Just a bit about some of the clean up we did yesterday, since I didn’t get back to the computer until much later.
The girls were able to get the sheets of metal roofing that blew off the old garden shed out and strap them back on, but weren’t able to screw them into place. We don’t really have a way to reach the top. Too much stuff around the building. Will have to get back to it another time.
They also picked up some of the fallen branches around the yard. When I went out again later, I picked up some more. There are still a few areas that are are so wet, we’re not trying to get into them to do any cleanup yet.
The main thing I’m happy to have finally gotten to, was cleaning up that piece of tree that fell on the canopy tent. With the BBQ moved away, it was easier to get at, and the picnic table made a convenient saw horse. I was able to use the mini-chainsaw to cut most of it to size, then used a buck saw on the rest. I didn’t fill like dragging an extension cord across the wet lawn to use the electric chainsaw.
I cut it to fire pit lengths, and the whole thing fit into the wheel barrow, except for the little branches that went onto one of the branch piles. I kept the bark the fell off, though. The inner bark in particular is good for starting fires.
You can see the hole in the ground from the tent leg that got driven in when the piece of tree fell on it.
This was some nice maple wood, so it went into a pile we’ve got that’s almost all maple and apple wood we’ve been cleaning up, to use in cooking fires.
We’re looking forward to the winds dying down so we get get the fire pit going and finally test out that cast iron Dutch oven. We should get some excellent cooking coals out of this. Can’t let it go to waste! :-)
As much as I look forward to the winds dying down, they are certainly helping dry things out. Even the water seeping into the old basement is visibly less, for all that we still got rain. Still, I want to get the platform set up again, so we can go back to hardening off our transplants. Theoretically, we can just put them on the ground, or even just on the platform bed frame, but they’d be in reach of the groundhogs if we did that. I’ve been seeing them running around in the yard, and on the garage cam live feed. I imagine there will soon be little ones, and hungry mamas would make short work of our transplants.
This morning, I decided to finish my mourning rounds by finally digging out the BBQ, so I could put the new cover on it. I was waiting for a slightly cooler day, when things wouldn’t be melting while I worked.
Though it was still very much a “rubber boot” morning!
This is the cat path from the kibble house to the storage house. The cats made the paths you see on the left with their muddy little feet, while the path veering right goes to the fire pit.
As you can see, there is a low spot right here, filled with snowmelt. I had to slog through it several times while I was working this morning!
With the melt-thaw happening over the last while, the top of the snow has formed a pretty hefty crust. In fact, this morning I spotted our piebald deer through the bathroom window, on the far side of the old kitchen garden, walking on top of the snow. Not only did the snow hold her weight, but when I walked past the area later, I couldn’t even see tracks.
As you can imagine, the ice chipper got a good workout while I was digging, this morning!
I cleared a path along the side of the collapsed tent, removed hard packed snow that was on top of the remains of the canopy, then had to cut away parts of the torn canopy to free the BBQ. Unfortunately, I still had to deal with the piece of tree that had broken the tent in the first place.
That out-of-focus branch tip in the foreground is part of the branch that you see stretching up and out of frame at the top.
I had to break off that branch in pieces to be able to access the back of the BBQ and the other corner of the tent. On the plus side, since the branch was sticking up into the air like that, the pieces are very dry. They’ll be great for the fire pit.
This was the main problem. One of the canopy supports was across the side element on the BBQ. There had actually been a folded up camp chair leaning against it. There’s a little pillow attached, and it actually protected the BBQ. The little bit of scuffing you can see under the canopy support happened just this morning, after I moved the camp chair out.
I couldn’t get that piece off the BBQ. It wouldn’t even break for me, as others did. All it would do is slide back and forth, but there was still too much weight from the canopy remains, and the snow trapped in it, to lift it.
There was a possible solution, though. We had dropped the tent legs as low as they could go, to cover and protect the picnic table and BBQ, making sure it was thoroughly pegged down with the support ropes, to make sure it wouldn’t blow away. What I could do was remove the canopy from the frame as much as possible, then raise the legs up to the first notch.
It took a while – and more digging to reach – but I managed to get three of the legs raised to the next highest position.
Which helped to a certain extent, but that fourth leg by the broken piece of tree would not budge.
