Clean Up

Clean Up: spruce grove, west perimeter

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Finally.

FINALLY!!!!

I got some clean up started today!

The area I planned to work on stays shaded for a while, which allowed me to work later into the day than otherwise. Dragging the bigger trees I cleared to one of the wood piles outside the yard really showed me what a difference that made! Walking into the sun, the heat hit like a hammer.

After a while, I stopped dragging them out and started a pile in the yard, instead. We’ll drag them out when it’s cooler!

I took before and after pictures from two different views. Here are the before pictures.

The area around the old dog house is where the wood pile was, when there was still a wood burning furnace. It has a pallet fence, and pallets on the ground, all of which are falling over or rotting. My ultimate goal for this year is to get this area cleared.

In the process, I also wanted to clear things a bit further back into the trees towards the outhouse, to access a fallen tree I want to clear out.

There turned out to actually be two of them. After taking pictures, I went to pull out what I thought was a fallen branch, only to find it was actually another dead tree – just a long and skinny one, with about 8-10 feet buried in the tall grass that I didn’t see!

I also cleared some poplars that were growing too close to the outhouse.

The dead tree I wanted access to was also longer than I expected. It extends quite a bit further into the trees, and in the third picture, you can see how its top has landed on other trees, causing them to grow bent.

I’m debating with myself whether I want to cut it into more manageable pieces and haul it out, bit by bit, or just drag the whole thing out in one go.

The lazy part of me says, drag it out in one go. :-D

While working my way towards the elm tree with the tire around its base, I made a discovery.

I’d been able to somewhat see the log someone leaned against the tree trunk through the dying cherry trees, but what is that metal thing under it, and the fallen branch?

It’s a metal chair frame.

Because… of course.

I’m keeping this.

I’ll turn it into an art installation. To go with all the toilets I’m finding! :-D

Clearing around that elm meant I also finally reached one side of the pallet fence.

There’s a poplar growing through it.

I also uncovered a dead tree and some fallen branches.

There are some branches that I put in the area (you can’t see it in the picture) that I saved from the pile in the big garden area that my sister and her husband had pruned before we moved here. Some of it is apple wood. I also kept some of the dead and dying cherry trees I cleared today. I plan to cut them into discs, or other shapes, to make things with them.

It’s hard to see, but as I was trying to clear away the cherry and poplars, I found some of them were growing through the remains of pallets.

There’s going to be a lot of that, as I work my way into the area.

By this point, it was getting simply too hot to keep working outside, and I had to stop for the day. Checking the temperatures before I started this post, I found it was 30C, with a “feels like” of 33C. Hopefully, I’ll be able to continue tomorrow. They’re predicting thunderstorms, but we shall see!

Here are the after pictures of my progress so far.

That reciprocating saw made the job so much easier! The only other tools I had to use were pruning sheers for stuff too small to use the saw on, and a rake, to try and find the bases of the trees I was taking down.

Of the self-sown cherry trees in the area I cleared, I did actually keep one. It even has some cherries ripening on it! I’m hoping it’s far enough away from the elm tree to get adequate sunlight.

Clearing and thinning the trees is the easy part. The hard part is going to be dragging the dog house out (it’s on a pallet, which is rotting and collapsing under it), then digging all the old pallets, pieces of carpet, and who knows what else is buried in there!

The Re-Farmer

Basement finds and explorations

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

It’s been a hot one here today, so not a lot of outside stuff until later on. It was fascinating to find out from a dear friend that, in the city we moved away from, they had only 8C, and not too far from there, people got snow!

One of the things I need to do is re-pot some of our indoor plants. Today, I made a trip into the basements (which I usually avoid, because my feet and stairs don’t get along at the best of times!) to rifle through the various plant pots I had seen hidden in various places.

Continue reading →

Clean up: south fence path progress, and finding flowers

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Today, I finally had both the time and the weather conditions to work on the south fence line of the spruce grove (there there aren’t actually any spruces left…).

So, while waiting for the freshly washed gates to dry, I brought out the weed trimmer, my new reciprocating saw, and a whole lot of extension cord!

Here is my first progress shot.

Continue reading →

Gates, take two, and getting wired… less

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

So today has been an odd mix of productive and not so productive.

First up, we set up the wifi booster in the garage. There was some doubt as to whether it would work, as the outlets are against a metal clad wall.

