altivo

Shades of Aristophanes. The frogs are going, it really is spring here. First daffodils opened on Sunday, lettuces and spinach are coming up in the hot frames, and the peas are planted. I let Tess out on the new grass for just a couple of hours on Sunday. She never seems to have a problem but I'm still cautious about that. One thing is still missing, the ducks haven't laid a single egg yet.

Opened the bedroom window last night, not the first time this year, but this time there was frog music to listen to, something I really enjoy.

Unfortunately, traffic noises are something I don't enjoy, and we have a lot more of those than we did even just two or three years ago. When we bought this place I thought "That's it, I'm never moving again." But now, it's at least conceivable again. Not a pleasant prospect, but... I'm feeling closed in upon.

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Current Music: Jim Brickman - Another Tuesday Morning

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cabcat.livejournal.com

How on earth do you manage to have time to work and look after all those things? You must tell me your secret....seriously, I never have enough hours in the day to do even half that.

From:

altivo.livejournal.com

Well, part of the secret is having a mate who does a big share of it. If it weren't for him, I'd certainly have to get rid of the sheep and the ducks, and probably cut back to one horse. No way am I ever living without a horse again.

He does the gardening because he doesn't care for my lackadaisical style of just planting things and letting them duke it out with the weeds. Whatever wins, I'd eat. :) When we moved out here seven years ago, he took early retirement. Having worked 25 years at a consulting firm, his income from retirement savings is almost equal to what I make working full time. (Which isn't a lot of money, but it's enough to get by on.)

Actually, the way we get away with much of it is by "benign neglect". You don't have to mow grass if you have horses and sheep to eat it, for instance. ;p

From:

niko-winterset.livejournal.com

*smiles* It is nice to be able to open the windows up and enjoy the fresh air. We have been lucky enough to be able to do this off and on for the last monthor so. I have to laugh though since we flip back and forth between heat, AC and just the fans and open windows.

Oh, enjoy your upcoming vacation.

Storm

From:

songdogmi.livejournal.com

I miss the sounds of the fields coming back to life (well, ok, the winter was part of life too, but you know what I mean) in the spring, frogsong and birdsong.... don't really get that living in a suburb, does one?

Where I used to live was getting encroached upon while I still lived there. Now they're rebuilding the road we lived on so it'll be a five-lane highway, so I'm sure the traffic is incompatible with rural living now. I figure one needs to live at least fifty miles from downtown Detroit, maybe more like 75, in order to be free from sprawl. But you have to be careful which direction because you could end up in metro Toledo or Lansing or Flint. Land in that radius is still pretty expensive, too. Affordable land is a lot farther away.

Rats, now I'm all bummed out. But yay for the frogs and the plants in the hot frames and new grass.

Mom had a cold frame... that's probably the same as a hot frame, huh? Set in the ground with a wood-and-plastic hatch, kept things a bit warmer while they grew....

From:

altivo.livejournal.com

A cold frame is a hot frame without any heat. ;p

We have both, actually. There are two cold frames out in the veggie garden right now. A hot frame has artificial heat added to that which is generated by greenhouse effect and sunlight through the glass (or plastic in our case.) Traditionally that heat is provided by a buried layer of manure that creates heat as it "ferments" or whatever it is that manure piles do. They can get hot enough to catch fire in dry weather though. I've seen it. Ours has horse and sheep poop buried under it. More "modern" hot frames use electric heat, from incandescent bulbs or buried heating cables.

Both hot and cold frames allow plants to grow when the outside weather is colder than they would like. The hot frame can actually produce things like lettuce and spinach when the ambient temperatures are below freezing.

Yes, sprawl is a real terrible problem and getting worse. The county here spent years drawing up a development plan that would have restricted sprawl. That was unpopular with the developers and big landowners, who make millions of dollars by creating sprawl, so they put on pressure for "amendments to the plan". The amendments would have cancelled out the whole thing, by allowing sprawl just about anywhere the landowners wanted to put it. That caused near riots when public hearings were held on the subject last month. So, the county board decided to drop the development plan completely and not implement any plan. Instead they are starting over. Meanwhile there is nothing to inhibit sprawl, which is just what the developers wanted in the first place.

