A last post about my walkabout in our yard.

The spruce grove next to the house might be what’s preventing us from being able to get more stable internet (with better data plans!), but it sure is beautiful.

This view is from the end of our garden near the road to our driveway.  As you can see, there are quite a lot of downed trees in there.  Quite a few dead trees that we will eventually need to cut down, too.

Well, we’ll have plenty of wood for our fire pit, when the time comes!

In a corner of the yard, near the fire pit, is one of several old log cabins on the property.  The wall facing into the yard has vertical boards for siding.

There used to be a gooseberry bush at the opposite corner.  I used to love picking the juicy, tart green berries and eat them when I was a child.

Years later, I discovered that they were supposed to be eaten after they turned red and soft.  I’d always thought that was when they’d gone bad, because they tasted so bland. :-D

I don’t know what happened to that gooseberry bush.  It’s not there anymore, and other trees are growing near where it was.

This wall here faces what used to be an open area where my late brother had his “bike shop.”  There were all sorts of bike parts and pieces that he would use to cobble bikes together.

Quite a lot of those parts and pieces seem to still be there, rusting away.

I’ve read that this type of corner joining for log buildings is a style mostly unique to our region.

This old shed was used for storage for as long as I can remember.  I don’t know what its original purpose was.

This is part of the inside.  The roof is collapsing on both sides.  The rafters are full of all sorts of things.  I have no idea what that machine is, but it looks like it runs the length of the building.

The stuff jammed into there is amazing.  An old wringer washer.  An electric stove.  What looks like a very, very old washer and drier set.  Pieces of antenna.  Head and foot boards.  Old window frames.  A bike that I think used to be ours.  Tires.

I don’t think anything in there is salvageable.  It all just got shoved in there and forgotten about.

This old log building looks to be in better shape.

That’s a relative statement.

This is actually outside the fenced part of our yard, but is still part of the larger yard that includes the barn and various outbuildings (and cars, trucks, tractors, hay rakes, fuel tanks… ).  Before my father bought the property, this was the “summer kitchen.”  There was a wood stove and the cooking and canning would be done in here in the summer, rather than in the main house, so the house wouldn’t get overheated.  I imagine it reduced the risk of burning the house down, too. :-/

We used it as a chicken coop.  There was a walled in area around two sides of the building for a chicken run, though we would let them out during the day in the summer.

I briefly considered going over to look inside.

I changed my mind.

I just didn’t feel like working my way through the barrier of burs!

We’re back in the yard, next to the house again.

My late brother built this bird house for my mother, and it can be seen from our dining room window.  My mother is a strongly religious person, so he built it in the shape of a church.

It still gets used by birds every year.  I am hoping that we will have a chance to take it down and fix it up this year.  Maybe prune back some of the branches around the post, too.  Once we have a better idea of what’s actually growing there.  It’s in what was one of my mother’s many little flower gardens around the yard, but it seems to be all bushes now.

What I would love to do is have a deck built along this side of the house, with a ramp leading to the end of the house where the current main entry way is, and the direction we need to go to get to the van, so that my husband doesn’t have to fight with the door while trying to get his walker up and down the steps.  Then we’d also be able to start using what is supposed to be the front door.  If that happens, this garden bed will likely need to be taken at least partly out.  Which would not be a bad thing, I am thinking.

The Re-Farmer