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Ah, family

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One of the benefits of moving out here is that we are close to family again.  Both sides.  Which, of course, makes it much easier to get together and visit and spend time together.

Being close to family is a good thing.

Unfortunately, family is why we left in the first place.  Specifically, my mother.  That’s a long story that doesn’t belong on this blog, but after 14 years away, things have changed and the biggest reason behind our leaving doesn’t exist anymore.  Still, when my mother asked us to move to the empty farm and take care of it for her, we did have to consider certain relationship issues along with everything else.  My mother is an amazing woman in many respects; intelligent, brave, strong, and a real survivor.  There are just… other issues.

Today, I ended up having an unplanned visit with my mother, so we could lend her our scale.  She is going for surgery in a couple of months (yay!  Finally – though not for her knee replacement, yet), and the surgeon wants her to lose some weight.  She remembered that there was a scale here, under a dresser that was in the hallway near the old kitchen.  I told her that yes, there was a scale here, but we packed all that up.  She was surprised that the stuff was not in that corner anymore and asked what was there now.  The cat litter box, I told her.  Oh, no! she lamented.  She doesn’t like that we have cats, because then we have a litter box, and then there’s the smell and…

I had to remind her what I’d already told her about before; that when we moved that dresser, we found old cat litter (and more).  Oh, but that wasn’t while she was at the farm…  *sigh*

Okay.  Moving on.

Once it was agreed that I would just lend her our scale, so she didn’t have to buy herself a new one, we worked out that I would come over today and finally get a visit in.

It was actually a good visit, overall, which is always appreciated.  Plus, it gave me the opportunity to show her pictures on my phone.  So she got to see the kittens, and some of her flowers.  I showed her the progress in the old kitchen and some of the things I found. I also showed her pictures of different areas in the yard that I’ve been cleaning up.

It was so strange.

I get some very mixed messages from my mother.

We are here to take care of the place for her.  Which we have been.  However, we have noticed things that are a priority that she had never had to concern herself over, because my dad or my brothers always took her of them.  In her mind, the priorities are the things she worked on.  Like the garden.  Which we’ve not touched this year and is overgrown.   At one point, she told me that I was lazy, and that I was unintelligent. But when I would tell her about the work I’ve been doing around the yard, she would start telling me that I shouldn’t be doing it, I should get my oldest brother to do it.  The one that lives 1 1/2 hours away.  Because I, being female, shouldn’t be doing this stuff.

Today, I started showing her pictures of different areas among the trees I’d cleared out.  Not even all of them; just the most recent.  This included before and after pictures, of course.  As I showed her a few… then a few more… then a bunch more… she suddenly sat back, looked at me and said; “you need a man around!”

List of Emoticons for Facebook | Symbols & Emoticons*facepalm*

So, if I don’t do the work, I’m lazy, but if I DO do the work, I shouldn’t be doing it, because it’s men’s work (and let’s not even start on what she must think about my husband being disabled, in constant pain and unable to do this stuff).  I don’t think she even realized how insulting she was being, even when I told her flat out, that’s insulting.

There was no sense that she felt anything positive about what I’ve been doing.  I’d show her where I’d trimmed away from the storage house stairs and cleared her grapes a bit, and she demanded to know if I was watering them.  Was I doing this?  No, I’m focusing on that.  Well, what about this other thing?  No, I’m doing this, this and that, because they’re more of a priority.  What am I doing about those things over there?  Well, this is what I have planned.  Oh, she’d never do it that way, she did it this way and it was never a problem.  Gee, thanks, Mom.

It’s an odd position to be in.  I’m am glad that we moved out there, even with all the problems that came with the move.  I’m enjoying the work of getting things cleaned up, fixed up and cleared out, that hadn’t been done for so many years.  Every area we’ve worked on looks and feels so much better, even if there is still much work to do.  As I walk through different areas that I’ve cleared in the yard, it feels so much more open and airy and welcoming, and I can hardly wait to keep going.  Right now, I’m holding back until my birthday gift gets here.  Which was supposed to be delivered on Friday, but now when I check the tracking, there’s no date and it’s back to “in transit” at the city.  Turns out that we are “in a remote area where delivery does not happen every day”.  No kidding.  I should be receiving notifications now, though, if not a call, about delivery.  I might have to pick it up from a depot in the town my mother lives in, but we’ll see.  Until then, the clearing of the trees will wait.

