Evil the rooster had his pen mowed. He wasn’t exactly chipper with all the activity, but he did his best to strut his manly stuff and look suitably concerned.

Lee tilled up several garden beds by hand with his grub hoe. He said the soil broke up beautifully. These beds have been in use for several years now, and spent the recent winter months under a sheet compost of chicken litter.

I prepped the new beds with Steve Solomon’s fertilizer mix and worked it in.

I filled up my remaining beds with seeds and starts.

Grow little broccolies, grow!

There was an old Brussels sprout plant left behind from last season that sprouted the most delicious and delectable tender shoots. As you can guess, Lee and I were munching on them.

Lee’s Note: Brussel sprouts must be the world’s most overachiever vegetable. First they produce a tall stalk covered with dozens of Brussel sprouts. If left uneaten for months, they next head out a single larger cabbage. The cabbage eventually bursts, the stalks tip over from the weight, and an abundance of Broccoli Rabe sprouts from the main stalk. I’m fascinated to see what it will produce next–hopefully chocolate!

Lee spent a couple evening hours on three days and made an amazing amount of progress clearing out blackberries with his grape hoe. I followed after him and raked up all the dead grass and bramble mix. We want to plant some grass seed here to help compete with the inevitable regrowth of the blackberries.

Lee also dug out the biggest blackberry root either of us had ever seen.

Finally, we got the chainsaw going and started cutting firewood from the nut trees that broke up in the snow storm. There are so many small trunks that it’s a slow process. On the plus side, no splitting!

The rains have finally ended and my cold is on the decline, so I have high hopes for this next weekend.

Suddenly I had a burst of inspiration: cover up the grim with some cheap paint and repurpose some of the unused space with more storage. I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner. The cheap paint turned out to be a gallon of mis-mixed green paint from the hardware store. For the cheap storage, Ikea came to the rescue.

Since there aren’t any working outlets in the kitchen, the oven had turned into a flat surface for food storage and a box for my cast iron pots. This wasn’t a really good use for the space. We took out the oven, ripped out the tape they had again used to ineffectually stop mice, installed a thin piece of wood to solve any mice problems, caulked, and painted it all. The four baskets in the Ikea cabinet were required so our dogs couldn’t get into anything. I’m not sure what to do with all this new space as it is so exciting.

Our house isn’t square though, so things didn’t go smoothly. We ended up having to remove a piece of trim and cut out a section of drywall to fit the Ikea cabinet. This isn’t a big deal, because this wall will eventually get moved out a few feet anyway (the fridge will wind up in this spot later). That also meant we couldn’t slide it all the way back so there is a big gap behind it.

We also got a super cheap storage box to hang over the canning jar rack. It basically holds everything that was sitting on the old oven and items that were on the counter. Ikea was about to close when we got there so I forgot to get doors for it. Really, with our messy kitchen, it doesn’t matter. One cool thing about the picture below is the new drywall Lee added around the top of the masonry chimney (which used to stop about 6″ short of the ceiling). You could see petrified mice stick out of the rubble of the missing blocks before we sealed it up and painted it. Yeah, really gross.

These two storage pieces cleaned up a lot of my counters, so now I have more space to work. It’s amazing!

Lee says that since I spruced up the kitchen I should take the duct tape off the broken window pane and replace it with clear tape. He also thinks I should paint the window trim. You can still see the previous tenant’s slap dash job of painting it. Edging was too much work for them, as was taking down the curtains which must have been there once. I don’t think I will paint them though, because it seems like it would be a pain to paint all those muntins if we are just going to replace them. Who knows. Maybe I will get around to it.

The extremely stained and nasty looking non-working dishwasher became my new cast iron pot holder. You can’t pretty up everything.

One area I didn’t deal with is the space behind the sink. I can’t get it clean and the warped piece of moldy trim is just so nasty. Maybe I can think of a cheap way to improve this too.

After putting an arm full of brush into the burn barrel I ran my fingers through my hair and found a SLUG! Who in the world gets slugs in their hair?!? Hopefully it has happened to someone else out there and I’m not the only one. Slug hair is not soon forgotten! That evening after a shower I was tugging at my hair when I realized the crusty spot was a slug trail. Yuck!

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?”

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.

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!

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!)

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.