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 💚
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