The main thing is, while we are taking care of the place for my mom, it is becoming more and more our home.  My mother somehow thought that we could just leave everything behind and move into the house as it was, because everything was already perfect, and she’s still not understanding that no, it wasn’t perfect.  Not even close to perfect.  And we are finding things she knew nothing about that need to be dealt with.

I think, in a way, she never will.  And certainly I know that I will never be good enough, or do right, in her eyes.  But I do wish she would, if not appreciate the work that’s being done, stop telling me that I shouldn’t be doing it, because I’m female.

Ah, family.

The Re-Farmer

Power Pole installed: stage one

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Yay!!!

Our new power pole was installed today.

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Here, they are lining up the drill to dig the hole, making sure it’s straight.

I wanted to take pictures and video, but I also didn’t want to be in their way, so I didn’t.

Part way through drilling, it sounded like they hit a rock.  The electrician got down on the ground and I guess he was able to move things out of the way, as the drilling continued soon after.  Then the drill attachment was switched for a bucket, which they used to lift and line up the pole itself into position.  By then, I was inside, because I didn’t want to hover, so I didn’t see how they moved the pole into place.  I only saw them lifting the pole at one end, and using chain to secure it so it could be moved.

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We have a fairly shallow topsoil, then its sand, gravel and clay.  Once the pole was in, they pushed the soil back around it, and you can see that clay heavy soil ended up on top.  The electrician poured a bucket of water over it to help things settle.

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Old and new!

It now needs to sit for at least a few days for the ground to settle.  He will come back, likely at the end of the week, to unhook the wire from the old pole, move it to the new one, and hook up the power.  If he were to do that now, the weight of the wire would cause the pole to tilt.

Only after the wire is transferred can the old pole finally come down.

By next weekend, we should have power hooked up to the garage and the barn again. :-D

The Re-Farmer

An Experiment

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Like so many others right now, we are experiencing a bit of a heat wave.

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It’s the “feels like 41” part that’s the killer.

For those of you in the US, 31C is 87.8F and 41C is 105.8F

Thankfully, my daughter has air conditioning where she works.  Whether or not it will make a difference behind the counter is questionable, though!  I will find out when I pick her up tonight.

So we’re doing very little of anything physical during the hottest parts of the day, right now!

Meanwhile, inspired by a video someone shared on Facebook, I am going to try an experiment.

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After dropping my daughter off at work, I picked up a bag of mixed size balloons.  I used the big enameled container I found in the old kitchen – the one my mother used to mix bread dough in – and gave it a wash (a challenge, since it’s bigger than our sink), then used it to hold the balloons I filled with water.  The package had some teeny tiny balloons, too.  Those, I put in the fridge freezer.  Two batches of these bigger ones are now in the chest freezer.  I’ve got them sitting in reusable grocery bags, so they will be easier to access, later.

When they are frozen, I will put some out for the cats.  The tiny ones will fit in the bowls we have for the indoor cats.  I will start with one big one in one of the water containers for the outside cats and see how it goes over.  I plan to put a smaller one near where the kittens are.  As it melts, it will also water the bush that’s near the entrance to their hiding place.

It should be interesting to see how it works.  For starters, I foresee potential problems with the balloons freezing to each other, due to the condensation on the outside.  As long as I can transport them, that shouldn’t be a problem, since the balloons will be broken and removed before the ice is put out.

I hope the cats like it.

On the topic of animals…

While driving my daughter to work, about half way to town, we saw a small black bear crossing the road!  While I have always known we sometimes have bears around, this is the first time in my life I have actually seen one out here.  Pretty cool!