From:

songdogmi.livejournal.com

Ah... we didn't have any manure (or outside electricity) to provide heat for the cold frames, so they weren't hot frames. That sort of thing would really extend a growing season. Way cool.

The whole sprawl thing is just infuriatingly complex. I'm sure in Detroit, we're going to end up with all the development in a ring forty miles away from downtown, and downtown will be a donut hole. Everyone is looking for the big bucks now, and never mind what the consequences are in the long term or even not-so-long term. I'm sorry to hear your county's anti-sprawl plans got shot down, but maybe they can still come up with something that protects the rural areas of the county, and in enough time to prevent any lasting damage.

From:

altivo.livejournal.com

I'm afraid there's no hope. Development plans here are just that, plans. They have no force of law, and are only advisory. Areas marked as dedicated to agriculture on the existing development plans are being dug up for subdivisions even as I write this. Thousands of acres in fact.

The sad thing is that this part of Illinois has really excellent soil and water for agriculture, but will not have the drainage or water table to support heavy suburban populations in the long run. The hit and run developers are not interested in that, of course, only in the up front profit. The people who will buy the sloppily built houses really have no idea what they are getting, but most won't stay longer than five years (the average seems to be less than three) before moving somewhere else, so they aren't concerned with running out of well water 15 years down the time line. And politicians, like the county board, have even shorter horizons. Their concerns never extend past the next election or the next kickback, whichever comes first.

The present development boom is driven by low interest rates and easy mortgage loans, combined with bad zoning decisions that were made as much as 30 years ago. Large chunks of farmland were rezoned back then at the owners' request, for either estate housing (3 acre lots) or single family housing (1/4 to 1/2 acre lots.) The rezoning was not expensive or hard to accomplish then, the county population was low, demand was low, it didn't much change the value of the property, but the word had gotten around that development plans were being considered. So you got your rezoning done just in case.

Apparently there is no way to cancel out that zoning and change it back to A-1 unless the property owner requests it. With developers now offering the owners as much as $20,000 per acre for corn fields, there are no applications for zoning reduction, you can guess. And the development plans, even if implemented, do not override existing zoning. So we are getting what is called "spot development" where they build a subdivision out in the country, miles from the nearest town, sandwiched between farm fields and barns. Fifty houses here, a hundred there.

That increases traffic, pollution, and drainage problems. So the quick answer guys widen the roads. Then they start putting in sewers and forcing people to change from septic tank to sewer connection. Now you have the infrastructure for more development, including shopping malls. And at the same time you've increased the tax rates on the remaining farm land so much that the dedicated farmers give up. Either they retire and live off the millions they can sell their land to a developer for, or they sell it anyway and move out to the Dakotas or something where their money buys a bigger farm.

Our best hope is for the "housing bubble" to burst, as Greenspan suggested it would do soon. Interest rates are rising, inflation is kicking in, and both should help slow this disaster for a while.

Meanwhile, our obnoxiously loud neighbors who moved here from England two years ago have already put their house up for sale. We checked. They are asking nearly twice what they paid for it, only two years later. If they get that, I hate to think what the property assessor is going to do to me in the next cycle of reassessment. Much increase in my taxes beyond what they already are could force even me to sell out and move to the Dakotas. If they doubled our taxes overnight, as that could do, we simply couldn't afford to live here any more.

From:

songdogmi.livejournal.com

The good news for you is, the bad neighbors are leaving. The bad news is, the taxes will go up and the new neighbors could be worse. Sorry, that's not very positive, is it?

All you wrote about sprawl is so very familiar here - well I'm sure you know that, since it's been happening for 30 or more years here too. The one difference would probably be that central Chicago is still pretty full of people, right? Unlike central Detroit -- here one of the problems is that people are moving away from infrastructure that is still mostly pretty sound (or at least fixable) and building new infrastructure. There are neighborhoods in the city of Detroit that could just about be rebuilt from scratch into a place where people might actually want to live, but instead they're building in Fowlerville and Richmond and Lake Orion. Such a waste.

It's sad that people don't see the value of high-quality farmland so that its used as farmland. Yet more waste while we plow over fertile ground and develop ways to make unfertile ground grow things (irrigation in deserts, chemical fertilizers, genetically modified crops).

I could go on, but it'll only depress us both.