After dropping my daughter off at work this morning (and a quick visit to the beach), I continued clearing the west fence line, working away from the fire pit area.

When I did my evening walk around the yard last night, there was still enough light to rake up the dead leaves and twigs where I had been working last time. It was not really something I’d intended to do yet, but I had issues last time that I wanted to check out.

This morning, with enough light to see, I checked it out.

Yikes!  No wonder I kept stubbing my toes, tripping and twisting.

I had cut those lilacs and caragana to as close to ground level as I could at the time.  I didn’t take into account the thickness of years of dead leaves.  Once raked out, I could see that I was no where near ground level on these!

Thankfully, I did not need to go over this area again today, because I didn’t want to use up what little time I had before the heat hit, cutting it down shorter.

This is the next section I worked on.

(Click on the images to see larger)

There’s one before picture, and two after pictures of the space around the two elms.

I did end up taking down some caragana and lilac growing together that I’d originally though I could leave.  You can see it to the right of the two elm trees in the before picture. However, to clear the fence line, they had to go.  Like so much else, there was a lot more dead in there than I expected.  Even after I’d already cut away dead sections, some time ago!

Here is how it looks now.

I had no energy to cut it down closer to the ground than this.  By the time I’d got to this point, the heat was already getting to be an issue.

I also needed to clear it to get to the next section, which I had not expected to get to this morning.  Here are some before pictures.

The first two are around a bigger maple with three trunks.  The third picture is of some maple next to it.  All dead, it turned out.  When I grabbed the first piece, preparing to cut it, it just broke loose immediately!

Here is how it looks now.

Two of the three trunks in the bigger maple turned out to be dead.  I will take them down, the next time I’m working in the area.

On clearing away the smaller maple, I found the remains of an old, rotting stump under the leaves.  What I cleared away had been the suckers growing out of a maple that had been cut down long ago, that did not survive for very long.

The next section I will be working on will include that big willow in the background.

Of course, while clearing and cleaning, I found questionable things.

The first was…

A single sock, buried in the leaves.

When I first saw fabric, I figured it would be a painter’s glove, like the many I packed away from various places as we put my parents’ things in storage.  Nope.  A sock.  Just one.

Then there was the barbed wire.

The first being this rolled up wire on a fence post.  You can also see the end of the cable that extends from the gate post.  I can’t quite figure out why it’s there.  It doesn’t seem to be actually supporting anything.

Note the post itself.  It’s basically just a piece of tree someone cut to size and used as a fence post.  Untreated wood like this cannot last long.

Most of this fence seems to be made up of this sort of post. :-(

On the next post over, there was more barbed wire.

Just a length of barbed wire, with worn out twine at its end, dangling there.

I’ve left the lilacs and caragana growing through the fence at this point, to hold the fence up.  It’s no longer even attacked to some of the fence posts at the top anymore.

It wasn’t until I had cleared around the bigger maple that I realized what I was seeing.

Someone wrapped a loop of barbed wire around the trunk to hold up the fence post.

A temporary fix like this, I can understand.  But the whole point of temporary fixes is that they are… well… temporary.

That maple trunk is the one that’s still alive of the three trunks growing together.

I don’t think I was out much more than and hour, working on this, before I had to get out of the heat.  We’ve got heat wave warnings for the rest of the week, across the prairies.  As I write this, we’re at 31C (87.8F), with a humidex of 35C (95F).  It’s not expected to start cooling down for the evening until about 7pm.  At least we’re not supposed to go any higher, today.  By Saturday and Sunday, we’re expecting to get temperatures of 35C with a humidex of 41C (105.8F).

Ah, Canada.  Where the summers can get as much above freezing as the winters can get, below freezing! :-D

The Re-Farmer