I imagine the poor thing was really suffering from the heat, though.  :-(

The Re-Farmer

Update:  Wow, that didn’t take long!  After finishing this post, I looked at the weather app again, before closing it down.  It’s already gotten hotter.

2018-07-07.heat2

Red Sided Garter Snake!

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We saw our first snake of the year!!

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Can you spot it in the greenery?

Thankfully, it moved and stayed in a spot I could get better pictures of it. :-D  (There IS a red stripe along its sides; honest!)

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Garter snakes are awesome to have around, because they eat insects, mice – even leeches. If you ever have the opportunity to visit Manitoba‘s famous Narcisse Snake Dens, either in May, when they first come out of hibernation, or September, when they return to the dens, I would highly recommend it.  There are dens in Saskatchewan and Alberta, too, but none as extensive as in Narcisse.  Sadly, people sometimes destroy the dens, thinking the snakes are some sort of pest, which they most certainly are not!

Judging from the size of this one, it might be a female.  They are quite a bit bigger than the males.

I am so happy to see it, and I hope to see more!

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: old kitchen – clearing the stove

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Yesterday, while working on packing stuff in the old kitchen, my focus was on clearing the wood cook stove.  It was completely hidden away by stuff we put there, just to get them out of the way until we could get them to the storage shed or, for our own stuff, create a space for it.

The old kitchen is an add on to the original log house.  I had thought my dad had added it on after buying the farm from a relative, but I’m told the original builders had built it.  Another log building that we used as a chicken coop was the “summer kitchen.”  That’s where a stove was set up and the cooking and canning would happen, to keep the house from getting too hot.  As I understand it, this stove is from the summer kitchen.  Which means this stove hasn’t moved in about 3 generations.  Maybe four.

Until the new part of the house was built in the early 70’s, and we got running water and an electric stove, this was our kitchen.  Even after the new one was built, when the power went out, we would go back to using the old kitchen for cooking and some of the heating (the wood burning furnace needed electricity to operate the fans the blew hot air).

It’s a good thing we have no plans to use the stove.

I’m just going to post a couple of pictures for now; I found a lot of weird stuff on, in and around it!  Here is how things looked after I moved away that big stuff we had leaned in front of it.

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The chair, we’d put in to make room in the dining room, since we didn’t need the 8 or so that were there.  The vehicle bike rack is ours.  We kept it, even after selling off our bikes before a move, because we’d intended to get bikes again.

There’s a vacuum cleaner you can see on the left, with its head in the centre bottom of the photo.  That used to be ours!  And before that, it belonged to my in-laws.  They gave it to us during one of our moves back to the province, and when we left it again, it ended up on the farm.

The fire extinguisher box on top of the warming shelves turns out to have a fire extinguisher in it!  We’ll have to take it out and check its condition.  If it’s good, we’ll just need to recharge it and we’ll have an extra. :-)  We already have another modern one in our kitchen, though I suppose it’s due to be recharged, too.

You can also see just a bit of an umbrella sticking out.  That’s ours, too!  My husband bought it for the girls the second time we moved back to the West coast.  It’s painted silk with scenes of Winnie the Pooh (book style, not Disney style) on it.  There was a second, smaller one, too.  The girls were 3 and 6 at the time.  They are now 22 and 25.  So excited to find that!  I hope we find the second one somewhere, too.

I’ll post pictures of some of the other stuff I found later.  For now, this is what it looked like when I stopped for the day.

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Yeah, I found another vacuum cleaner. :-D

The tin on top of the warming shelves was one of the things I found IN the warming shelves.

It’s full of nails.

The oven door is broken.  I found a piece of hinge on top of the stove, and I think the second hinge is broken inside the oven door frame itself.

I wonder why one corner  of the stove top is leaning down like that?

Amazingly, there are still ashes in the fire and ash boxes.

Eventually, I plan to give it a good cleaning, polish it up and find some way to put the oven door back, though I doubt it can be repaired.  If there is a baking rack for the oven, I haven’t seen it – though I might not even recognize it for what it is, if I did.  I remember my mother baking, but have no memory of a rack in the oven.  The only memory I have of looking inside the oven was when my mom was canning and had jars in a water bath, the container of which pretty much filled the entire oven.

