Tilling The Garden

The Farmer has been working on getting a garden all tilled up.  He’s making sure there is plenty of room to plant everything we want…

I think we’re going to plant a lot of marigolds to keep away bugs and take up space.

He worked really hard at getting the dirt good and loose.

We won’t plant anything until we get back from Florida (going to visit family the week of April 19th!). 

But when we do… oh my, that’s a LOT of space!

Lumberjack on the Farm Again!

The Farmer just can’t resist.  Every 3 or 4 months, he has to play lumberjack on the farm.  We have lots of trees around here, and as is the way of things, some of them die.  One of those dead trees is close to the house.  I think it taunts him, “Come on, you want to see if you can cut me down, you know you do!” 

Of course, the problem is to cut the tree down without knocking down the electric lines right beside it that are going to the house.  Or the many different fence lines near it.  Or gee, how about the tree falling onto the house itself??? Yeah, that’d be great. I guess we’d see how good our insurance is. Picture calling up your insurance agent, “Harvey, I need to file a claim. A tree fell on our house.” When he asks HOW that happened, let the hemming and hawing begin!

To give my heart even more palpitations than usual, instead of a regular saw, The Farmer decided to carry a chainsaw up the ladder to work on this tree.

See all those electric lines?  Oh, and I neglected to mention there’s also a big transformer on the electric pole nearby!

Once he was way up in that tree, and after I’ve asked him if he’s kept his life insurance paid up, he whipped out his chainsaw.

I stood on the ground and watched this big offshoot of the tree trunk quiver. Beside the electric lines. Close to the house.

Meanwhile, The Farmer concentrated hard on the job at hand.

It is well he concentrated on what he was doing. Have I mentioned all the electric lines near the offshoot of the tree trunk he was sawing?

Eventually he sawed through far enough he felt he could pull the limb down in the direction he wanted it to go. He was done playing tree surgeon. 

So he put one end of a rope around the tree limb, and the other end tied around a big walnut tree in the backyard.

Part of his rope system includes a winch, or “come-along” as he calls it. (I’m not sure if that’s a southern term, Okie term, or redneck term. Also, please note that’s a wInch, not a wEnch – he’s not allowed to have those on the farm.)

Once he’s tightened the rope as far as he can with the winch, he starts pulling on it.

It didn’t take long, and I barely got the camera up and “rolling” before the limb came down!

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That was fast!  And fortunately, or no doubt because of the Farmer’s most excellent planning . . . the tree missed the electric wires, house and even all the fences.  Of course, it also didn’t mash down the pallet fence around my trumpet vine and lilac bush because the top fell against the guide wires attached to the pole for the electric lines and transformer.

All that remained was to get the tree off the guide wires and trumpet vine, and cut it into pieces.

As Hannibal of the A-Team used to say, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

I guess it was another good day for the Lumberjack On The Farm.

Leveling Things Up

Okay any married ladies reading this, I’m just wondering. . .  when your husband loses something, does he ask you what YOU did with it?

The Farmer may protest otherwise, but it seems to me that when something gets misplaced around here, I hold a very responsible position.  That being that somehow, I’m always held responsible.  Not to say I don’t lose my fair share of stuff and then some, but it’s not ALWAYS my fault when we can’t find something.

Recent case in point… Saturday the delivery guy was here to repair our mailbox.  (That’s a story for another day…)   He was setting the post in concrete, and asked The Farmer if he had a level.

Well, he does.  A couple of them in fact.  But he couldn’t find his shorter level.  Later that afternoon, when he was back inside, he wanted to know what project the Cave Geek and I had been working on, and what we’d done with his level.

I informed him we hadn’t been near his level.  I’m not sure he believed me.

Now fast forward from Saturday to this morning.  We’ve got a bunch of roosters penned up, and one of the hens managed to crawl through a little hole and get in with them.  Now one hen in with 9 or so roosters makes for a bad scene for the poor hen.

I managed to chase her inside their building, and shut the cat door leading inside. 

Okay, I know that sounds weird to have a cat door in a chicken house, but cat doors really make great little doorways for chicken houses, because you’ve got a neat sliding panel you can take in and out.  It really comes in handy sometimes, like today.

Anyway!  I slid the panel shut on the cat door, and opened the people sized door to get the hen.  Bet you can’t guess what I found?!

Yep, sure enough, there was the level The Farmer was looking for Saturday.

It’s like this, sometime back he was putting in some new roosts for the roosters.

