Project completion and seasonal contemplation

 We are now able to put a checkmark next to the latest big project on the list. It is done! We have a complete barn now. Exhale. Woodchuck hired the same crew that finished the framing and did the roofing to put the doors up. He has been better about admitting when it is the right time to hire someone else to do a project. But let's not talk about he took the flesh tip of his finger off chopping up fire wood. SMH.

We have been back a few times now to finish up the little things on the barn. To peel off the stupid plastic barrier on the trim that he thought we were supposed to leave on, to put the wood and stone under the doors to close up the gaps until we get concrete poured, to put the handles on the doors, and to finally park the tractor in its new home. What an amazing feeling of accomplishment!

We were lucky to have such mild weather this Fall to help us gain more time to work on these kinds of projects. We were also very lucky to have made more progress on the front ditch, cutting down and pulling out large trees, driving copper nails in to the stumps that were left from invasive plant species. I'm getting lots of practice on the tractor!

 The ditch is now full of water, the pond completely refilled. There's a part of me that wishes we could have gotten even more done, but I know that we did a lot and have to remind myself that there will always be things to work on and it can't all be done at once. 

With each trip out there I have left feasts for the wildlife! Those cute little pumpkins and squashes that are used for Fall decor were cracked open to expose the tasty insides that some animal seems to enjoy the taste of. The smell of fresh pumpkin and squash is intoxicating to myself as well! I also saved up some veggie scraps and scattered those between the shipping container and blueberry bushes. The crows have been going nuts when we show up, so I can only hope now they recognize us and have accepted us in to the magick of the land. 

It is hard for me to focus on projects while out there at this time of year. The dying back of vegetation and thinning of what is impenetrable during warmer months captivates me. I stand still for what feels like hours, scanning visually and intently listening. Every chirp, caw, or twig snap catches my attention and I breathe in all of the amazing scents that comes with crisp, cool air. It's a whole other world at this time! Of course I love it too when it has snowed and I can look for all of the various tracks of animals, but even those distract me from the amazing and magickal world that Fall brings. There is something about tracks in mud that I find adorable, though finding them in glittering snow never disappoints me.

Our next immediate plan for the land? To start making our way out on to the watershed to start removing the invasives. I haven't decided yet if I want to go immediately to the watershed, or work our way to it starting with the the other side of the blueberry bushes and cleaning that out to make our way to the watershed pond. I kind of feel like that is a good option, and then we could cut the seed tops off of the phragmite in that area. But we'll decide closer to the time when we are ready to do that and dampness of the land will also make that decision. The next couple of Sundays will be busy with holiday stuff, so we likely won't start working on the land again until after the new year. I hate waiting that long!

We took a walk in to the first row of the second CRP yesterday, for Woodchuck to pick out a Yulemas tree for his breakroom. There's something so heart warming about a big, burly Neanderthal male finding a tiny little tree that he likes. We brought it home and he "planted" it in a pot while smoking a whole chicken for us to use for upcoming meals.

As far as regular life outside of the land, I am finding myself in complete burnout mode. I have spent weeks with every day, all day on the road. The all too familiar feeling of burnout and being overwhelmed slowly started creeping in and I didn't do anything fast enough to stave off hitting the brick wall. Trying to be there for family members who need help right now, working, going back into physical therapy, dealing with the holidays here, the land projects....I am meant for short-distance sprints, not long-distance cross-country. And so I find myself home today on my day off, in crying jags, seeing all of the things that I want to do but am already watching the hours tick off on the clock way too fast. I have also not been able to work on art and creations the way my spirit needs me to in order to stay balanced, and I feel like a wreck inside. I really miss having more time at home to create. But that doesn't pay the college tuition! I need to get better at the balance part.