I had forgotten just how big it was! The ice chipper is right at the largest end of the piece. Once I figured out where the end was, I could use the ice chipper handle to lever the branch loose, so it was no longer frozen to the ground. It was leaning right against the leg, pushing it over.
As much as I levered and wiggled the whole thing around, it still wouldn’t move off the leg.
There had to be a reason I couldn’t see.
Yup. Here it is.
There was a large branch, hidden in the snow, that I had been trying to roll it against! I stabbed along the length of it with the ice chipper until I found it’s end.
I was not about to dig all that out.
I grabbed a hatchet, instead. I didn’t need to even cut all the way through. Just enough that it would break, and I could finally clear it from the leg.
Which worked, but then I discovered another problem. The leg still wouldn’t move.
I chipped away around it. What you’re looking at is ground level. When the tree fell on the canopy, it drove the leg into the soil. Which is amazing, considering the legs have a flat plate on the bottom, so they can be pegged to the ground. Which they are. So the bottom of that leg, and the base of the part that slides up to raise the height of the tent, are frozen into the ground.
Well, crud.
I ended up having to break as many parts of the canopy frame as I could, to finally be able to clear the BBQ enough to cover it.
Which I finally did!
Then I used some of the heavy blocks of snow that were on the torn canopy to weigh down the bottom edges.
The frame is a mess, but it can’t be removed until the ground thaws out enough.
I like that the new cover for the BBQ has grommets on it. We’ll be able to peg it to the ground in between uses, so the wind won’t tear it off.
The branch pieces were set aside on the snow near the fire pit. Maple will make a nice cooking fire.
Then, since I was there anyhow, I dug a path from the fire pit to the wood pile.
Normally, I’d say we can use the fire pit now, and have ourselves a cookout if we want, but with that big puddle in the path, I think it’ll wait a bit longer. We don’t all have rubber boots.
For now, I’m just happy to have the new cover on the BBQ.
As long as we don’t get any more pieces of tree falling on it, now that there’s no longer the tent frame to protect it!
Happy Three King’s Day! Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, which is our last day of Christmas. After today, we start taking down our decorations. :-)
It was another mild day today, so when I finished my rounds this morning, I decided to go ahead and dig out the fire pit.
I considered breaking out Spewie, our little electric snow blower, but for the amount of snow we have, I figured it would be easier to just shovel it!
I shoved the snow off what I’m using for a cover, but didn’t bother moving it, yet.
On our warm days, the snow melted enough to create a layer of ice on the surface of the picnic table. We’ll be staying at these mild temperatures for a while, so now that it’s uncovered it should melt away on its own.
I cleared a path to the organized wood pile. That cover did not need to have snow removed from it. I didn’t bother shoveling to the big pile of branches. The little pile has kindling and should be enough for our needs. We may not use the fire pit at all, but at least now we have the option! :-)
I made sure to dig the path to the fire pit wide enough for my husband’s walker, should he feel well enough to join us if we do a cookout.
I was being watched the whole time!
You can see the cats’ favorite way to get under the storage house. The path that goes around the back branches off to a partially broken window they also like to use, as well as through the trees to the path they’ve made to the storage building outside the yard. Well worn little footy paths in the snow! :-)
I also had to dig a wider path around the kibble house. There is a lot of overhang on the roof that is working quite well for the cats, but not so well for a human with a walker! :-D
While clearing around the cat shelter and kibble house, I found this.
It’s a frozen little cat treat! :-D Next to the slab of ice that slid off the “porch” roof of the cat shelter.
Rolando Moon looks like she’s thinking of that delicious frozen treat! :-D
So we will now be able to easily get at the fire pit if we feel like having a cook out, or just a nice fire. I still like the idea of using a fire to thaw the ground out, so we can set up the fire pit grill my brother and his wife got for us!
We do have the BBQ they have us, and the propane tanks does have fuel in it, but I am much more interested in the fire pit, instead! :-D
In other things, I was able to get through to the clinic to make an appointment with my doctor about my breathing issues. After hearing the messages about restrictions before it ever got to a human, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make an appointment at all. The messages say nothing about medical exemptions to mask wearing, of course. Which sucks, since not being able to breathe properly is why I need to see a doctor in the first place. I was able to make a telephone appointment for Friday afternoon, and then it will be up to my doctor to decide if I should come in or not. I made an appointment for my daughter for right after mine, so when he’s done with me, I can just hand the phone over to her. This is the first doctor’s appointment either of our daughters have had since we moved. After seeing how difficult it has been for my husband and I to get good medical care, they have developed a strong distrust of doctors. I can’t say I blame them, either.