For now, I am done with the oven area.  I will next focus on emptying the shelves in the west side of the room and made some decisions about which, if any, I will keep.  I think I might keep one, just because it’s been handy to stand on to reach the breaker panel.

I am NOT looking forward to working in that nook beside the oven.  It’s going to be a tight fit to get into and move around in there, and it’s quite the disaster. :-(

The Re-Farmer

A bit blustery out there!

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First up, here are a couple of bird photos for you to enjoy. :-)

My husband got this purple finch at the feeder not long ago.

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And I finally got a blue jay picture!

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The blue jays have a habit of taking off before I can get to the camera, so these days, it’s a challenge to get any pictures of them at all.

This was another indoor day, for the most part.  There were plenty of storm warnings for the southern province which, for us, translated to rain early in the morning, and now high winds.  I had to go into town to pick up some prescription refills, and made a point of checking the yard out before I left.  There were a few downs branches that were of little concern.  In the areas of the maple grove I haven’t cleaned yet, I found myself looking at some branches and wondering, is that new?  Or what that already there?

About the only good thing right now is the wind direction.  If one of the trees by the house does come down, it’ll be fall away from the roof, instead of on it.  Though, looking out my window at the trees behind the storage house, it’s the opposite.  At least that building is empty and has no power.

Speaking of which…

The second tree care company came by on Monday, and I got the estimate emailed to me last night.  It’s basically the same as the first company; $1500.  Looking over our budget (barring any unexpected expenses), we should be able to get it done in November.  Choosing the company is going to be a bit more difficult; they’re pretty equal in every tangible sense.  One also does yard work and landscaping, which I would want to keep in mind for the future.  The other does trees and nothing else.

So we have some talking to do and a decision to make.  I’m just glad it’s something we can get done before winter, instead of waiting until spring.  Though if we get some sort of cash infusion (like the shares the housing co-op we moved away from still owes us!), it would be good to get it done earlier.

The Re-Farmer

Clean Up: Maple Grove, evening progress

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I wrote up my last post while taking a hydration break from working in the maple grove.  By the time I was done, I found myself nodding off at the keyboard.  I figured lying down wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Three hours later… :-o

But, I’ve got it done as much as I can for now.

Here are the before and after pictures of the two North rows.

I cleared out two of the tree spruces in the foreground of the second picture.  The two I took out had a few green sprigs here and there, but were otherwise dead.  I also cut off the dead branches from the one in the middle.  I am hoping that, now that it’s open and clear, it will survive.

The remaining spruces in that northernmost row are doing pretty good.  I trimmed the lowest branches, as well as the dead ones that I could reach with a hand saw.  The dead ones were mostly on the south side of the trees, where they had no light.  The other living spruce trees, I only took off what was in my way as I moved around.  I will finish cutting away the dead branches when my birthday gift comes in. :-)

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This is the remains of a row of raspberry bushes.  I can see some dead canes from years past, but no fresh canes in this area.

To the right, you can also see a gooseberry bush I found.  I had cleared out a broadleaf tree that was between two spruces, and discovered the gooseberry under it!

20180702.cleanup.maplegrove.eastside.big.gooseberry

Then there’s this gooseberry bush, in dire need of having the deadwood cut away.  It’s growing next to a chokecherry tree, which was also overgrown and in need of pruning at its base.

20180702.cleanup.maplegrove.eastside.gooseberry.chokecherry.cleared

It was amazing how cutting just one sucker at the bottom of the chokecherry tree cleared almost everything up!  A few downward hanging branches to clear away, and various saplings, burdock and stinging nettle to clear away at the base, and what a difference!  I even found some raspberry bushes with baby berries on them.

The gooseberry, on the other hand, has almost no sign of berries on it at all, and what little it does have are not looking good.

20180702.cleanup.maplegrove.eastside.appletree.before

This is the very end of the “raspberry” row, with an apple tree near the compost pile.  There’s even a lonely little asparagus fern growing in here!

