We were ready to hit it! Beautiful morning, storms forecasted later in the day, and a long list of projects to get done before they did. We had to drop my car off again at the garage down the road first thing in the morning and then Woodchuck drove us to the land in his car. I admit that I sometimes miss being the passenger, as I do 99% of the driving when we hit the road. It was a welcomed change of pace!
As soon as we got to the land, we were greeted with the most adorable trespassers. We think they might belong to the family a couple of houses down who have a very tiny homestead. They were chill, adorable, and very hungry for all of the little bugs. I asked them to please eat as many ticks as they could! I wasn't sure of the sounds they make, as I tried various ones to get them comfortable, but they ended up making a sound between a duck and a chicken and are very quiet. They got within a couple of feet of us as we made our way around the land. And their feathers? Absolutely beautiful! I hate that I have seen them for sale at the craft stores :( GuineaFowl!
We tend to get a lot of adorable trespassers and hitchhikers at or from the land. This jumping spider hitched a ride on me recently back to my car to get in the air conditioning!
He's cooling his little butt, lol.
Thank goodness for the wind, because it was humid and the sun was HOT!
While Woodchuck opened the storage container, I walked the area. Salsify needed to be pulled.
And I saw a lot of white blooms high off of the ground that I needed to investigate. Unfortunately, a massive Multiflora Rose :( This is an area we haven't touched yet in the clean out of invasives, so I'm really not surprised.
On to the first project! Creating a fence barrier in the ditch coming off of the pond so that when Woodchuck puts the fish in, they can't escape. He ordered some Tilapia after finding out that they can help clean up the pond. All that money he spent on chemicals and they didn't make one bit of difference. I have to admit that the sound of him sloshing around in the water sounded very refreshing, lol. For the first time ever, I put my hands in it to wash them, and it felt so good! He's worried about snapping turtles (as he should be), but honestly, I hate being afraid and just want to be smart about how we interact with natural places.
And done! We didn't know if Tilapia jump, so we made it two fence panels high just in case. It's anchored at the bottom with large pieces of stone and brick.
Project number two, which I don't have pictures of, was us trying to transplant some volunteer elderberry babies. They didn't like it much, immediately went into shock, but it was honestly worth a try since where they were growing gets mowed and they would never mature there. I watered them well, and I'm sure we got the storm at the land too which watered them even more.
Project number 3 was capping off one of the drainage pipes in the forest. I am not 100% confident that this was a good idea. When we bought the land we were told that the start of the pipe had been capped off, however, we could see water flowing from it, so unless there is a break somewhere in it, or it has drainage holes in it along the way, that information was false. So we sawed off the broken part, capped it, placed a brick against the cap incase of pressure build up, covered it and marked it with a flag. I'll keep an eye on the forest to see what happens, but we were told the beginning of this starts at the house North of this pipe. It was where the previous owners mother lived. There is a family with some farm animals living there now and we honestly don't know what is going into that pipe and then draining on to our land. We tried stopping there recently, but nobody answered the door.
Before we went our separate ways to work on our own things, I walked around a bit. I found this tiny and lovely Parasola mushroom. 😍
And look! Some of the flooding has gone down in the back ditch! I would say it was a good 4-6 inches shallower now, though it was still very high.
It was time to head into the forest! Because I keep going in at the same spot and getting stopped at the same spot, I decided to go to the very end and work my way back. I didn't care if there was standing water, I needed to at least get my eyes on what was going on. I was greeted with a new patch of Packera! It is now dappled throughout the forest.
I did my usual pulling of cleavers, and babies of honeysuckle, bittersweet, multiflora rose, dug up lily of the valley, cut troublesome grapevine and inadvertently would dig up critters. I couldn't get information to load on this guy while I was in the forest, so I left him. Turns out he's quite the troublesome creature with crops and fruit trees. 😟
But I was SO excited to find the Twayblade Orchid again!!!! And is that a little baby orchid coming up next to it???!!! This is the only one I have found in our forest since purchasing the land 3 years ago! I always put a little cage system around it so that I can find it easier next time out and can monitor its growth.
I was sneezing non-stop and had faucet nose. Everything was covered in a layer of pollen, even feathers that the birds had dropped, and there were piles of cottonwood cotton throughout.
A species of harvestmen arachnid. They are super fast runners, and even jump!
UGH, the first time I see the wild strawberries ripen and he ran over them with the tractor while mowing 😢 I memorized the location and will check on the ones here that weren't ripe yet.
These babies were huge! And although I was tempted to harvest them, thinking they were chicken of the woods, I needed to get out of the forest in a timely manner because the storms were moving in and the winds were really picking up. I also don't trust myself on identifying anything else but morels. I sent the picture to a mushroom guy just North of me and indeed, this was not chicken of the woods and not edible! 😱
I named this worm Jaba. He was so fat, and didn't even move!
I checked on the blueberry bushes before we left, and they are getting closer to becoming actual fruit. Since we trimmed the bushes, they look so much healthier!
We picked my car up from the garage down the road, came home, worked out, and Woodchuck wanted to go to town to grab some groceries and dinner. Of course he waited until the storms were starting!
They followed us back home! I hurried up and jumped in the shower and was just getting out when the sirens went off.
There was a confirmed microburst just North of us!
So depending on the weather for the rest of the week, Woodchuck wants to head back after work to finish weed whacking. I've also tracked down some free wood that he can use for the walking bridge, but there was a lot of interest in it and I don't know that it won't be snatched up before we can get there to pick it up. He has been toying with the idea of buying an old truck to make situations like these easier, instead of having to rely on my car and the trailer we hook up to it. The most recent repair, which I have to say that even though I've spent about $3,000 to get her fixed this year, are things that have been ongoing that are just now getting noticed and fixed. Yesterdays fix was a leaky valve cover gasket and although the guys knew there was a leak, they didn't tell me and didn't move forward with fixing it. Once I was told that there was a leak, I asked Woodchuck why she hadn't been fixed? He shrugged. So they fixed that yesterday, but because it gone so long with the leak, my spark plug wells were FULL of oil and all of that had to be changed too. So a $200 job ended up being $360. I'm glad she's fixed, and the guys at the garage are great, but damn it, Woodchuck! Why oh why does he let things go until they are a bigger, and more expensive, issue?! I tackled him and play choked him--which would have been hilarious to anyone watching. I'm 5 foot, 140 pounds. He's 5' 8" and 200 pounds. But seriously, my car is very, very important to me. Anything we spend a large amount of money on and rely heavily on is! I take care of these things to help them last longer and reduce issues. He had speculated that I was having spark plug issues because I kept telling them that the idle was weird on her, even with all of the other fixing they had done this year. Now we know why.
Oh and! Today embarks on the first of many appointments to meet with bankers about construction loans. One step closer! 🙌
No comments:
Post a Comment