One nice thing about no leaves on the lilacs this time of year; we can see the birds in them, better. :-)
Things are quite a bit warmer, as I post this photo; the chickadees look so much smaller, now that they don’t have to puff themselves up like this! :-)
The redpolls can really make a splash on an overcast day.
Just look at those little claws, grasping the lilac twigs.
They do seem to like those uppermost perches!
Just before I headed out to my mother’s to help her with some cooking, my husband starts laughing out loud in the living room, calling us over.
If you’ve seen his previous post, you know why!
I managed to get some photos on the DSLR, too.
Too funny!
What a handsome boy he is!
While he was going around the platform feeder, birds would start flying over, see him and abruptly change directions. It looked like they were dive bombing him!
He so wanted to get onto the hanging feeder, but it kept moving! :-D
I don’t know what he found to nibble on up there. We saw him chewing on things a few times.
I probably don’t want to know what he was eating.
He also was standing on his back legs, trying to climb even higher, but I wasn’t able to get photos.
While Corvo was busily entertaining us, Doom Guy and The Outsider also came over and hung out at the bottom of the planter. We couldn’t get pictures at the time, but my older daughter caught this one.
He’s here all the time, now, and seems to have made himself at home.
My daughter also got a photo, a few days ago, of one of the mystery cats that sometimes shows up.
This is one of two strange adult cats that have been showing up now and then.
He seems pretty chill. :-D
Beyond getting entertained by cats at home, I spent some time with my mother, doing some cooking that will be used by home care when they come by for meal assist later on. I noticed that another jar of the chili we made for her finally got used. She told me I should take it home, because it wasn’t “fresh”, and she needs to only eat “fresh” food, for her health.
Well, she eats plenty of stuff that isn’t “fresh” all the time, so I know that’s just something she came up with to excuse not eating the chili. I explained again to her that the reason I put them up in jars the way I did, was so that it last longer. It didn’t matter. Like the chicken my sister-in-law made for her, that ended up going to the cats, she’s simply decided it has gone bad, and that’s that.
So much of the fresh food that was prepared for her ended up being thrown out, because she wouldn’t eat it for some reason, and it actually did go bad. Such a waste.
I had a chance to show my mother some photos of the clean up I did along the fence line up to the gate, because of a concern she brought up when she phoned to ask me to come over. It seems “people” have been telling her that I was not just cutting down dead branches, but taking down living trees. Now, I’ve been keeping my mother in the loop about what I’m doing, including clearing trees from the fence line, because we will need access to it to repair it. Then she started talking about her lilacs. She had planted special lilacs by the gate. I told her on the phone that they’re still there, I just cleaned out the dead stuff and the poplars that were growing in the middle of them. She seemed taken aback when I mentioned poplars, but she was really upset that I had apparently cut down her special lilacs. I assured her I hadn’t, then asked who it was that was gossiping about us that she was listening to. I found out, and was not at all surprised it was the person that is the reason we have to lock our gates. *sigh* Ah, well.
So I showed her a picture of the area by the gate I had cleaned up. Including this one.
I don’t know what kind of lilacs those are (I wasn’t sure they were even lilacs; she has the usual purple lilacs on the other side of the gate).
It turns out, this wasn’t the gate she was talking about. She thought I had cut down her white lilacs.
These ones.
We cleaned up this area, months ago.
She has seen this area since I’ve cleaned it up, so she knew what I had done with it. But when she was told I was cutting by the “gate”, she thought of the gate into the yard, not the gate at the driveway.
I’ve made a point of keeping my mother in the loop of what we’ve been doing, showing her photos every chance I get, until she is strong enough to come and see for herself. Yet, all it takes is one person, who has no clue what we’ve done or what we are doing, to start gossiping, and she starts to panic.
So disappointing.
She saw the pictures, however, and I talked about the repairs to the fences that are needed, and the section with posts that will need to be replaces, and so on. She was happy with what she saw. It worked out well in the end. :-)
The Re-Farmer
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
It’s been another scorcher today, but I decided to work on the lilac row in the West yard. It was shady, and I made sure to have a water bottle with me to stay hydrated. By mid-afternoon, though, the sun had moved far enough that my shade was gone, and it was time to stop.
Most of the work was done around just one old lilac bush!