20180702.cleanup.maplegrove.eastside.appletree.after

I found more salvageable raspberry canes.  After cutting away some lower branches and saplings at the base of the apple tree (including maple and elm saplings), it was basically just weeding and removing old raspberry canes.  There are some plants in there I recognize as flowers my mother planted, so I tried to avoid taking those out.  Lots of creeping charlie and burdock in here.

At this point, I called it a night.  Which worked out perfectly, because that’s when I got a call from the second tree care company about coming over.  It was another father and sons team. :-)

When they got here, I showed them the areas I wanted work done on, plus the trees to come down.  He asked questions about how far back I wanted to cut things (basically, enough to not have to do this again for 5 years).  He wanted to know about the overhanging branches, which would normally be left if they are not touching the lines.  One of them is a very healthy maple tree, and cutting it back would mean removing pretty much half the tree.  When I pointed out it was from those overhanging branches that we got the burned branch from, and that it had happened before, causing a power outage, he understood why I didn’t want ANY overhanging branches at all.  They even measured the trunks of the trees that will be taken down, including the dead spruce.  They had to take into account being able to get their equipment in, too, and I told them about the three different gates that were available.  We also talked about cleanup.  He charges extra if they bring in a chipper, but I did say I wanted to keep the chips for mulch, and to keep the bigger wood, too.  He mentioned they don’t usually chip dead branches, because it dulls the cutting edges, but the stuff they’ll be cutting back will mostly be life branches.

He took a whole bunch of notes, and I will get the estimate emailed to me.

I told him about how we don’t own the land, and that I am getting estimates to talk to my mother and brother about before a decision is made, and that I’m hoping to get it done in the fall.  Or spring, if the cost is higher (which I suspect it will be, with these guys, but we shall see).  He was good with fall, mentioning after August is when they’d be available to do the work, so that works out.

And that’s it for the next while.  Tomorrow will be a trip to the city for my daughter, which should give my body time to rest.  Feeling pretty stiff and sore right now! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Clean Up: maple grove progress

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Today, I am continuing working on the East end of the maple grove, and have just stopped for a hydration break before finishing for the day.

I am thinking it would be a good idea to rent a wood chipper in the fall.  There is just SO much wood being cleaned and cleared away.

So this is what the area looked like on Saturday, after I cleared out the old garden path.

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Apparently, the only photos I have taken from the other end don’t show the whole area.  Ah, well.

An interesting thing about my taking all these before and after pictures, as that I have a time record, too.  I don’t typically pay attention to what time I start or finish, but my phone’s camera is set to use the date and time in the file names.  This means I can say with confidence that I worked about 1 1/2 hours, starting just before noon, in this area.

This is what I did in that 1 1/2 hours. :-)

I started by clearing away by the water tap.  For that one, I just had to take some video.

So… that post isn’t doing anything useful anymore. :-(

I cleared out a couple of dead spruces beside the tap, one of which was rotten enough that I just broke the trunk at ground level and pulled it out.  There were some elms growing out of an old trunk that was pretty big when someone finally cut it down.  That’s the one that has me wondering if the roots have caused any problems with the underground water pipe.

There was another dead spruce nearby that I took down.

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I even got it to fall right on my pile! :-D

As I moved on and went to pull some stuff out of the grass by another dead tree, I stepped on something that sank under my foot.

Do you see it?

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Neither could I.  Even after using the weed trimmer here, I see nothing.

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It was some fence wire that was rolled up, but ended up flattened at some point. From the looks of the rusty old soup can I also found under it, it’s been here for quite a long time!

I moved the two tillers closer to the shed so I could clear where they were sitting.  That included moving two garbage cans (one of which was partially sheltering a tiller) and piece of aluminum that looks like it is part of ducting for a large building that used to shelter a push mower.  My brother took the mower to see if he could fix it.

When I went to take out some other fence wire in the area I found…

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… a chokecherry tree and some vines growing through it.

