We had a cat adopt us recently. She doesn’t seem to mind that we have dogs. In fact she rubs against Edgar every time she can. She is a big tree climber and rodent exterminator as we see her constantly hunting and find dead bodies around.  We decided to call her Piper as when she first started hanging around she meowed at us all the time.

The feral cats that came with the house decided they were going to hang out at the neighbors house. Piper we figure is just a new discarded cat someone dumped. Several neighbors have told us that a lot of cats get dumped around this area. Lee and I both are pretty pleased to have a rodent slayer around as the mice and gofers abound around here.

The chicks are coming along nice. They have a lot of their feathers in now and their combs are slowly starting to get bigger.

This is the little chick that I am guessing is going to be a boy. His tail feathers are more droopy then the other chicks. He is one of the Golden Laced Wyandottes.

Two more weeks and they should be fully feathered according to our chicken book. Most of our chicks have boy names. So when we do find out which one is the rooster I guess we will have to give it a girl name. So far all four of the Barred Rocks are named Bob. The two Araucanas are named Elwood and Jake. One Rhode Island Red is named Jules. That leaves four left to name.

The tomato cages that you can buy in the store are either too small, too shoddy, or too expensive for nice ones. So we decided to make our own tomato cages after seeing similar ones at my sister-in-law’s. We got a roll of rebar mesh at Home Depot along with rebar tie wire.

Lee cut the rebar with his angle grinder into the measurements that we wanted. We overlapped one square of the rebar mesh and wire tied it together at two places in the top, bottom, and one place in the middle.

Then Lee angle grinded off the bottom wire so we would have the spikes to put in the ground. Lee made two of them for me. Only 15 more or so to go.

A few posts back I mentioned that Hazel nut trees don’t burn well unless they have some time to dry out. Lee took out a small Hazel nut tree about three days ago. Every day since that there is a wet spot all around the stump where the tree is still bringing up water. It’s a little less pronounced today but still there.

My Nasturtiums are blooming. Okay maybe I should say Lee’s Nasturtiums are blooming as I bought them for him. He was interested in them since all parts of the plant are edible. When I tried to get him to eat one of the flowers today though he got nervous and told me to look it up before he would.

We have these trees around our property that we don’t know what are. They have small thorns on them and leaves that remind us of Mountain Ash leaves. Here is a picture of one of them flowering out. It’s rather pretty and fragrant.

Thing is the one that is in the picture is slightly different from the ones in a different area around our land. The one pictured has a straighter trunk while the ones not pictured have a twisted Africa look to them. But they both have the same leaf look, flowers, and thorns. Any guesses on what it might be?

I went out to water this afternoon and saw that the deer had gone through and mowed almost every fruit tree that we had planted. The annoying thing about this  is Lee has all next week off so he can put up the garden fence. Why couldn’t they have waited one more week?

This weekend Lee and I decided to tackle the fence line that ran down the middle of our property. This wasn’t a small challenge, as most the  fence line was covered in sticker vines. The first thing I did was to go down the line cutting the draped vines with clippers and making a pathway through so Lee could get in. After that was done, Lee could then take down all the barbed wires and fence posts. It went pretty fast until we hit the forest of sticker vines at the back of our property next to our neighbor. That required taking out trees and pulling tree-like branches of sticker vines out of trees. After that we cut down lots of small volunteer Hazel nut trees and trimmed back limbs so Lee could drive his tractor through with the mower. We made another huge burn pile after just getting rid of four last week. All our effort really made a difference in how nice it looks.

Before and after.

Before and after.

Burn season is coming to a close soon. That made us try to hurry up and burn the four piles we had around the property. With those piles burned that means we have had 12 burn piles so far this season. Wow! I knew we had a lot of brush to get rid of but I didn’t know it was going to end up that many. We have lots of trees that need taken out so I am expecting a lot more burn piles again next burn season. One thing I learned is that Hazel nut trees need some months to dry out because the wood won’t burn otherwise.

The first fire I did some days before. It was the scariest fire I have ever had that left me shaking. It had a bunch of cedar limbs in it that had been down for about a month or so and misc. other brush. I lighted the fire and about 5 minutes later it was a fire bomb. The wind started blowing and started grass fires but the flames were so high and hot I couldn’t get near enough to put them out. I ran back to get Lee to help and a shovel (because my rake wasn’t going to cut it) but by the time I got back we could get near it to get the grass fires out. I decided after that scary experience that I was going to wait until the weekend for Lee to help me with the other burn piles.

Saturday comes and we have the most enormous pile of Cedar limbs to burn from the two trees we had cut down in the front of our house. I was feeling nervous but this pile decided that it wasn’t going to go crazy, thank goodness. It did burn amazing fast though.

Since it was still early in the day I thought “why not try another fire”. I didn’t think it was going to burn but I used the last of my paper on it. It took off so I was feeling pretty happy to get a second pile out of the way for Saturday. Jessica came over for the day along with Skip and his kids. Lee and Skip had the fun job of tending this fire.

By now I am beat and ready to pack it in. Skip tells me I should start the third fire for the day. I have the excuse of not having any paper left but after he carries two shovel fulls of embers from the above fire they managed to get it started. This was a burn pile full of Hazel nut limbs that I had tried 7 or so times to start through out the burn season and could never get it to start. Grrrrr. Thank goodness that chore is gone for a few months. Now I just need to go make some more piles.

Lee and I have been working on taking out some small Hazel nut trees. Mostly we did it by hand with a saw and a hatchet. One tree we used my fathers chainsaw until it pooped out and another tree we used the tractor on. What we learned from this was that it is going to be a ROYAL PAIN to take these trees out. Skip suggested a different way of going about it that we are going to try out in the coming months.