And I guess he wanted to be sure the roosters weren’t tilting while they slept, and used his level to get the roosts… well, level!

Once I took a picture of the incriminating evidence, I carried the level around to The Farmer’s workshop, and hung it on the peg board.

See, there it is!  It’s probably not in the exact spot The Farmer would hang it, but I don’t think he can miss it.  The level is back in place, and just so everyone knows….

I WAS NOT THE ONE WHO LOST IT!

Autumn Azalea And Wooly Bears

This weekend I noticed that not only is the camellia bush hanging in there and blooming, but the Autumn Azalea bushes in the same flower bed have decided to have a last hurrah and throw out a few blooms.  I guess they decided to live up to their name, since they are from the Encore^® Azalea Collection.

This first one is an Autumn Debutante Azalea.

It’s a light pink, whereas the other one, Autumn Sangria Azalea, is a hot pink.

Having checked those out, Toby and I decided to go for a walk in the woods.  We passed The Farmer in the bottom pasture.

He was busy burning old feed sacks and boxes.  I don’t know how we seem to accumulate so many boxes, but there always seem to be a bunch around here.

There was a nice bright yellow leaf caught in the weeds.

Some day I need to figure out what kind of tree has that leaf.  We have a lot of them around here, whatever they are.

Right beside the path going into the woods there is an old tree that’s been stuck by lightning.  At the base of the tree some fungus balls were growing.

I haven’t seen any quite like them before.  There’s nothing in the picture to give you a perspective, but they’re all about 1 inch across or less.

Of course we can’t go back in the woods without taking a stroll along the creek.  It’s got lot of leaves floating on it.

They especially collect along the sides, or around obstacles like this fallen tree.

I don’t know about other American Working Farmcollies, but our Toby LOVES water.  The highlight of a run in the woods is to splash across the creek and back at least once.

Given the opportunity, it’s more like 2 or 3 or … more times.

On our way back to the house, I stopped and turned over one of the salt bins.  This is the same one I found a black widow spider under earlier this summer.  Thankfully, this time it was a more innocuous discovery.

Whether you call it a wooly bear, wooly worm, or more properly, the banded woolly bear, we find a lot of them around here.  They hatch late in the summer or fall, and overwinter in this caterpillar form.  What’s cool is that the little wooly worms survive freezing by producing a cryoprotectant in their body.  How about that, this cool little woolly bear produces its own antifreeze!

Next spring, the little wooly worm will eat and eat, snarfing down all the grass and weeds it can.  Then it pupates, and the fuzzy little wooly bear turns into the Isabella tiger moth:

Of course, while it’s still a fuzzy little wooly bear, you’re supposed to be able to use the banded woolly bear to predict what kind of winter is on the way.  Supposedly, the thinner the brownish red bands, the harsher the winter will be.  So if the wooly worm is mostly brownish red in the middle, winter will be mild.

Considering how wide the brownish red band was on the wooly bear I found, looks like if the folklore is correct, we ought to have a mild winter!

Lumberjack On The Farm

One of the trees near the house died. Our lumberjack on the farm was tired of looking at the dead limbs, so decided he’d do something about it this weekend and play tree surgeon.

The problem was the tree’s location. It’s near a pole with a transformer, electric lines, the house, and several fences. So The Farmer devised a plan to get the tree limb to fall in the one direction it could safely go.

First he climbed up in the tree and tied a rope around the offending limb, then he took that rope and hooked it to another rope with a winch on one end, and that rope anchor-tied to a big walnut tree in the back yard.

Once that was done, he climbed up in the tree.

Then he was ready to start sawing on the tree limb.

He went up and down two or three times, but the limb was stubborn. It didn’t want to crack loose and fall down away from the tree.  (I think it is safe to say The Farmer does NOT have a master’s degree in aboriculture.)

Finally he sawed through enough of the wood that it DID work.

Of course, it didn’t fall *exactly* where it should have, and part of it crashed down on the pallet fence.  But at least none of it fell on our Lumberjack.

You can see the limb was pretty high up in the tree

Here’s a close-up of where the limb finally broke totally off:

Now there’s a mess of tree limbs on the ground to clean up:

Our lumberjack on the farm, aka tree surgeon, aka arboriculturalist, is still eyeballing the remaining dead tree limbs with thoughts of yet more removals.  I shudder to think where the next one might land, as it is even closer to the electric wires.

Is there a tree surgeon in the house?