But that is done. We shall see what the doctor has to say when the time comes. I am not expecting much of anything, to be honest. No one is getting real health care right now, and our premier has just put us under another 30 days of house arrest, even has many of our politicians have been caught ignoring those restrictions and have gone traveling to tropical places, visiting with their friends and family, and then pretending to be sorry after getting caught.
Thankfully, we are out here in the boonies, and I get to focus on more pleasant things. Right now, I’m working on a project to help me be organized about our gardening, including keeping track of what seeds to start indoors and when.
Yesterday, things were a bit cooler and finally nice enough to start a fire in the fire pit!
I’ve been putting small branches and the invasive vines I’ve pulled up into there since last summer, so it felt good to finally burn that stuff away!
While I was at it, I decided to clean up the bricks around the fire pit that the skunks revealed while digging for grubs.
Knowing that these were the glazed bricks we’ve got all over the place under there, I decided to use the sidewalk ice scraping tool. Just a flat blade that would slide across the surface, and cut away the root mats at the same time.
It worked remarkably well!
In the above photo, I’d finished uncovering the bricks all the way around.
There was some seriously thick root mats covering some of them!
The next step was to hose them down with water, including using the jet to pressure wash some of the dirt out from between the bricks, and between the bricks and the fire pit ring.
Where the water pooled showed me the most uneven areas of the brick ring.
What I will eventually be doing is taking them out completely, leveling the base off as best I can, then putting them back.
Ideally, I’d be adding a layer of gravel under there, first.
I am seriously considering taking the wagon and a shovel out to the old gravel pit to see what I can salvage out of there!
Until then, we make do.
My next step was to use break up the ridge of soil and root mats around the ring some more.
Every now and then, I’d find a small rock, but then I hit was seemed to be a much larger rock.
A strangely flat and smooth rock.
I found another brick!
For a moment, I thought maybe there was a second ring of bricks, but the angle of it was too random for that.
Somehow, a single brick got left to one side, and got buried with the others.
The ones around the fire pit getting buried makes sense, but how does a lone brick on the side get left there long enough to be buried, too? Did no one try to mow there, before it got covered? Did people using the fire pit (and I know it did get used) simply walk around it until it disappeared, along with the other bricks?
So very strange!
I set it aside with another brick like it, that I’d found under some nearby maple trees. :-D
(These glazed bricks have been around for as long as I can remember. I have no idea where they came from, but they would be at least 50 years old, and probably quite a few years older. While I intend to take them out of the various areas they are in now, to replace them with what should be there instead (like infill around the house!), these are going to be kept and repurposed. They’re too slippery to use as a “floor” for anything (which is probably what they were salvaged from originally), but I think they would be great on walls or something, at some point.)
Once I broke up the ridge, I used the metal blade on the scraper to push the soil away, to try and level things a bit more.
The grills in the fire pit, btw, are the racks from our old oven. After burning away what was already in the pit, I started working on the pile of branches by the collapsing log cabin. When a solid bed of coals was formed, I put the oven racks in it, then built the fire up again on top, to burn away any grease or whatever that got on them while being used. We basically didn’t bother to clean the oven when we knew we needed to replace it fairly soon. It did have a self-cleaning function, but we didn’t feel it was safe to use. With elements on the stove sparking, we didn’t want to find out if anything electrical would give out in the oven, too!
So I used the fire pit to get the cruddy bits off.
Shortly after this, my daughter joined me, and we built the fire up once again, to get rid of more of the branch pile.
I also used a metal rake to spread the soil out more, then took the hose to it, to break up the clumps. The water no longer pools at the bricks. :-)
After a while, my daughter took out the oven racks and set them aside to be hosed off, later.
The next thing I want to do is empty the fire pit of ashes, which will be spread over a garden area or two.
