Lee has been making steady and slow progress removing blackberry vines by our house. This is a before picture.

These are some after pictures.

But, you can’t have a cleanup job around here without finding some hidden treasure. Somebody needs to think of a story that somehow ties these items all together.

A one armed teddy bear.

One pry bar.

One ski pole.

One ski glove and one bottle of baby oil.

And last but not least, two balls. (What? Did you think we could do a cleanup project without finding a ball?”

Lee has found a new use for his 8″ grape hoe. It works amazingly well for cutting through the thick stems of the blackberries and even small branches. He makes sure to sharpen the blade every time before use and it seems to slice through like butter.

There is this section near our house that is solid 12 foot high wild blackberry vines. A fence runs through it, along with some random trees, so driving a tractor with a brush hog through it isn’t possible at the moment. We do want to put a fence there eventually, so we have to get it cleared out. The nice thing about when this section in cleaned out is we will be able to see out into our back fields. In between whacking the berry vines Lee has to stop to collect barb wire, some of it thrown on the ground, some of it on newly found fence posts.

We didn’t even know that there was an old corner post back in that mess.

When Lee finishes clearing out spaces he then drives his tractor with the brush hog through it. He has been working at this job here and there for small amounts of time in the evening. I must say that I think he has made an amazing amount of progress compared to me working on it with hand trimmers.

It finally got hot over here. It’s funny how when the good weather hits Oregon every one starts doing yard chores that were postponed during the wet times. We got a lot of really wet late rains this year that were interspersed with sunny breaks. That meant that our grass and weeds and everything else around the house turned into a JUNGLE.

Just outside our back porch there is a mess on both sides. I’d been putting off doing anything about it because I knew at least one side had buried trash in it. Sifting through dirt taking out someone else’s trash doesn’t really rate high on my usual want-to-do list. I decided to tackle it finally and got it cleaned up.

I filled up one trash can with garbage that I found while sifting through the dirt. It was the usual: bits of plastic, broken glass, tin can lids, rusty nails, but mostly old buried shingles. I also can’t forget about our property’s official garbage mascot, a matchbox car. The day I stop finding matchbox cars I will know that all the garbage has been unearthed on our property.

My aunt gave me some iris starts and I bought some annuals and Lee got me some bark-o-mulch to lay down. It looks much better now. I’m not going to plant anything permanent here because later on we will build a bigger porch and put a patio in. Not to mention we will need plenty of space to work in when Lee installs the new window above it and when we get around to painting the house. Once we get all that done then I can think about more permanent landscaping.

On the back left corner of the house where I was cleaning is a bush that is flowering again. I love this bush and think it is so pretty. I really wish I knew what it was. It looks like a rose, but it is not.

With the left side of the back porch cleaned up I then had the right side bugging me. It looked awful. Thankfully I didn’t find nearly as much buried trash this time.

Lee dug out two lilac bushes (they were badly placed) for me and we leveled and graded around the foundation like I did on the left side.

Along with the thick layer of bark-o-mulch (for weed control), I also laid down a strip of fabric weed barrier right next to the house. I was really getting tired of grass growing up the side of the house as we don’t often get the edger out. I plan on using the landscape fabric barrier along with bark-o-mulch on the south side of the house to help with that same problem. I would do it on the other two sides of the house but there are grading issues that need to be dealt with before it can be done.

We finally planted our Empress tree that we bought last year. I can’t believe that the poor thing survived a year in it’s little pot. Empress trees have leaves that are edible to livestock, easy to propagate, and they grow amazingly fast (up to 15 ft a year). We are thinking about experimenting with this tree, making new starts off it, and then using them as a sustainable firewood source. We shall see how it goes.

I went and limbed trees by our house. Mowing somehow becomes a more pleasant experience when you don’t have branches trying to poke out your eyes and you have to duck every few steps.

This section by the house was finally mowed after about a year. It looked a right mess. I also did some limbing here. I need to clean out the back area soon, which will involve picking up downed branches before I can do anything else. We finally discarded a pile of wood shingles from our roof remodel last year. Yeah I know, a year later and a big eyesore right in front of the house. We still have one wooden shingle pile left but it is farther back and doesn’t annoy me as much. Hopefully by next year that one will be gone too. We let my parents, uncle, and neighbor take what they wanted last winter to use as kindling.