Here is the before picture, from when I first started working in this section.
Then after I’d cut away the false spirea (and the branch that fell on it after hitting the power line!).
Finally, here is how it looks now.
Lots of skinny little dead branches among the skinny little live branches! :-D Several dead main trunks were cleaned away. There was quite a lot of undergrowth behind the lilacs that needed to be cleared away, just to reach the lilacs themselves. In one lilac bush towards the left in the photo, I didn’t even have to cut the trunks. They just pulled out of the ground, or came out easily with a twist.
At some point, we’ll have to rake under there to clean up the many tiny dead twigs and branches in the leaves. For now, I am focusing on just getting the big stuff cleaned and cleared out, while slowly working my way down the row.
It’s much slower work with the lilacs, since it involves removing so many little things, compared to working on the big trees, that’s for sure!
The Re-Farmer
I have just finished working on the bushes in the west yard, near the fire pit, for the day. It’s not finished, but there is a storm moving in, and I did get the big stuff done.
So I have after pictures I can show you.
I actually went deeper in then I’d intended to. I started in the area around the linden and plum trees, to get more dead branches down, and everything was getting so hung up, I had to go further in, just to stop that from happening.
In the process, I found the lilacs that used to form a tunnel I’d crawled into as a child.
Yeah. Most of the lilacs are dead.
Between these and the tree directly behind the linden tree, there was just no way to avoid getting hung up on dead branches.
Here is the after, for this area.
Still lots to clean up, but the dead stuff is mostly gone. The remains of the lilacs might actually survive. They are very hardy.
Here is what it looked like around the linden tree, when I finished up.
Then I started working my way down the rows.
Here is the before of the first section;
I believe this is another crab apple tree, and it looks like it has some sort of fungal disease. I cut away lots. Here is it, now.
I freed up more plum trees in the process.
There are still signs of spotted and yellowing leaves higher up in the apple tree, but I got as much as I could reach for now.
While working in between the rows (there are three rows in total, in this location), if I had to choose between getting rid of a caragana and something else, or a false spirea and something else, I would choose the something else. This was not a difficult thing as, in the process, as the “something else” was usually a fruit tree. I also found a giant caragana in the back row. Unfortunately, the biggest trunk of it was dead and so rotten, I broke it off and yanked it out without having to cut anything.
In fact, I was doing that a lot, today. Yanking stuff out right by the roots, or breaking them and pulling them out.
The next section has a dead tree in it. Here is what it looked like before.
There was a lot of false spirea around the base of it. In clearing that out…
… I freed up some more plum trees.
That dead tree is going to need more than the little hand saw to take it down! So it stays, for now. Though I was able to just break a branch off of it.
Next was another crab apple tree.
This one has a lot of tiny apples starting to grow on it, but it also is starting to show spots on the leaves. :-(
Also, a lot more of it was dead then I thought!
I was taking out lots of dead branches, and even a couple of trunks.
Like this one.
This is probably the biggest thing I cleaned out today. It wasn’t until I cut it, then started dragging it out, that I realized how big it was, so much was hidden among the branches.
There is still lots to do here, including clearing out the section of false spirea at the end, so I can reach the dead lilacs behind it. It’s going to be a while before all the bits of dead branches and twigs on the ground are cleaned up, though I did take out the hidden ones I found by stepping on them.
All of this was about 3 hours of work, give or take.
When I was a kid and mowing the lawn in this area, when the crab apples at the end of the row were full of fruit, I would pick a whole bunch of them when I went under it, I would eat them as I mowed my circuit, then gather more when I got back. They were small, hard green apples, and very sour. I loved them!
We also had a pear tree next to this crab apple tree. It was another small, hard variety. My father told me about having this variety when he was growing up in Poland. They were too hard to eat as they were, but they would be gathered and buried under rocks in the fall. In the winter, they would freeze. Later, the rocks would be removed, and the frozen pears taken out. The freezing not only softened them, but made them sweet, as well.
I have no idea what happened to that tree.
I also wonder what happened to the mountain ash (aka rowan) that used to be here, about were the current diseased apple tree is. We had a few of them. They never got very big; nothing like the ones in the city we just moved from – I had no idea they got that big until we started living there! But they were beautiful, and produced masses of red berries.
A lot has changed over the years we’ve been away, but a surprising amount has stayed the same, too.
