My older daughter was a sweet heart and set up my mother’s concrete statue of Mary. We discussed a few possible locations, and decided on the space beside the mock orange, at the clothes line platform.
I had done some clean up there, then mulched the area, so she moved the mulch and tried to dig down to place the block.
She found a stump of a root, so she placed the block with one of the openings over the root, then stuffed the openings with straw mulch.
She also found…
A whole bunch of strange things buried under there.
Whenever I am able to go to the beach, I keep an eye out for interesting things. Especially for things for my daughter’s collection. We sometimes joke about her habit of picking up random things she finds on the ground! :-D
The last time I was at the beach, I made an unusual find that I thought was funny enough to take a picture to send to her.
After dropping one daughter off at work, my other daughter and I did a whole bunch of manual labour around the yard.
The first thing we did was haul away the stuff I’d clean up in the old wood pile area, including moving the pile of debris to the back of the outhouse, and sorting through the pile of found objects and garbage.
Yesterday, being Sunday, my daughter had a short shift and I was planning to stay in town again. I ended up meeting with my older brother and his wife, and we were able to spend a couple of wonderful hours together.
They are such great people!
At one point, we got to talking about how useful it would be for us to have a trailer, and how expensive new ones are. Apparently, there had been a small trailer by the garage, but it disappeared before we moved here.
Then they remembered.
We do still have a trailer.
Sort of.
They told me where it was, so when I did my evening rounds before it got dark, I went looking for it.
I was able to get about an hour of clean up in the old wood pile area. I made sure to check the temperature before I headed out, and it was only 22C. Thank God it wasn’t any hotter, because even that felt way too hot.
Y’know, I’ve always wanted to travel, and go vacation on some tropical island. I still want to do that, but I am realizing that I’d just die in the heat! :-D
Last summer, while going around the property with my older brother, we had gone into an area filled with rocks and blocks of concrete and all sorts of bushes growing among them. My brother remembered that there were hazelnut bushes there. We didn’t find any, but I decided to check it out again, in case something managed to grow this year.
One of the things we found in the spruce grove was a bench made by nailing a board across 2 logs.
It was left where it was, but while doing my rounds this morning, I noticed something missing…
The board was off.
I’m not sure what knocked it off. The outside cats did sometimes sit on it, so it’s entirely possible some animal bumped it and finally knocked it off.
You can see how the rot was the worst, where wood contacted wood. One nail was still in a log (bottom of the picture), while a second nail at the other end (in the board, top of the picture) was rusted away to almost nothing; just a tall, thin bit of metal I would not have recognized as the remains of a nail at all, had I not been looking for it.
I cleared away the board and the nails, but didn’t bother moving the logs, yet.
When the spruce grove is finally cleaned up, I do want to set up a bench or two. Something make out of materials that won’t rot like this! :-)
Today, my daughter and I got some progress done on the old garden area that we mulched with straw this spring.
We didn’t put anything under it, so things did start growing through it.
This is taken from one corner, next to the gooseberry bush and raspberries.
It looks a lot worse than it is. Partly because some of the weeds are so big, they take up more space on the surface than what they take up through the mulch. Partly because the mulch itself had seeds in it, and we’ve got oats growing in there, now.
We wanted to cover it, but first, we needed to kill this stuff.
Yes, we used herbicide on it. No, I’m not the least bit bothered by that.
Before we started, we tried to set up a hose to wash up later – and to spray any kittens who might come too close.
I’ve had some problems with the hoses. We’re down to two again, despite my repairs to them. There is, however, a garden tap. Basically, it’s a tap at the garden with a pipe running to the house, then a section of hose that can be screwed on to the water tap at the rear of the house. We’d never needed to test it out last year, so this was a good time to do it!
Yeah. That’s water spraying out of the ground, next to one of the wood piles.
I tried turning on the garden tap itself. Some water did start to come out, which turned really brown, then stopped altogether.
So I tried hooking up a pair of shorter hoses to the house tap, instead. One of them was spraying like crazy at the tap. When I switched to the other hose, it was fine.