Once it is cleaned out, I want to add some cinder blocks or bricks into the pit. They will be there to hold one or both oven racks. This way, if we wanted to, we could use pots and pans for cooking over the coals. I do have a campfire rack, but it’s meant to put food on directly to cook, not hold the weight of cooking utensils. The oven racks and bricks will open up more possibilities for what we can do on our fire pit. :-)
While I was working on uncovering the fire pit ring, I had help.
Not the most useful kind of help!
More like the “pay attention to me or I’ll trip you” kind of help! :-D
Eventually, he got tired of trying to make me pick him up and went for a nap. :-)
Such a cutie!
He would make such a loving indoor cat, but we’ve had no luck in adopting him or Creamsicle out. :-(
Lately, Potato Beetle and Creamsicle have perfected the art of rubbing against our legs WHILE we are walking, somehow managing to maintain contact and pressure even as we pull our legs away.
Such determined creatures!
Also, Potato seems to like my new shoes. Maybe that’s it. He’s happy I no longer have these.
My left shoe had actually blown out like the one on the right, but I’d used Gorilla Super Glue on it. Amazingly, it is still holding! The other shoe was only coming loose at the toe tip, so I glued that – only to have the sides blow out, soon after! The tip managed to hold on for days longer.
I’m not a shoe person. It’s so hard for me to find shoes that accommodate my feet, I don’t bother. I have one pair of regular shoes. Maybe a pair of sandals, too, if I can find them. Not this time of year, apparently. :-/
Women’s shoes don’t fit me, at all. I can wear extra wide men’s shoes, but to get the right width, I go with a size that’s a fair bit longer than my feet. Which is why I keep catching the toes of my shoes on things. :-D It means my shoes wear out on the sides faster, as my feet bend in a different area than the shoes are designed for. It doesn’t matter if they are cheapies, or if I spring for a higher end shoe. By the end of a year, all my shoes end up looking like this!
While my daughters and I were in the city, my darling husband finally got through to our internet provider and had a little chat with them.
We had internet soon after.
The problem is still not solved, though. It’s just a make-do until a tech comes out to check the secondary account’s satellite disk.
When they first brought this up with my husband, they said it would cost us $125, just to have someone come out.
By the time he was done with them, that fee was waived!
Also, we are back to using our primary account for now, and we will NOT be charged double the price per gig. However, anything we do use is that much more on our bill, so we will be rationing our data for a lot of things.
While we do have a signal with this dish, it is not the same as it was, before all these problems started, just a few days ago. Data transfer speeds are insanely slow, and it can take several attempts just to get a web page to load. WordPress has always been troublesome, but it took me about 8 minutes just to get the editor loaded so I could write this post!
Still, it should mean I can catch up on posts with images. I always resize the images into smaller file sizes, so they don’t take up much data. The following photos all uploaded faster than I could get the editor to load!
So these go back a couple of days. :-)
In the last while, we have been regularly putting the kittens and Beep Beep in the basement for the night, then my husband is usually the one who opens the door for them in the mornings. So we still have cat food both upstairs and down.
The cats, of course, always act as though they’re starving, even though there’s plenty of food in the upstairs bowls. What they’re really begging for is wet cat food, and they get that only once a day. The dry kibble is always available.
Since the adults cats now go into the basement regularly, they’re also going for the kittens’ food bowls, so I added larger tin, so that the kittens could still get at some.
Just look at those buggers! They’re crowing around the smaller containers, like they haven’t eaten in a week!
We have been mixing kitten kibble in with the adult kibble. I think the adult cats like the kitten kibble better! :-D
While I was tending to the kitties that day, it was also the day to check the temperature and humidity in the root cellar. While there, I noticed something I had forgotten about.
The two bottles of our most recent batch of mead!
We were supposed to taste test a bottle after different lengths of time. One of them was supposed to be opened up on my birthday. I completely forgot about it!
At some point, I’ll grab one and bring it up for a taste test. :-)
While checking the garden plots, I discovered something unfortunate.
All three beds of beets had quite a lot of their greens missing. It seems we had a deer visiting! She especially seemed to like this Baldor variety.
In the squash bed, I had a more pleasant surprise.
The largest squash plants that I thought were green zucchini turned out to be…
… sunburst squash!
From the number of buds we’re seeing, it looks like we’ll have quite a lot of them over the summer, too. :-)
I had one last surprise that morning.