The Re-Farmer
Some bonus pictures for you today. :-)
My mother’s white roses by the sun room have been in full bloom for a while, and the one in the flower garden has caught up.
The bumble bees are loving them!
I’m not sure what type of bumble bee this one is. There are several types that are similar, and none of the pictures I was able to get show it well enough for me to say for sure.
This bee with the orange stripe is the Hunts Bumble Bee; also the Tricolored Bumble Bee.
Bumbles have always been my favorite bees. I remember finding a bumble bee’s nest by accident, when I was a kid. I was wandering around in the quarter section that my younger brother now lives on and noticed bees flying out of a hole in the ground. It was awesome, to sit there and watch them. Until then, I hadn’t known they had ground nests – I’d just never even thought of how they might nest before.
I wasn’t finding bees on the lilac bush at the time I took these, but WOW is that bush ever a prolific bloomer! It’s just a mass of purple, and I can even smell it while I sit in my office!
I’ve tried to find out what variety of lilac this is. I’ve found a variety that had similar flowers, but different leaves – and I’m pretty sure we do have that variety in another part of the yard! With these, I can’t be sure, but I think they might be Dwarf Korean lilacs.
Whatever they are, they are gorgeous!
The Re-Farmer
A bit of an experiment for the day.
Most of the photos I take are done with my phone’s camera; for the most part, I leave the DSLR on the tripod at the living room window, with our 70-300mm lens on it, to take pictures of the deer and birds. Things are quiet out there this time of year, so it’s been sitting idle.
This morning, I decided to grab it and get some flower photos. I put on an 18-55mm lens, then took a few more shots with the 70-300mm lens back on.
Much to my surprise, there is quite a noticeable difference in the pictures, with the big lens looking much better. Part of the surprise is that, with the big lens, I had to step quite far back from the subject, just for the camera to be able to focus (another time, I’ll break out the macro lens). My hands tend to shake, which can really affect photos taken with a bigger lens. So I fully expected the photos with the smaller lens to be clearer.
Here is a comparison. Aside from resizing the photos and adding the text and frame, they are untouched. No post processing.
This one was taken with the 18-55mm lens.
It’s certainly a pretty photo (that lilac tree is just a mass of flowers right now!). I would have preferred crisper focus; that softness was not deliberate, but the result of my hand shake. Still, the softness is nice, too.
Here is the one taken with the 70-300mm lens.
The focal points are much sharper. Even though I had to stand further back and zoom in more to get photos, it was unaffected by my hand shake. The 70-300mm is a newer, faster, lens than the 18-55mm that we have.
I’m happy with both, but it was interesting to see the differences.
The Re-Farmer
With all the yard work we’ve been doing over the past while, I’ve been really appreciating all the blooms.
The ornamental apple trees and plums are long since finished blooming, but now we have all sorts of flowers, scenting the air!
Right by the sun room door is this white rose. There are others in the flower garden, but they are not as prolific as this one is!
After clearing away the vines that had climbed up the lilacs by the people gate, I could finally see that they were blooming! I’m sure my mother told me, at some point, that these were white lilacs. Not that I can remember one way or the other! So it was a nice surprise. :-)
This is the huge lilac bush with teeny, tiny leaves and flowers, that I’d cleared a maple tree out of, earlier. I’ll need to go back to this garden and finish cleaning and clearing it. It, too, is inundated with vines! There are regular lilac bushes at the other end of this flower garden.
This is also technically the “front yard”, and the door in the middle of this side of the house is the front door. Which isn’t used. In fact, I still haven’t been able to open the screen door; it’s still stuck at the base, and I don’t want to force it and break something.
If all goes as planned, though, that is the door the ramp we hope to have added will be installed at. Depending on the dimensions, it may be necessary to remove this garden.
The post in the foreground had a bird feeder on it. I took it off after I turned away from pruning a branch and smacked right into it with my glasses, knocking them askew.
Thankfully, the base was designed to lift right off. It needs to be cleaned up and repaired, anyhow. :-)
In the big flower garden, off the old kitchen, is this honeysuckle bush, in full bloom! When talking to my mother about clearing this garden, one of the things she requested as to save this bush. It was being choked out by the invasive undergrowth!
I can see why she wants to keep it! :-)
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 