Continue reading →

Clean up: spruce grove, south fence continued

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Last year, before it finally got too cold to work on cleaning and clearing the trees, I did manage to get some areas on the south side of the spruce grove done. Just a bit by the garage, and more more by the gate.

One of my goals for the day was to finally start working on clearing that middle section. Since we now have a working electric chain saw, which is the perfect size for the job, I figured it would be nice and quick. When cutting some of the larger trees, I’d made a point of leaving fairly tall stumps, so they would be easily visible and no one would trip over them. I intended to cut those flat with the ground, too.

I tested the chain saw out, first, of course.

Then went back to cutting by hand.

Check this out.

Continue reading →

Clean up: front gate prep (updated)

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

This morning, my older daughter and I moved the gates and got started on prepping them for painting.

Those things are fekking heavy!

After considering our options, we ended up digging out a roll of plastic I found in the garage to use as a drop cloth and set one half of the gates up on bricks.

It’s hard to see in this picture, but even though I’d already hosed the gates down before we put it over the plastic, after hosing it down second time, the water puddled under it is really dirty!

We went over the gate on one side with a wire brush to scrub any areas that looked like the paint was peeling of, or were particularly rusted. Then we washed it.

We found an eco-friendly detergent for the job.

After doing the one side, we rinsed off the suds, flipped it over, then did it again.

We also took the sliding bar off the other half and that got scrubbed, cleaned and rinsed, too.

As of this writing, it’s still sitting in the sun, drying. We forgot to get paint thinner to clean our brush, so I will get some when I go to pick up my other daughter from work. By then, it should be dry enough to start painting. :-)

Once that one is done, we’ll do the same to the other half of the gate.

We’ll also need to do the gate posts, though for that, we’ll have to get those bottom broken hinges off, before we can clean it. We’ve been applying penetrating lubricant to them, every now and then, in hopes that that will finally get them loose.

While scrubbing and cleaning the gate, I could see that there was red paint under the black – and in some places, a bright blue! The gate construction is not very usual; gates tend to be made wither either a lighter material, or in a triangular shape, so they aren’t so heavy in the middle, which would stress the hinges and cause the posts to lean inwards. I’m thinking my late brother built the whole thing from scratch! As for the gate posts, which he designed so that they could easily be leveled as needed, they are actually starting to lean outward, due to the shifting of the ground. Heavy as the gate is, it’s not enough to overpower the forces of freeze and thaw!

I’m looking forward to how it looks when everything is all painted and fixed up.

I’m also looking forward to having a working gate again.

The Re-Farmer

Update: first coat of paint on the first side of the first gate is done.

That’s a lot of firsts. LOL

I am loving that blue!

The piece by itself on the brick is the slider bar. When the gates are hung back up, the bar will be placed on one side, with two bolts holding it place. One of them also acts as a stopper, when the gate is closed and the bar is slid across to hold the other side in place. At the other end is a hole for a pin to keep the bar from sliding back again. There had also been some electrical wire, used like a twist tie, to further secure the gate. We replaced the wire with a length of chain and a carabiner, before we had to start locking it.

For as long as I can remember, the pin was just a long screw tied to the opposite gate with some bale twine. When the gate was vandalized, the screw was bent into a semi-circle. Our vandal didn’t move the slider bar before he jacked the first side of the gate off its hinges. So we will have to think of what to use as a pin. Hopefully, we’ll find something nicer than a screw and bale twine. Not that that was anything to sneeze at. It worked for many years, after all!

The paint needs to cure for at least 6 hours, so tomorrow we will be able to flip the gate and do the other side. Then we will have to wait for all the paint to cure for 24 hours before we can put on a second coat. If all goes well, we’ll be able to move this one aside to cure while we prep and paint the other one.

I will have to find something soft to put over the bricks so as not to scratch the new paint after we flip it. :-)

Clean up: garden edging

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

A bit more progress on the garden today; my daughters used some pieces of the trees that were taken down to edge the area we mulched yesterday.

The North end was left alone, since we won’t be going into there much at all, and the South edges were left open a path between the raspberries and the future garden.

The beauty of using these logs is that they are big enough to made an adequate “wall”, but will be easy to move away again, when that time comes.

One of my daughters tried to use a hoe to level some areas, so the logs wouldn’t be more level. The ground is so hard, it just bounced off the dirt!