Some of this is going to wait until my telescoping pole chainsaw arrives – I got a shipping notification in my email this morning. :-)  I also won’t be going back through this area with the weed trimmer until after I’ve cleaned it out more and cut trunks down to ground level.  I was finding too many rocks, branches, brick and pieces of wire.  I got the cheapest weed trimmer I could find, so I don’t want to wreck it!

At the Easternmost end of this area is a couple of dead spruces.  One of them had thick vines growing out the bottom of it that I had cut, but left hanging.

Today, I pulled them out.

The vines may have started at the base of one tree, but part way up, it spread to the other dead spruce tree (and is likely what killed both of them).

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Looks like some kind of triffid!!  Some of it broke off and is still in the tree, but this is most of it.

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These are the two dead spruce threes it was attached to.  Funny.  They look MUCH emptier, now that the triffid vine is out.

Oh, my SIL told me about an app called Plant Snap that I downloaded and tested out.  These vines are Virginia Creeper.  It is related to grapes, but their berries are poisonous to humans (birds can eat them), and the sap can be an irritant.  Because they spread through rhizomes so aggressively, it looks like the only way to permanently get rid of them is with some Roundup.  Which I plan to use elsewhere, at some point, so that works out.  I’m told that spruces are impervious to Roundup, but clearly not to these vines!

This is what the area looks like now.

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Later today, I plan to work on that north row.  After that, this section will be pretty much done, other than what is waiting for a chain saw.

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Here is the pile of what 1 1/2 hours of cleaning and clearing trees looks like, including the vines.

Yeah.  Wood chipper.

The Re-Farmer

 

 

 

Canada Day Storm!

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We got hit by a short, but intense storm today. Severe enough to warrant shutting down the computers.

I got a couple of videos, so when the storm passed, I turned on my desktop, and began uploading the videos.

Then the power went out.

It was just for a few seconds.  Then it came back on.  Then off.  Then on again.  Then flickered a bit.

So much for my uploads!

I didn’t try again until after picking up my younger daughter from work.  Thankfully, my older daughter and I had put on the new windshield wipers, first!  Turns out that we have to open the hood to be able to access the wiper arms, which meant I could barely reach, and couldn’t see.  The wipers the van came with were broken and kept together with electric tape, which had come off some time ago, so the ends on the driver’s side blade were just sort of flopping.

Changing wiper blades should be easy.  Just pop off the old ones, pop on the new ones.  But no… that would be too easy!  I got the old wiper blade off, but there was a piece attached to that arm that should have come off, too.  It wouldn’t.  After a while, I figured I’d put the old blade on and try again later.  That didn’t work; a piece broke off, instead.  So later on, I backed the van out of the garage so we could see, then popped the hood.

Of course, that’s when it started to rain.  *sigh*

After righting with it for a bit, and another piece breaking off, I drove it back into the garage while my daughter got our tool kit (with all the stuff in the garage, do you think there are any actual usable tools in there?  Nope!).  While waiting, I got the passenger side blade changed.  That one came off easily, and the new blade popped right on, the way it’s supposed to.

It took a pair of pliers and elbow grease to get the driver’s side arm bar clear of the broken bit.  Once that was done, the new blade went on quite easily.  Yay!

It made all the difference while driving in the rain!

As for the videos, I’ve had some trouble uploading them; I think the power outage happening while I was trying to upload them the first time messed things up.  As I type this, the second video is still uploading, after the file got rejected three times!  But it seems to be fine now.

After the storm, I did a walk around to see if there was any damage.  A few branches had come down, but nothing serious.  I did another walk around after picking up my daughter, and there were even more branches down.  No roof damage, though, which is the main concern. :-)

The sky is clear, now, and it’s looking lovely out there.  The rain is much appreciated!

The Re-Farmer

Clean Up: Maple Grove, garden path

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We had some much more pleasant temperatures today, so I headed out to do some work in the maple grove this evening.