My house is slowly coming back to better after always being neglected. Things are getting put away where they are meant to be, art ideas are swirling again, and I have finally forced myself to sit down and update you. I guess that means I'm feeding the balance recently and should feel good about that! But there's still that feeling of depletion that comes with this time of year. Of disappointment in people. Of dreaming of more magickal surroundings and situations than the basic sparkle I manage to create lately given the circumstances. Such a feeling of longing and a little bit of sadness. I think I just miss myself and Peace. I've never been one for the rat race and hustle and bustle of the holidays. Only I can control that for myself. Only I can make better decisions for myself and well-being.

I hope for you to have peace and well-being as well. Happiness, contentment, and no guilt for pulling back when you need to. I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to hugging a tree. I miss my woods. 💚🌲

Summer into Fall

 I had to FORCE myself to sit down and work on this and it has still taken almost a week of working on it here and there to get it done! There is always so much to do that I'm having to pick one thing over another anytime I am home. For as much as I love writing, and sharing our adventures with you, there just isn't enough time in a day to squeeze everything in. So let's get going on the past month or so!

The work on the second ditch has stopped completely since we were moving full tilt ahead on the barn. I am SO GLAD that Woodchuck hired that crew that he did, because they were at the land to receive the metal and man door delivery, and they knocked out the roof for us too!

The rest was now up to us! My previous maintenance manager, now my friend, came to help us and he has been invaluable. Having another set of hands, his strength, and input on things moved this project forward in ways it never could have with just myself and Woodchuck. And it has been so nice spending time with him in a way that I never have before. One day he hopes to put up a barn too, so he's learning a lot along the way on ours.

The mornings are chilly and we had a bit of a cold snap, but overall we have been VERY lucky to have a mild Fall and little rain to hold up the work. We start our work mornings with lots of layers! In these pictures they are installing what's called the Rat Guard. It's the ledge that the sheets of metal siding will rest on.

This will be the view in the early mornings from the house (that is yet to be built). Once that sun moves over the clearing, we will start to warm up as long the winds aren't strong and cold.

The first sheet of metal is up!

Down a layer of clothing now that the sun is above us, and we have a half a wall! In the moments that they didn't need me, I foraged and wandered on the forest edges. What kind of gifts will the forest and Mother E show me?

I'd go back anytime they called me to help, and we had a nice lunch break with sandwiches and chips, and before you knew it, the whole back side was done!

Woodchuck and I went back a couple of evenings during the week to cut the metal for the sides, and get them lined up and ready on the ground. I had to wear ear protection because using a saw to cut metal is LOUD, and getting hit with all of those little pieces of fire hot metal pieces flying off of it while it's being cut HURTS. But I survived, and during any metal cutting while my friend was there, he stood in my place to give me a break. What a guy!

We had a large and adorable jumping spider that likes Woodchucks tool bag and a grasshopper that didn't listen to me to move before the saw turned on. He got the scare of his life, most likely.

Once the weekend came again, our friend came to help put the sides up! When we start, we don't have a very good system, but as time goes on we work one out. The guys would stand the metal up and my friend and I would hold it in place while Woodchuck went up on the ladder to put some screws in at the top. Then my friend would go up another ladder while I still held the bottom against the barn and they'd put in some screws at the upper half portion. Then we'd move on to the next panel and do that all the way across. Once we saw that it worked out and nothing needed tweaking, we'd finish putting all of the screws in, with me doing the ones at the bottom since I'm the shortest. Then it would be time to put the trip at the top, between the roof line and wall where they meet.

For some reason, Woodchuck thought that putting that trim on from the roof was a good idea. I told him earlier that morning that it wasn't, but Aries going to do what Aries going to do. Long story short, he fell at the peak of the roof (it's a 4/12 pitch, metal roofing, no stop-toe guards), slid down the roof and nearly right off of the barn. He was bruised, sore, and cut up from hitting the screw heads on his slide down, but thank goodness he's okay and that my friend was there to help keep the situation from being worse!

