There was a grand ball deflating today. I managed not to stab myself accidentally which was amazing for me. Lee gets nervous when I use knives. After much slashing and stabbing the ball massacre was finished leaving me with a headache from ball fumes and 9 balls for the dogs.

When Lee and I bought this house it came with a ball graveyard. An odd thing to have but kind of funny. The owner said he tried to pile them all in one spot because of them being all over the place. After we started cleaning up the property we added a few more to the pile that we found, threw a few away, and Edgar has recycled a few.

Lee wanted to start clearing out a spot for a compost pile so the ball graveyard got displaced. We will save the ones in the best condition for Edgar to play with and just throw the other ones away. Edgar was a little overwhelmed with so many balls to choose from. Or maybe he was just a little nervous about it since they all seemed to come flying out at him as Lee was moving them.

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.

Today I decided to clean up by the wood shack. It’s been an eyesore and I thought it would be a quick and easy job of taking down brambles and picking up some boards. Um, no such luck. It started with me picking up boards and then slowly realizing that we had a whole nother trash pile. This trash pile was over grown with grass and had a layer of dirt on it. In fact Lee’s brother made a comment one time about how the ground seemed to be higher in that area. Yeah, that was because it was a big old trash pile. What was in the pile was lots of rotting wood with nails in them from some sort of building they had taken down along with trash, toys, and a lot of broken glass (which I ended up slicing my finger on). Just let me say that diapers really don’t break down any with time.

I felt very upset with this trash pile as I didn’t know that we had another one to take care of. What started out as maybe an hour project took much longer, a dump run,  and we are still not finished sifting through the dirt for trash.

This is what it looked like before we realized what we were dealing with.

And this is what it looks like after hours of tedious work. Doesn’t look like we did much. But it didn’t help that all the trash was buried under the dirt and I would keep coming on buried pockets of broken glass.

I have been looking forward to this day ever since we moved in. We had the two Port Orford Cedars by the front of the house taken out. They were way to close and blocked a lot of light. Along with that we had the huge tree that was also in the front yard limbed up some. We had that done for light reasons and because the branches were hanging down way to low.

This is what it looked like before we had the trees taken out.

The first tree we had cut about 14 feet up so it wouldn’t smash into our newly planted fruit trees.

After that he cut off the rest of it.

The second tree he had to trim up the limbs so they wouldn’t scrape on our house when it fell down. That is him up in the tree.

Then he tied off the tree and just when it was about ready to fall he got in his truck and pulled it over with that. Both trees went exactly where he said they would.

This is what it looks like now. Thankfully we still have our house intact! Now we just have a big mess to clean up.

Remember this?

We’ve been busy. This is what this section looks like now.

I got burn pile seven and eight done today. Yup, another exciting news flash.

This weekend was very busy. Lee built another wood rack, we bought a used mower and then I mowed for hours trying to get the grass under control by the house, we went to the dump and got rid of that NASTY freezer that’s in the above pictures (I’ve been hating that thing for forever!), Lee sawed off the part of the wood shacks entry way so you no longer have to duck your head to go in, we got rid of some more scrap wood, and then we just all around tidied up.