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: garden prep and bale

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Yes! It’s finally done!

We’ve broken down and removed the straw bale we got for mulch last year.

It’s amazing just how much material is packed into a round bale.

The girls continued taking wheel barrows of straw to the garden until the core was small enough to tip over and roll away.

There was still plenty left behind, of course.

Despite rolling against the grain, it still left a trail, all the way to the garden. :-D

Note in the above photo, how wide the mulched area in the garden is. We’ve already widened it on one side a bit, since we last worked on it.

Once in place, the core could simply be unrolled, leaving behind a thick enough layer that it only needed to be tamped down in places.

You can really see the difference between what was the bottom of the bale and the top; the part that was touching the ground is still tightly wrapped, and already starting to decompose, while the top is much looser, as it had room to spread while we took layers off to cover the septic tank and mulch the old kitchen garden.

This is where the bale sat all winter. When it was first moved, and my daughter was raking up what was left behind to haul away, she noticed lots of worms. When I was transplanting the raspberries, I noticed plenty of worms, too. This is a good sign!

This area behind the house is very spotty as far as how the grass is going, with the area closest to the house having almost no grass at all. So we’re not too worried about the grass that was under the bale; we’ll need to find some shade hardy grass seed for the area, anyhow.

And here we have the mulched garden area for next year. In the foreground, to the left, is a big gooseberry bush that I hope will actually produce some berries this year. Next to it is a chokecherry, then where the raspberries were transplanted, a crab apple tree, and the compost. Which, I discovered as I tried to turn it, was used for garbage at some point, as I found pieces of food tray foam and the remains of a plastic tray that held transplants. Plus, lots of branches, still. This is where a pile of pruned branches and cut back trees were piled, then moved to the middle of the garden, before we moved here. The plan had been to burn them – yes, even when it was right on the compost pile, under that apple tree! – but we broke it down and moved it manually, last spring. We’ll have fire pit fuel for a long time, just from that one pile!

The next steps for the mulched garden area is to “frame” it with some of those logs we have from getting the trees cleared. The idea is to keep the straw from being dragged around with our feet as we work in it. Other material will be added to it, to build up the layers and improve that rock-hard soil. Covering it all with landscape cloth to prevent the grass and weeds from growing through the mulch would be good, if we can get enough to cover the whole area.

We’re getting a pretty decent sized garden out of this! Obviously, nothing close to what it was before, but we can amend and re-claim sections of it, little by little, over the years, while planning out where we want to put more permanent plantings.

Slowly but surely, we’ll get it done! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: it’s for the birds, and planning ahead

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Today, I continued my spring clean up around the yard. Now that we have yard equipment in the side of the garage we’d stored the foam insulation from around the house last summer, this year I’ve put them into the barn for storage.

I’d love to empty that barn so we can actually use it.

All in good time!

For now, I went back to the jasmine bed, mulched it with straw and began saturating the mulch with water. Though we did get rain recently, it wasn’t enough and everything is still bone dry.

While the hose was running there, I decided to move the unused bird bath from beside the storage house to the flower bed by the bird feeder. I found a block to use as a foundation and used a hoe to dig down and level a spot for it, first. Once the bird bath was in place, I moved the bird feeder stand to its summer location. Over the next month or so, the flowers should hide at least part of the bases.

That bird bath needs a thorough scrubbing and re-painting. We shall see if that becomes a job for this year, or next. Or maybe we’ll get a new one.

I’m hoping the water is far enough away from the platform feeder that falling seeds will not become a problem. When the lilac beside it is in full leaf, it should provide some shade. This should slowly become a nice little bird garden, I hope. :-)

The birds were quick to come back to the feeding station, but I haven’t seen them checking out the water, yet.

I also cleared out the bricks that I took out when rebuilding the jasmine bed. I have decided what I will be using them for.

This is the window to the old part basement, where we used to throw logs in for the wood burning furnace. The roof that keeps precipitation from leaking into the basement is on a hinge, but I haven’t decided on how I will get it to stay all the way up while I work. If I really need to, I can also remove it until the job is done. The cat kibble is under there to keep it out of the weather. There are chunks of brick and blown in leaves, but otherwise I think it’s just dirt. The “retaining walls” built up on the sides are slowly getting unstable.

