Nice Day To Work Outside

Wasn't today a beautiful day for working outside?  I mowed and bagged the lawn.  Then I set to work on my mini-prairie.  I have an area on the east side of the house that I consider to be a little prairie.  I planted prairie seeds years ago and have several clumps of prairie grass.  I know some of it is Indian grass but I don't know what the rest of it is.  Every three years I mow the prairie down.  One year I tried to burn it.  I waited until snow covered the ground.  I lit the patches of prairie grass and let it burn under the snow.  But this year I mowed it.  Then I planted the bergamot, big blue stem and Indian grass seeds I had in my pocket from visiting another prairie.  Now both of my compost piles are brimming with leaves and grass.  I moved the chicken coop to a fresh spot of grass.  I moved my black sunflower seed bird feeder to a new spot so disease doesn't spread from dropped seeds on the ground.  I wondered how long it would take the chickadees to find the new location.  They found it within 30 seconds.  They must have been watching me move it.  After that I did some preparation work for my new bird feeder that I will install.  I am hoping this will be a squirrel proof feeder.  I climbed the crabapple tree next to the pond and tied some coated electric wire way up high in the tree.  I put it as high as I could reach without falling.  I strung the wire across the yard and secured the other end to the top of a post on my deck.  The wire on the deck post is slightly higher than the wire on the crabapple tree.  I slid a couple pieces of pvc pipe down the wire.  When I get my new birdfeeder (covered platform feeder with room for cakes of suet on the sides) I will slide it down the wire followed by two more sections of pvc pipe.  A plastic bottle would work as well as pvc pipe.  The birdfeeder will be too high for the squirrels to jump onto.  I hope it will be far enough from the deck and the tree for the squirrels to leap onto it.  If they try to cross the wire to the feeder, the pvc pipe will spin when they step on it and throw them to the ground.  When that was done I still had energy and sun light so I disposed of my frozen annuals in the larger pots and replaced them with cuttings of red twigged dogwood and other decorative fronds. When that was done I went buckthorn hunting.  I found plenty.  All around the largest tree in my yard (a red oak) was a buckthorn colony.  I can only imagine some hungry bird ate some buckthorn berries.  Usually birds don't eat buckthorn berries because they have little nutrition and make the birds sick.  The buckthorn eating bird must have had a tummy ache so it sat in the biggest red oak tree around and had the trots spreading buckthorn seeds all over the ground.  I cut a big pile of young buckthorn trees.  None of these trees were large enough to have berries.  After I cut each tree, I sprayed the stump with "Brush B Gone" so the stump wouldn't grow suckers.  I kept at it until the sun started to go down.  When I accidently cut the tube of my stump poison container with the nippers, I knew it was time to go in.  If I keep after this buckthorn every fall, I know I can win the battle in my yard.  Fall is the best time to kill buckthorn.  It's easy to find because it has the only green leaves left this time of year. Buckthorn is more susceptible to poison because it draws the fluids back to the center in the fall.