After the tree care guy came to give us an estimate, I decided to focus first on clearing the old garden path.  Whether we hire these guys, or the company coming to give a quote on Monday, they will need to bring equipment in to access the trees they will be cutting clear from the power lines.  Good enough reason to start at the old garden path.

This is what it looked like before.

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The deadwood on the ground here is partially cut, and it made up of several trees.  Elm and maple, from the looks of it.

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This photo was taken back in May, and you can see where the path is supposed to be in the background.

I also worked my way along the north row of trees, bordering the garden, and heading towards the garden shed.  I started off by using the weed trimmer to take town the tall grass and weeds, so that I could at lease see the branches and trunks.

Then I started dragging stuff out.  This photo is of JUST the deadwood I pulled out of the grass.

20180630.cleanup.maplegrove.gardenpath.deadwoodpile

Almost all of this is just from that blocked garden path!  Even after this, I kept finding more, as I walked back and forth and I would step on something.  I’d then go to pick up what I expected to be a small branch, often finding myself pulling out something 6-7 feet long, and completely buried in grass and leaves!

After I cleaned out the stuff already on the ground, I started taking out the dead spruces on either side of the path, and cut back the other trees that I had pulled the deadwood out of.  They were mostly dead, already.  I also took out another small dead spruce tree that was near the big dead one that will be coming down when we get the lines cleared.  I almost left a young elm to grow, until I clued in to how close it was to the big dead spruce.  I looked up and, sure enough, the elm was directly below the power lines.

So that had to go.

Along with the dead stuff, I also cleaned up some suckers at the bases of other trees, or growing out of stumps.  Some of those suckers had been growing long enough to almost be trees all on their own.  For the trees I took down, I left fairly tall stumps to make it easier to see them until I can cut them at ground level.  A fair bit is being left until my birthday present arrives. :-D

I finished off with the weed trimmer again.

Here are the after pictures.

20180630.cleanup.maplegrove.gardenpath.after

A couple of the stumps near the centre of the picture were already there, hidden by the suckers growing out of them.  The old garden path is now open!

The big dead spruce tree that will come down is the one with the big rock next to it.  There is also a young maple kind of by itself there right now, and I will be cutting that down when my birthday present gets here.  It’s directly under the power lines, too, and already grown tall enough to almost touch them!

20180630.cleanup.maplegrove.near.gardenpath.after

This photo was taken from near the big dead spruce tree.  The main garden area is completely overgrown, but it was so roughly plowed, mowing is not an option.  It’s not a priority right now.

There are three spruces next to each other, just right of centre in the photo.  I am hoping the one in the middle can be salvaged.  The other two are too far gone.

On the garden side, starting from about where those spruces are (I think they are Colorado blues), is the old row a raspberries.  It’s completely choked out with crab grass and weeds, and overshadowed by mostly dead trees, with a very few canes trying to grow.  Another area that is not a priority right now.  When the time comes, we plan to have a raspberry patch with three different varieties, including one with gold coloured berries, that mature at different times.  That way, we will be harvesting berries from July through September. :-)

All in good time.

20180630.cleanup.maplegrove.near.gardenpath.lookingeast

I plan to work my way down these two rows of trees, next.  Where the big rock is, is the garden tap.  It’s got a couple of dead trees by it, as well as a live one.  They will all come down to clear the tap, and the buried pipe that leads to the house.  I’m hoping the roots haven’t caused any problems.  I have yet to hook it up at the house end to test it out, since it’s barely accessible right now.

There are two old tillers that have been sitting there for years, one covered with a piece of tin, the other with an old rug.  They should still be salvageable, so I am hoping to be able to move them into a shed or maybe the barn, to get them out of the weather.

Once this area is done, I will turn my attention to the West side of the maple grove.  Lots of deadfall in there, too.

The really big job is going to be dealing with the trees to the North of the grove, that has been so densely planted with trees.

While doing this outside, I also will be working on packing up the old kitchen, so we can get that cleaned out and looking good again.  I want to get that done within the next week.  I’d like to be able to open the door and not worry about the cats getting int. :-)

Lots to do!  :-)

The Re-Farmer