On Friday I only had my helper friend as my backup helper left for 3 months as an intern on vegetable farms. He did the foliar sprays as usual and brought in these from the gardens.
I spent a quiet morning listening to Remedy: Ancient Medicine for Modern Illness. I had already listened to Episodes 1 & 2, and got about a third of the way through Episode 3. I’ve found the series very interesting so far.
About 10AM I got going and made a lunch and got ready. My friend was picking me up at 11AM when my helper friend would leave and we were going to her new place in “Paradise” as she calls it. It’s way up in the hilltowns.
She had found a spring house on the property and had spent the summer making pools running away from it.
This is a photo she took of what it looked like in June when she bought the property.
She’s spent lots of hours there cutting brush away from the stream and then hauling out all the leaves and mud plugging it up. There are stone walls everywhere and she used the stones from a nearby one to build the pool walls.
The brush and mud has been going into a huge hugelkultur pile behind the sitting log.
It was while she was sitting on the far end of the sitting log drinking her coffee one morning during the summer that the huge porcupine appeared at this end, sat down for a while then wandered off. It was there as long as it took for her to drink her coffee.
Hey @riverflows there were 2 of these mushrooms on the sitting log, and loads of mushrooms everywhere we wandered, on dead trees.
The spring house needs the mud dug out of it and a new door and roof.
Below the big pool with the mud was a small round deep pool.
If you look in the lower right corner of the first pools photo, you can see the big pile of mud that had accumulated there. My friend planned to move that pile out of this pool while we were there today. She also collected and spread a lot of leaves around the lower edge.
There were very few bugs for being deep on the forest. Mid afternoon the water skeeters appeared on the middle pool.
She got the big pile of mud moved to the hugelkultur and then worked for a while hauling 5 gallon buckets of mud from the bottom of the pool. She got about half of it done when she called it a day.
All the mud she stirred up in the big pool ran down into the deep pool. But I was amazed when she stopped working in the water, how fast it cleared up. But the deep pool will need dug out also now.
We had walked a ways up the stream so I could see how she’d cleaned it out above the spring house. There are many small streams on the property but most are obscured by brush and leaves.
We got picked up and headed back home. She had pointed out a church she particularly liked on the way up so we stopped to check it out on the way back. It dates from 1785.
It had 6 beautiful stained glass windows. Three facing the road were easy to see and photograph. But the 3 on the other side of the building had heavy mesh screens on them to protect them. This one was my favorite.
There was an old graveyard behind the church so we went to see if we could read the old stones. I found this one from 1796 that was still legible. There were older ones, but not clear enough to photograph.
NOTE: My sister has done extensive genealogy on the family and when she saw the stone she sent me this:
“Thankful Munn and her sister Mary (who was Samuel's 2nd wife), 1st cousin 8X removed, moved to Buckland with husband”
When we were done looking, she brought me home again. It was such a lovely day and it’s so beautiful up there in her “Paradise”. I hope to go back in October and see what it looks like with foliage.
Wow what an outing! How lucky she is to have land with those streams. Hard work to clear and direct the water but very rewarding I imagine. And wow .. that stained glass window! I adore the fact you thought of me with the mushrooms. Have I become the crazy fungi lady?
Nope, but I did think of you when I saw them....
Very nice day in the mini forest! Natural streams of her land! How wonderful! But there’s a lot of work waiting to be done; that forest should look fantastic in autumn.
I think so too!