With all the mowing that has been going on Lee was about ready to tidy up the back fields. He did a few passes with his tractor and then it started overheating. DOH! I hate it when that happens. I need a mowed field to make my cleaning happiness complete don’t you know!

We are slowly getting ready for some more fencing projects. This new fence line will run from the corner of the garden to the chicken pen. It will be around 200 feet. Unfortunately, there was a huge pile of limbs that we had saved for firewood which was right in the pathway of where the new fence will go. (There are other obstacles that need to be resolved, so don’t expect the fence to go up tomorrow.) Lee decided to attack the limbs with a bow saw and in just a few hours he had cleaned up the whole mess.

It actually added up to more wood then what I thought it would–almost half a cord. When we finish super insulating the house as we plan, then I foresee the possibility of keeping warm on just a little bit of gathered wood like this.

I really am glad to get rid of that eye sore of a mess. This is our new view where the pile of limbs were. Okay so it’s not super grand yet as we still have a TV out there from the previous tenants. Most the the previous tenant’s stuff is gone, but not all of it yet.

Oh well, I can live with one rotting TV for a little while longer. It sure beats what it used to look like when we bought the place.

Oh yes, I have to add another picture too. It makes me feel better about how far we have come since buying this place. You can see why one little TV is no big thing after all the work we’ve gone through cleaning up.

After we had finished cleaning up our limb mess, Lee started sweeping debris off his tractor and found a vine growing up it. I didn’t realize these vines were growing yet. Lee’s tractor has been parked since he finished moving the chicken coop into the garden about a month ago.

This vine is about five feet tall and very determined that it wanted the tractor as a trellis.

I have no idea what type of plant this wild vining species is. When I saw it growing last spring I didn’t pull it up as it reminded me of a squash plant and I wanted to see if it would grow any sort of fruit. Now granted, when I showed it to my mom her advice was just to pull it up. It never did anything last year, so this year I will just pull them up. That is unless someone tells me otherwise about what an amazing plant this is.

The first of the bleeding hearts are up finally. Now, didn’t I tell you they were the matronly color of purple and not the pretty two-tone ones you can buy in the store? Oh well, I still have a special spot in my heart for them.

Finally, on a wonderful, amazing, spectacular note, Jack, our little one eyed throw-a-way cat is becoming a mouser. We keep finding dead bodies at our back door. We love our little black Jack cat. I hug her all the time much to her dismay. (She secretly loves it!)

Lee and I have been working on processing the wood scrap coming out of our house project. Most of the wood we are just cutting down to size so it will fit into our wood stove. It should burn very good as it has had over 70 years to dry. Lee cuts the wood to size in the cart so it will just fall into place.

Then once the cart is full I bring it back to the barn stall and stack, and stack, and stack. We still have so much more to do before being done. I plan on being warm this winter.

The last of the plywood ceiling in the living room was taken off. We managed to not get beamed on the head by four pieces of wood left up in the ceiling. There wasn’t as many mouse nests which was nice. But there was still droppings all over the floor by the time Lee finished.

I decided to call this room the boardroom. Lee hates this room with a passion. The reason being that every time he uncovers a wall it has boards then making a new wall. All of the plywood had been taken off the walls but Lee had never touched the ceiling. We thought it would be just like the ceiling out in the living room with plywood over the floor joists. Nope! It had plywood over boards attached to the floor joists. There was much groaning on Lee’s part.

The drywall was taken out at the end of the stairway.

Back in April we had two Port Orford cedar trees fallen in front of our house. Since that day we have just been walking over them to get to the front door. I jokingly referred to the fallen trees as our anti theft device for our house.

We didn’t want to split the logs up for firewood. The reason for that being is that Lee would like to have them milled and use some of that cedar for making closets in the house. He bought a drawbar and borrowed an old log rolling tool from my Uncle. Then Lee pulled them to the back of the house with his tractor and stacked them. I thought for sure he was going to take out the mail boxes or get one of the logs stuck in the middle of the road. I am ever so impressed. Not to mention I am not going to miss stepping over those logs while carrying groceries.

