Warm & Productive Weekend

Saturday was in the lower 70’s (yes, you read that right) and today was in the lower 50’s.  Grandma came over on Saturday to watch Rhiannon so Paul & I got a lot of outdoor chores done. 

Godzilla was in working order so Paul dozed a few more trees down & then went to doing “cleanup”.  Having a mechanical monster capable of toppling trees on a whim seems like a great idea, but it does leave a mess.  Naïve as I am, I was originally thinking, “Wow, we can clear pasture in NO time at all”.  Then reality slapped me awake as I witnessed the gawd-awful mess that the dozer creates in its path.  The path itself is clear, but the surrounding areas become a tangled mess of trees, limbs & root balls.  So now we have to sling a chain around the larger trees to drag them out of the mess, cut the limbs off (and avoid getting impaled by branches), toss the limbs in a pile to run though the wood chipper, then saw up (and eventually split) the tree trunks into woodstove-sized logs. 

Our limb-chipping provided seven wheelbarrows full of chips so I got the small path to the goat area spread with the new wood chips.  Several small cedars went through the chipper so it smelled sooooo good!

My small berry garden was swallowed by the weeds this past summer.  And beaten by the Africa-Hot summer.  And provided soft, composted earth for the bastard Armadillos to dig in.  All this equals a not-so-nice-or-productive garden.  Add that to the fact that the chickens were having a ball scratching through the newly raked mulch & dirt and you get a not-so-pleasant-gardener that was screaming obscenities and waving the rake at the poultry digging around the remaining blueberry bushes. 

This garden used to be fenced in, but the ice storm two years ago mangled the fence & some of the posts so Paul finally took it out this fall.  If I have any hope of keeping the remaining raspberries and blueberry bushes, I’m definitely going to have to put up another fence.  I’ve already been eying some of the cedars that met with Godzilla this weekend and plan on using them for fence posts.

Speaking of the ice storm damage from 2 years ago; it seems that we’re in for another potentially nasty ice storm this evening & tomorrow.  I’ve got to get working on preps for that this afternoon.