One Pile Ends, Another Begins

[kevin_standlee]

Only a week after clearing the winter brush pile, we have started on the summer one, for safety reasons.



The brown area on the right between the camera and the garbage bin is where the brush pile was before we burned it a week ago. However, notice all of the new greenery in this field? While it's good for the rabbits, there are not enough of them to eat it all (which is probably just as well), and these little green shoots turn into tumbleweeds and other nasty things soon enough, and they are easier to weed when they're small.



It's much too hot to do yard work during the day, but Lisa has been awake before dawn when the temperatures are more reasonable (overnight lows being around 17°C this past week) and in the pre-dawn twilight has been digging weeds with a Hula Hoe. This morning, I joined her and we raked out more debris and hauled it away from the fence line, where we are trying to build at least a 5 m cleared area (10 m would be better). We're not done yet, but the bushy growth along the fence in the distance need us to break out the power tools, because some of that stuff is bigger than we can tackle with the hand clippers. Fortunately, Lisa has an electric chainsaw, and there's a power outlet on a pedestal just over the fence near the travel trailer shelter to which we can connect it.



We are now dumping the yard debris where the previous brush pile was. While we may put some of it in the regular garbage dumpster on a space-available basis (there's no alternative disposal or recycling in Fernley: there is only one form of trash disposal; no composting or recycling), it will otherwise wait until next October when the fire department issues new domestic yard waste disposal burn permits.

The field next to our house does not belong to us; however, until an owner shows up to tell us otherwise (in which case we'll ask them to clean up their act), we're working to try and keep the area clear along our fence. While we are perhaps two minutes away from the fire station, the best wildfires are the ones that never got started in the first place.

In the meantime, we hope that the wildlife that use that field appreciate the new temporary habitat. During the past week. we've seen chipmunks, rabbits, and quail show up where the old pile was with a distinct air of "What happened?" about them. I can see why they'd be disappointed. There are predators around here, particularly some hawks that I've seen come swooping down on that lot, and having places to quickly shelter — the hawks can't get into the brush; we've seen them try it — is important to the little critters.

Comments

[wild_patience]

Is the two-story structure also your house or just a very close neighbor? If it's yours, I didn't realize your place was so big. Nice.

[kevin_standlee]

The two-story house on the other side of the fence in these photos is our house. The work we've been doing (and where I was standing when I took the photos) is a vacant lot that we do not own, but that we clear for our own protection.

The upper story is actually an "in-law unit" that is supposed to be a self-contained studio apartment. However, it had plumbing damage when we bought it (factored into the sale price), and we've never felt up to investing the high-four-figure sum it would take to bring it totally back up to habitability. If we did so, it would become my office, rather than having me work out of the living room.

[kevin_standlee]

Being able to buy this house, which also has a two-car garage and the carport space that we roofed over as an RV shelter, on a 150 x 50 foot lot, for less than $80K (and a mortgage that has only about 20 months to run) was a significant contributing factor toward moving here.

[delosharriman]

Indeed, I'm hard pressed to think of anywhere in California a house of that size would not be priced literally an order of magnitude higher. The constant escalation of housing prices, which was so universally regarded as an unalloyed good thing right up to the 2008 panic, has certainly helped put the "American Dream" out of reach for many Americans.

[scott_sanford]

There are plenty of reasons not to live in rural Nevada, but there's plenty of wide open space there. Houses can be built large, since the budget that otherwise go into land can go to building structure instead.

[kevin_standlee]

And our house wasn't built the way you see it. It started out as a small structure to house a railroad employee of the Southern Pacific (Central Pacific). The railroader eventually bought the house from the SP and then started expanding it. That's why it looks so lopsided; they kept adding to it rather haphazardly.