The plan is to clear all that out and redo it with a brick “floor” under the window. Which will also be a good time to get the foam insulation out of the opening and put the metal mesh window over it for the summer. The wood frame for that is rotting, though, so I hope to scrounge up the materials to redo that as well.

For now, I’ve just brought over the bricks and filled the wheel barrow with water. Partly to get rid of any dirt and whatnot stuck to them, but also to wash away any ants or other leggy critters that might get transferred over with the bricks. I’d seen some tiny red ants when I dug the bricks out, and some were still there when I moved them to the wheel barrow, so I want to make sure to get rid of those or any eggs that might be attached. I might not get back to this until tomorrow, though. It’s already gotten very hot out there – we are at 23C right now – and this area is in full sun.

That reminds me. Time to check on the kitties in the sun room again!

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: wood chip pile and jasmine bed

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

I was able to tackle two areas in the East yard today. The first was planned; I decided to leave the remains of the wood chip pile where it was, and spread it out along Northwest corner of the spruce grove.

20190511.cleanup.mulch.1

Some of the pile got moved to the cross, as the pile at the other end didn’t have enough chips to extend that far. This will make mowing around this corner easier. Eventually, I will be clearing further into this area, but that will have its own natural mulch of leaves and spruce needles.

20190511.cleanup.mulch.2

This side is where they chipped the branches from the 2 big maples directly onto the ground. There is more cleanup needed here, plus that dead tree will need to come down at some point, so I wasn’t too particular about how much this area was spread out.

I have some thoughts about that dead spruce tree. I could have it cut flush with the ground. I could have the stump leveled at about a foot and a half high and use it as a seat, or put boards across it to turn it into a bench. I could have it cut a bit higher and put a table top on it, then add benches or seats around it. Or I could have it cut to a couple of feet, hollow it out and turn it into a planter.

Feel free to let me know what you think about these ideas in the comments. :-)

Once that was done, I finally got around to removing the foam insulation we put around the house in the fall. That got me eyeballing this odd little flower bed my mother made where she had transplanted a jasmine.

20190511.cleanup.jasminebed.1

This is what it looked like after removing the foam insulation; I had tossed the little plastic fence things in there, just to get them out of the way.

It’s falling apart and, when I try to water the jasmine by the steps, the water just runs downhill, past that piece of pressure treated wood and the miscellaneous pieces of brick. I had a couple of other pieces of pressure treated wood, as well as other bricks. I figured I could use both to build up a little retaining wall, bricks as a foundation for the wood, then more bricks on the wood to create a higher wall.

The first thing to do, of course, is take out the bricks that were already there.

20190511.cleanup.jasminebed.2

From where I was pulling things out, I get the impression that a bed was built up around the jasmine by the stairs when it was transplanted, and then it was extended when the second plant (I am not sure if it’s another jasmine; I don’t think so) was added.

I wanted a rectangular bed, since I was using the pieces of wood for walls, so I started digging it out to create level trenches to put them in.

20190511.cleanup.jasminebed.3

I kept finding more bricks!

20190511.cleanup.jasminebed.4

Using one of the pieces of wood as a guide, I began putting bricks into the trench as a foundation, leveling them off by eye. This is not intended to be permanent, so I’m not too worried about getting anything exact, but it will be there a few years, I’m sure, so I still want to get it solid.

After reaching the steps, I discovered a bit of a problem. Even using a block of concrete that was already there, the length of the bed was greater than the combined length of the wood I was using. I did have another piece that turned out to be just wide enough to fit, but…

20190511.cleanup.jasminebed.5

Yeeeeaaaahhhh…

No.

I mean, I could cut it to size with a chainsaw (now that I have one that works), but it’s quite rotten and…. nah. Not happy with it.

20190511.cleanup.jasminebed.6

So I moved the end in a few inches, instead.

Once the brick foundation and wood pieces were in place, I used the soil I’d taken out to fill in the gaps.

20190511.cleanup.jasminebed.7

Once that was done and stamped down, I realized I didn’t need to make it any higher.

I will likely need to bring in more soil for the outside of the bed, to tamp down and make sure the pieces of wood don’t just fall off their brick foundation. That can be done little by little, as needed, over the summer. I will also be mulching it with straw, when I start working on the bale.

So I now have to figure out what to do with the bricks. :-)

The Re-Farmer