?)

With the holidays past, my mind has turned to gardening for the season ahead. This week I received most of my seed orders with a hopeful heart. There's very little snow on the ground right now so I can do a complete walk about, dream, plan, and jot down thoughts. Recently I walked our east border of baby pines and noted that many are showing their snugly wrapped promises for spring.

That got me to thinking about the long journey we've made to get to this point.

Four years ago this April we rescued the little greens from growing in unfavorable places on our agricultural rights property and resettled 28 of them into our new acre of pasture along the lot line.

It doesn't sound like such a big job until you consider:
before that could happen we had to negotiate to buy a bit of property from its owner . THE BARN was not on our property after all...
You can see just how near to our original lot line the old barn stood.

Within months of my moving in (late summer 2010), the owner of the barn allowed a friend to "take some of the wood" for a building project (we later learned he never made use of the wood)

 

He left it like this.

Untouched by anyone but Mother Nature, this rubble festered for three years.
Being alone here most of that time I was uncomfortable walking near it at night. And I feared for my chickens as I knew there were animals squatting in the rubble.
This "tiny ruin" meant little or nothing to the owners of their other 180 acres. They didn't live nearby merely renting their fields and looking to collect their lease fees. But to us it was a daily and growing concern. Some of our neighbors began to ask us when we were going to clean up our mess.
Working with our realtor we managed to negotiate the purchase of one acre. That was all we were allowed but it would be enough.

With this done we were able to:
remove the debris and wild growing things,
regrade the land,
build a pole barn,
take down a lightning struck pine several stories tall,
bring in several truckloads of topsoil,
and finally reseed the land (a job we had to redo a few times with the amount of rain that rearranged       the first few plantings!)

Only then could we commence to locating and relocating the little ones.

Here's is a shot I took this morning. Lovely, isn't it?

Looking back and looking forward. Good activities for a snowy mid January morning.