While checking the usual spots for fallen branches, I went by the fire pit, which hasn’t been used in over a year. I noticed the skunks had been digging in the dirt, right beside it, and something in the dirt caught my eye.
That white you see?
That’s a glazed brick. One of the many we have all over the place.
Looking around at other spots the skunks had dug up, I saw signs of more.
The fire pit has a ring of bricks around it, completely buried.
It must have taken years for them to be covered by that much soil!
With no fire bans right now, we can actually use our fire pit, and uncovering the bricks will be a good thing to get done, too.
I am really looking forward to being able to do cook outs again!
I had some daylight left, so I decided to see how far I could get on another thing on my to-do list before winter.
Some clean up of the pile of larger wood, by the fire pit.
We may not have been able to use the fire pit over the summer, due to fire bans and unsafe conditions, but we should be able to use it in the winter. :-)
Among the dead trees I cut down, leaving tall stumps until I can come back with a chain saw, there are three spruce stumps that form a triangle.
I decided to take advantage of that.
My reciprocating saw got quite a workout today! I was able to cut to fire pit size, and move the enter pile of larger wood, and even get some larger pieces in the “kindling” pile!
The disturbed area by the tree with the tire around its base is where the pile was.
The tall stumps worked well to keep the stacked wood in place. We can also use them when we put a tarp over the wood. We can even nail it in place, so the wind won’t blow it away.
Yeah, we plan to get cheap tarps. Actually, there is at least one I saw in the barn that we can dig out and see if it is still usable.
Well, I’m glad my brother has been as dedicated to taking in-progress photos as I have become! After emailing him about what happened to the snow blower, he was able to email me back a photo of exactly where the fuel line was supposed to go (something I could not really see without taking the cover off, but could find by feel). He told me I should be able to push it in, and confirmed that it was solidly in place, when he attached the fuel line to the carburetor. It seems to have vibrated itself out, which really shouldn’t happen.
I was able to head out and work on the fire pit area, including getting a fire going to clear the pit out for a future cook out.
I ended up being out there for about 2 hours!
After getting as much snow out of it as I could with it full of wood, I made use of the fire starter cubes I picked up while in town earlier. I figured it was the most efficient way to get a fire going, with all that snow.
This evening, I decided to be methodical about clearing the west yard trees, and get right into the fence line.
It was a lot more work than I expected!
This is what it looked like when I left it last time.
I didn’t get photos from this angle today, but if you look behind the dead trees I cut down, that’s the area I focused on.
I had not really intended to start on the fence line on this side yet, but the mess was starting to get to me.
I am using the row of elm trees as my guide line for clearing the fence. Anything between where those trees are and the fence line will be taken out. This will leave a walkable path to access the fence.
I started at the gate post and made a discovery.
There’s two of them.
From what I can figure out, as the older gate post started to become unstable, a second post as added, and new and old were tied together with a loop of barbed wire.
It was most likely a temporary fix that ended up a permanent one.
The problem is…
Both posts are rotten and broken at the bottom.
The hedge that had grown into the fence was pretty much the only thing holding it up.
I don’t really want to replace this fence. I’d rather take it out completely. I am wanting to install new fencing that will include both driveways, instead. So for now, this old fence will remain for as long as it holds up.
As I worked down the line, I also discovered that there’s not just two gate posts, but two fences! Somewhere along the way, the old barbed wire fence got a mesh wire fence added with it. Then other cable type wire was also added, along the bottom. You can see part of it at the bottom of one of the gate posts, above.
This made clearing away the lilacs more challenging, because it was woven through both the barbed and mesh wire. For many of them, I had to cut them at least twice, so I could get the pieces out of the fence.
A surprising amount of the lilac was already dead. Most of the living lilac is on the other side of the fence. Which I will leave for now. It’s keeping the fence from falling over.
In the end, it took me almost two hours to clear barely 8 feet of fence line!
I’m also clearing in between and around the lilac and caragana that is in line with the row of elm trees. That included taking down a dead lilac that was a thick as a tree!
I’m going to have to change up when I work in the yard. We’re getting heat wave weather warnings for the next week. I like to do the work in the afternoon or evening, but the hottest part of the day tends to be around 5pm. It’s almost 9pm as I write this, and we’re still at 25C, with a “feels like 29C”. I’m going to have to start working on this stuff in the morning, instead, when it’s cooler, because by afternoon, it’s supposed to reach 29C, and feel like 34C, but be only 18C in the morning.
