Google Locate

Cool Google satellite imagery of the farm taken this summer in early July…. The white lines dotted north and south along the field are postmodern hay bales, huge round bales often prompting the question, "How’s a cow supposed to get a square meal?"  The outfit that takes the hay off the field runs an organic dairy. They bundle the huge round bales in plastic.  There is a specialized piece of equipment for this, and big rolls of white plastic sheeting for wrapping the bales.  A bale looks a giant marshmallow… contradiction between organic farming and shrink wrapped bales?  I think so.  Anyway, I like this imagery.   You can zoom in and see the vegetable gardens, north of the barn and farther afield.  The outline of the property is obvious given the bales spotted along the edges and the hedge rows. The big white roof of the barn marks the southern few acres.  Cars are visible on the gravel to the westof the barn.  North of that is the east lawn of the house (mostly dedicated to dog frisbee).  The house is invisible in the trees west of that lawn and east of the road about where the marker "pin" is on the map. (I had to fudge the house number in Google to get the pin to line up right.  Google isn’t programmed for addresses that encompass a half mile of road frontage.  If I use the actual house number, the Google address marker shows up in the Nature Conservancy a few hundred yards south.

North of the house and east of the road you can see our attempts to sprout a mixed woodlot.  That has a path running northwards through it and is bounded on the the north by the orchard, barely visible as little regularly spaced trees with a big vacancy in the middle where all the peach and most of the cherries fell prey to bunnies girdling them.  The slopes are gentle with only about fifty feet of variation from the marsh to high ground, so topological variation doens’t show up in the picture. The northwest corner shows the Nature Conservancy Parking lot as a spot of gravel just off the road about 800 meters north of the house.  The northeast corner is edged (N/S) with white bales and (E/W) with hedgrerow… everything to the east of that is prairie restoration and conservancy woods and marshlands bounding the lake…  on the south side you can see the Coberly driveway winding back past our "formal garden on the north and their horse barn on the south to their passive solar heated house to the southeast of our barn.

Scrolling the whole satellite shot to the northeast you can see a lot of speedboats as well as a few fishermen on the lake.  Seems like every lakeshore house has a pier with a boat or three.