That was it for this trip! We always think we can knock something out fast and that's just not the case. We have been SO lucky to have had a mild Fall so far, otherwise we'd be much farther behind. So Woodchuck and I made another trip to the land on an evening during the following week, armed with stand lights since it gets dark so much earlier now. Those didn't work out the way we needed them to, but mostly it's because of Woodchuck's eyesight now. Did I mention that before in any posts? I can't even remember.

 He's going blind in one eye, might eventually in the other. He's been getting injections in the really bad one, has what is called Wet Macular Degeneration and he was losing his sight FAST. He needs a lot of light, and some times a magnifying glass, to be able to see things even remotely better than without using those things. But the stand lights we took only created more shadows for him. So before we messed up cutting the metal, or one of us got hurt, we called it quits on the evening.

We got about halfway across! It should only take one more trip to finish the sheet metal.

So we went out one more evening and the siding is done....though screws are a bit out of line in some spots. After about 6 hours, our brains shut down and I was miscalculating where the wood beams were at and putting screws just into metal, and his eyes were not focusing at all and he couldn't get a straight line of screws across, lol. Our saw blade was going dull and the cuts aren't as clean and pretty as we would have liked and are only covered so much by the trim. Of course that all had to happen on the FRONT of the barn! He said if it all bothers him enough, we'll redo things.

The doors have been ordered and should be in in the next couple of weeks! Weather and temps are still mild and there's corner trim to put up and some metal overhangs to trim while we wait. We've been pulling up to turkeys playing on the rocks piles and walking the forest edges! Woodchuck said he doesn't mind if they use it as shelter right now.

We also got to the phragmite at the watershed pond and I was SO stoked to finally be getting this project started!!! There aren't many projects out there I expect help from Woodchuck on, but this was one where I made no exceptions to his participation. With the area leading up to the pond being so overgrown, it being so marshy, and this being my first time working with phragmite, I felt for safety's sake that it was best to have him there with me.

I was so worried that I had missed my window of opportunity to treat it. Late October is usually the cut off, and if the plant was brown, all bets were off. I had been formulating a plan in my head for weeks, probably months, on how to go about this, and of course once the moment came there were things that I forgot to do. Like dilute the herbicide. SMH.

We were surprised at green phragmite and a very low water level still! I got to cutting and treating the a$$hole plants right away. My injection tool of choice:

Woodchuck stood back, though was a little nervous about me getting hurt, and offered help along the way. He ended up having to go back by the barn to get a piece of sheet metal leftover so that I could stand on that because it was still so mucky even though the water levels had receded so far. I got my left boot stuck in the mud for a couple of moments and pulled that right groin/hip area again trying to get it out. I also fell a couple of inches on to my ass while squatting and was unharmed though I had a slightly damp ass thereafter. 

It took a bit to get the hang of it, as there is an internal disc layer that looks a lot like bone marrow that I would have to punch through on some of them depending on where I cut them down at. The water levels were so low though, that the root system was exposed on most plants! Fascinating!

Overall, I was really happy that I got to work on this stand at all, but was disappointed that I couldn't treat all of it. Woodchuck estimates that I got to about 30% of what we could see right in this spot and although he said he can see the difference, I really can't. Before and after.

So. Now that the barn is caught up until the doors come in, we are talking about what to work on the meantime. There are SO many options! Keep working on the front treeline between the front CRP forest and road? Keep working on cutting up the fallen maple and the piles of branches pushed off to the side of the driveway? (this seems like the best thing to do seeing as he wants to start building the house next year and we should probably make sure that the drive is free and clear), pull the cut trees out of the front ditch (that will depend how wet it is in there with the recent downpour we just got and possibly a light rain happening right before we make it out there again), keep working on invasive plants on the edge of the second CRP forest, keep clearing invasive plants on the West side of the pond, keep clearing the back ditch since we are barely halfway through that? And whatever else we haven't thought of yet!