There was a small grove of wild Hazel nut trees in the future chicken pen. These wouldn’t normally be on the top of our list for cutting down, but they interfered with our planned chicken fence line and needed to be removed. Lee took out the chain saw that my dad kindly gave us, and made a pretty fast work of it. Jasper and I watched in the camp chair.

Before & after:

Before & after:

Lee doesn’t like being able to see our neighbors now that the area is opened up. On the other hand, the openness will let more sunlight in and the grass will grow better. It’s a catch 22. Now all that we need to do is mow the area, move and stack all the split firewood from the latest Cedar tree take down, and clean up some stray branches. After that we can get down to fence building.

We needed another tree taken out before we continued on the chicken fencing project. When we had the previous tree in that area removed we didn’t realize that there was a second tree dying. This particular tree had a split about 25 feet up the side of it. The core of the Cedar tree was dead with some rotting in the middle like the last tree.

I had fully envisioned that when this tree was taken down it was going to take out the well head, which was in its path. Lee went and put a log chunk by the pump house to act as a buffer in case the tree fell there. Luckily the tree didn’t land on it when it went down. BUT, after the tree fell down it then rolled over on it. Thankfully all the damage that happened was the roof came off the poorly built pump house.

Here is a picture of the tree line in question. The red lines show where the two trees came out. Removing this new tree seems to have made the whole area brighter still. The green lines show where the three remaining healthy trees are. I’m not sure why all the Cedar trees were planted so close originally, as it makes it harder on the trees. With all the new light it should make the remaining trees happier. The white building on the far left is the back corner of our house. The building in the middle in between the first green and red lines is the wood shack. So the tree was somewhat close to important things. Even better was that when it came down it didn’t take out the stacked wood piles that we had. It couldn’t have gone smoother.

In just a few hours between the tree being cut down to when Lee went out to start clearing up the limbs, we had spiders making webs every where. Here is one of them.

Lastly, I have to put in the action man shot. It’s kind of blurry as my battery was trying to die but oh well.

This last week we have been doing a lot of clean up around the house. Lee decided that he wanted to start working on the mess where the new fence is going in near the house. I kept telling him to stop making messes as we are supposed to be making the place look better not worse.

Lee had actually started to clean on this mess a while back. You can tell because the grass is still very green in this picture.

He got this Hazel nut tree most of the way out. Nether one of us really wanted to start working on the sticker bushes that were way over our heads. So we didn’t do anything more to the area and went on to putting up the garden fence.

So here we are over a month later and I still don’t want to work on it. However, Lee likes to procrastinate clean up chores by doing other unrelated clean up chores.

Out comes the machete that we inherited from the house clean up. This is another tool that men find exciting. I’m thinking that it has something to do with swinging a big knife around creating havoc as they picture themselves in a jungle action movie. The only thing probably tying Lee to reality is the safety glasses. (Lee: In my defense, it was a Middle Ages action movie.) You can see by the picture how high the sticker bushes are as they are way over Lee’s head. The sticker bushes were weighing down all the small trees in the area and had most of them bent over.

Back in the same general area there is an old broken boat. My niece had fun playing in it as I think it was used as a sand box at one time. Except I could only find the merest hint of sand even though there were a lot of left over broken sand toys in the boat. I would actually like to see if there was some way the boat could be made more sturdy so it could be reused as a sand box. I will have to have Lee look at it closer to see if it could be saved.

Near the boat was a big tangled mess of chicken wire. It had been left out and trees and brush had started to grow through it all. Lee was not happy and you could hear him muttering about the previous tenants that had lived here. After the big struggle of getting that out it looked as if it were a complete roll of chicken wire that was mostly unrolled. I’m not sure that I knew that the chicken wire was even back there. Lee saw it when he was removing the existing fencing so he could get back to the sticker bush mess.

So what does it look like now? Still a mess but at least it’s progress. Lee wants to put in a compost station back there when he gets everything cleaned up.

On the bright side he has almost broken through the sticker wall so you can see out into the back field. It will be very nice and different when it is all cleaned up and you can see through. It will probably make the yard seem bigger.