So… we were down to one hose. *sigh*
While my daughter sprayed the garden, I worked on taking the pieces of wire that sewed the two sheets of black tarp together, out.
There was quite a lot of it. Some of the pieces were quite long and were done in a running stitch. On one section, there were two pieces used to created a double running stitch!
Getting it out was a challenge.
The kittens were very interested in the tarps!
After I got the wire out – and got scissors to cut away the fraying pieces that were catching on everything, I was able to spread them both out.
When the spraying was done, we left this area for a while, and I went back to working on cleaning around the old wood pile. After hauling another wheel barrow load to the pile near the burn barrel, I took a side trip into the barn, where I’d seen some tarps. The two black tarps are big, but not big enough!
While moving things to be able to access on of the tarps. I took a closer look at the old hoses that were in the way, and decided to try one of them out.
Much to my shock, it works just fine! No leaks or cracks, even though it’s really stiff from being in the barn for who knows how long.
So, we are back to two hoses. :-D
Later, my daughter and I spread the two black tarps over as much of the mulched area we could cover, while still making sure there is overlap. Then we checked out the two rolled up tarps I’d found in the barn.
One turned out to be an insulated tarp. We weren’t going to use that, even if it weren’t too small. We’ll save it for something else.
It turned out to be really huge!
Plus, it has grommets, so we can use tent pegs to pin it down.
We started to do that, but the ground is so hard, we actually bent some of the pegs.
Then, we had a visitor. A mom and her daughters came to look at the kittens to potentially adopt one. They stayed and played with the kittens, and took some pictures, for quite a while. I learned they got our phone number from the vet in town.
I had gone to the vet this morning, with updated pictures of the kittens, and little write-ups about each one, printed out. This family had actually phoned this clinic, asking about kittens, since they are also a shelter, and were given our number.
They will think about which one they will take and get back to us in about a week.
At least I hope so. I’d hate to get ghosted again. :-(
By the time they left, all the aches and pains were kicking in, and I had definitely overdone it on my broken toe, so I didn’t go back to get pictures of the tarps on the garden area, nor get back to working on the wood pile area.
It’ll be at least a day before I get back to it, since we’ll be doing our monthly shop in the city tomorrow. I’ll also be picking up a 5 kilo bucket of liquid honey I ordered yesterday, before we head out. My daughter is wanting to try her hand at making mead. :-)
Until then, it’s time to shower off the bus spray and herbicide, pain killer up and go to bed early!
I didn’t get as much done cleaning up in the old wood pile as I’d hoped, but a little is better than none!
This is most of the area I focused on today. I got more old pallets out, and a bit more rotten wood. For the most part, it’s too rotten to even pick up, but I’m hoping to at least get out the pieces with nails. I also cleared out some saplings that were in the wood pile my sister and her husband had made in the big garden, the summer before we moved out.
Most of the pile in the foreground is what I’d move there last year. I had intended to find uses for it, but I have access to better types of wood than I knew of back then, so I will be adding it to the chipping pile. I’ve got cherry wood set aside, and I have more than enough to work on, so any more cherry I take down is going to the chipping pile, too. There is still some apple wood I’d set aside by the old dog house. I’ll see what condition it’s in as I move it, before I make any decisions about it.
The pile of debris is growing, and I’m at a loss as to what to do with it. With the possibility of nails being in there, I can’t compost it, but there is so much soil in there, I just don’t think it’ll burn well.
I think, after I clean up more around the outhouse, I’ll spread it in the back. There is an access to the pit under the outhouse there, so it can be emptied as needed, so it should be kept open and clear. It’s not an area that will get traffic, to the risks of people finding nails is lower, and we certainly won’t be gardening or anything back there.
That’s one possibility, anyhow.
I did find a few things while moving pallets out.
A bent piece of sheet metal, two electrical insulators, and a perfectly intact tea cup – not even a chip on it! – buried under the pallet fence.
Weird!
In between working on this, we got some progress on the garden area we mulched, and had some company, but I will write about that in my next post. :-)
The Re-Farmer 