Ok, I have to stop thinking about it all, I'm getting overwhelmed......whatever we decide to do, I'll post pictures next time and hope it doesn't take me months to do the next posting ;) I estimate that we will be taking about 5 years to get the land back to what it should be. We are about a year and a half in at this point. Stay tuned!!!

The next step

 I knew it had been awhile since I last wrote, but since July?! Time is flying by too fast! A lot is happening, at home, in family, at the land, and I'm having a hard time gathering my bearings 😬 So let's see where I can pick up from and have this all make sense......

The majority of the Summer was spent on clearing ditches and their banks and that's still not done yet, but the back ditch is looking better. With us opening up the canopy, the ditch is growing green things! A blanket of Pilea pumila, otherwise known as clearweed or coolwort, and is in the nettle family, likes the conditions of the ditch now. 

I wasn't sure what to do at first! Do I need to get rid of everything now growing in the ditch?! What happens when it rains again enough to get water in there?! But my gut is telling me to leave it, at least for now, and let nature run its course. This plant is a native species BTW, even if to Eastern United States and not the Midwest where I am located. I seem to be finding a lot of plants on the land that are native to the Eastern part of the country. 

We were also prepping the area the pole barn is going to be built on!

We've been letting people know for months that we could use help building it and when we thought we would start on it, so they'd have some notice if they wanted to help. It ended up being hubby, his carpenter nephew he hired, and my previous maintenance manager at a job that I had until Covid hit. We thought that was going to be enough of us, but it turns out it wasn't and things didn't go as planned. Equipment malfunctions, crappy design equipment, I wasn't allowed to help, because they all thought I would get hurt. So I sat around doing nothing the first day except for keeping Woodchuck calm and doing the driving. The second day I sat around for a bit and then said to hell with it, they wouldn't come right out and tell me that they didn't want me to help, so I walked away and started doing my own thing. By the third day I knew what was going on and just did my own thing the whole time. They didn't get as far as they had hoped they would.

The plan was to have us all back the following weekend to finish the framing after getting the trusses delivered. But two days after we all headed back to into the world for the week, the carpenter backed out unless we met his new demands. So Woodchuck declined and hired a crew that has experience putting up pole barns, and with just three of them, this magic happened in a couple of days.

Woodchuck and I went out this morning to fix the smaller boards across the front, on either side of the garage door openings, that we had done wrong. Soon the metal will be on and then we'll work at saving up to buy the doors. 

I'm back to work as of mid-August, back at my previous job at the resale shop but under new management. Worked two weeks and caught Covid and it knocked me on my ass. Like, bad. I felt like I had allergies, flu, and a cold all wrapped in one and at the worst level you could get them. My highest temp was nearly 205 degrees and I felt like I hit by a truck. When I talked with my manager about having to call off and what the guidelines were to come back, he said he hung up and said that I sounded like I was dying. My chest is still crap first thing in the morning, but with asthma and allergies and my allergies always being bad at this time of year, it's expected. 

Never a dull moment!

So what's next? Keep working on the barn, start making a path to the watershed pond so I can treat the phragmite, keep clearing the back ditch, and hopefully get one more night of camping out there since we've only done it once a year for the past two years.

All of the above pictures are the work I did alone on the ditch. Temps were in the high 80's/low 90's and the humidity was terrible and we were all in the blazing sun all three days. That's when Woodchuck and I started not feeling good, halfway through the weekend.

On a trip during the week by ourselves, I saved a toad and baby snapping turtle from getting run over by the tractor. While I've seen many toads out there, this was the first time I've seen a snapper! Where there a babies, there have been adults and for being so small, this little one was super fast and strong!

While on the tail-end of Covid, I also got to see a Sun bow while out there. Gotta see the magic wherever it may be! 

Hard to believe we will have to transition into Fall work mode now.....I feel like we didn't even get to finish the Summer stuff yet. 😬 But we are making progress and seeing the fruits of our labors in projects and what is starting to grow out there! We are truly blessed, even through the hardships 💚