I am not a morning person. :-D
Well, if I’m driving my daughter to her shifts that start at 8 or 9am anyway, it will work out for me to do yard work when I get back in the morning, instead of after I pick her up at 4 or 5pm.
She has a road test booked in September. She’ll be able to drive herself to work, if we don’t need the van for something else.
It is becoming increasingly clear we are going to need a second vehicle for the girls. That and our utter dependency on having a vehicle makes me extra paranoid about having only one. It’s not like there are any buses we could use instead, or anything is close enough to walk to! We went about a month not driving our van until we had the money to replace the fuel pump, to avoid causing more damage (which our mechanic really appreciated), and that was enough for us!
At least we’ve finally reached a point where we are caught up. As of this month, we have no expenses left related to our move. Yay! It only took us 9 months. :-/ Starting next month, we can start diverting money to a contingency fund to pay for things like getting the trees cleared from the power lines and roof in the fall, or towards getting a second bathroom installed. Or unexpected emergencies, like the van breaking down!
The problem is, there are SO many things that need work around the house and yard, it will be hard to prioritize. We had hoped to get the second bathroom installed this summer. It’s high on the priority list, but clearing the trees became the higher priority since… well… we’d really like to NOT have our roof damaged or have branches knock out our power lines.
Today, I went back to around the west side of the maple grove to continue cleaning up. This time, however, I focused on the area nearest the fire pit and gate. This area seemed to have been mostly spruces, though only a few have survived.
Let’s look at the before pictures.
This spruce tree is right behind one of our piles of wood for the fire pit. It’s doing rather well, though as with most spruces, the lowest branches on the trunk were dead and hidden by the ones above.
Right at the wood pile is an elm tree that we thought was dead, but after we finally got some decent rain, suddenly shot out some green. It is still mostly dead, but we’ll be leaving it for now.
Most of the spruces behind it are completely dead. Only two are still alive, plus one scrawny little thing that I’m hoping will survive now that I’ve cleared away the dead stuff.
I went further under the trees for these next photos.
Going through here, looking at all the dead wood, all I could think of was “that’s a fire hazard, that’s a fire hazard, that’s a fire hazard…”
I started by pruning the spruce in the top photo and working my way in a bit, then went to taking down the two bigger dead spruces. These ones have been making a mess of my nerves, every time we used the fire pit and a breeze blew towards them!
I took the bigger one down first, because it was easier to get at.
When it finally started to drop, it got hung up on the trees on the other side of the gate. The cut part also just stayed on the trunk. I finally grabbed a piece of wood from the log pile and swung it like a baseball bat against the trunk.
It still just dropped straight down, being held up by the other trees.
I finally got it to fall, though!
After this, I cut the tree up into small sections so I could move it and work on the next one.
Which also got stuck and needed whacking.
It, too, was being held up by the trees on the other side of the gate.
My older daughter happened to come out to ask me something, so she got to do the whacking…
And also got it down from the other trees.
After this, I took down the two smaller dead spruces.
Then I realized I had completely blocked the gate, so the smaller stuff I would have taken to the pile outside the yard with a wheel barrow had to wait.
Here are the after pictures.
In the foreground is the spruce from the top photo. As I cleaned up after taking down the dead spruces, including cutting back some spreading lilac and caragana, I kept finding more and more dead stuff, buried under dead leaves and grass, and especially along the fence line.
I’m leaving the stumps of the trees I took down for now. You can see the pruned trunks of the two remaining spruces here; the skinnier one has just a few live branches at the top. There are still dead branches I want to prune away, but for those, I’ll need the extended pruner, so it will wait for now.
There’s still lots to clear out of here but, at this point, the heat was becoming and issue and I was getting ready to head inside.
The remains of the 4 dead spruces I took down, plus some of the larger dead pieces I dragged out while cleaning up. Lots of dead caragana and lilac hidden among the living. It seemed every time I thought I was done, I kept finding more and more to pull out!
I was just taking these last photos when my daughters came out to haul it all out of the yard for me.
They are so awesome!
Though it’s no where near done, the difference is still pretty amazing.
The Re-Farmer 