We had a nice rain today and, when it was down to a drizzle, the girls decided this was a good, safe time to get the fire pit going and burn down the pile of wood we had in it.

Then we had a cook out.  Because, why not?

While we were out, I could hear the sounds of cows mooing.  Not unusual, except that the sounds were much closer.

Like, really close.

This is taken from the gate beside the fire bit.

My mom rents most of the land out to someone, including the other quarter section.  He’s had his cows grazing there for a while, and now they are here.

While we had the fire going, even though it was still kind of raining, I couldn’t help but work on the area near the fire pit, cleaning up the area next to the log cabin that’s got a collapsed roof.  There were a lot of dead branches to clean up, plus saplings to trim away, etc.  More stuff for the fire pit! 🙂

The roof of the cabin is decidedly interesting.

That is a lot of nails.

This would be the remains of one of the trusses.

This board would have had shingles nailed to it.  They were all wooden shingles, most of which seem to be gone, now, leaving their nails behind.  !!

We also had a squirrel go onto the roof, where it seemed to find something to eat among the pieces of fallen roof!

My head just clears that truss piece, as I walked back and forth under it, making my daughters very nervous! 😀

As I was cleaning up along here, grabbing dead branches and dragging them out, the toe of my shoe caught on something under the decaying leaves along the wall, and I almost tripped.  Going back to pick up what I got caught on, I found it was a piece of board.

With nails in it.

Pointing down, thankfully.

I pulled more boards up out of the decayed leaves, also with nails in them, until the girls insisted I stop working in there.

Cleaning up under there is going to have to be a very careful job!

After we had our cook out, I stayed outside to burn more of the wood pile.  While there, I started to hear strange metal noises coming from the barn.

I knew exactly what it was.

I got my younger daughter to tend the fire for me, while I went to check on the cows.

Who, for some reason, decided they needed to graze around this collapsed shed, with all the sheets of metal lying about.  They were walking over the metal, and that’s the sound I was hearing.

They didn’t like me coming over and were already moving away when I took this picture.

The wire in the foreground is an electrified gate.  There are two of them the renter puts up before he brings the cows over, so they don’t go into the house area; this one by the barn, and another closer to where the cows were in top photo.

With the electrified wire there, I went through the barn to get to where the cows where.

I moved things around as best I could but I’d really rather fence this area off until we can get this stuff hauled away and cleaned up.  There’s little I can do about it.  Some of the metal bits and pieces could not be picked up and moved, so I used sheets of tin to cover them as much as I could, then adding whatever I could on top, to prevent the wind from blowing them away.

On the far side, I stepped on something that felt like a potential problem.  It turned out to be part of fence wire that was likely rolled up and left there.  Except it was there for so long, it was now covered in ground and I could not pull it up.  It was completely hidden in the grass, and a definite risk to hooves!  So I covered it with sheets of metal, then dragged a metal headboard out of the pile (I have no clue why anything like that would be there!) and tossed that on top, both to weight it down, and to make it more visible.

I really look forward to when we can start getting rid of piles like this.  It might be a few years before we get to the stuff on this side of the fence, though.

The Re-Farmer