Another Work Day

Make hay while the sun shines! And if it's too early for the hay to grow, do other projects until it does :) Brennen (with Gabby's help) spent quite a long time putting new crossbars on my swing. It keeps blowing over in the wind. We have it secured with dog tie-out stakes, but when the crossbars bent, they pulled the stakes out of the ground. It's nice to have my swing back in working order! Now I just need to spray it with Deep Woods to keep the ticks off of it and me :)


Another big project . . . plant my cherry trees! This proved tricky, since we had less hill space than I thought we did. Our property lines kind of just run together, and we figured we shouldn't plant on our neighbor's part of the yard :) So, finding an 18 to 20 foot distance for each of the three trees wasn't the easiest thing, but I hope they grow big and strong and we can hang three hammocks under their shade (in a few years?)


 And another big moment! The chicken babies are out of the garage and into their own little outdoor coop! We rigged up food and water and they had no idea what to do with themselves. The big chickens came over to investigate, through their coop wire . . . oh the sassy comments they made about their new neighbors! Our water bucket had a leaky spout, so, of course, that's where the brilliant chicks decided to lay down for their night's rest. I climbed the hill to check on them and found them soaking wet in a mud puddle. So I threw them through the upstairs doorway of their coop and stuck a board across the opening. Sometimes they seem to have bird brains ;)




Muriel helped Caelan supervise as we all worked. Gabby took a turn puppy-sitting, I think so Caelan could gather eggs.



This was an unexpected turn of events! We knew when we moved in that we had a buried fence and an electric collar for dog containment. However, the previous owners didn't really know where the fence was, boundary-wise, and Chauncey was hopeless with the system at our previous home, so we just bought the tie-out and called it a day. 

Eventually we discovered the location of certain sections of the wire . . . while digging. Ooops! With a new puppy, we thought it might be nice to have some sort of containment system and saw we could install a smallish one ourselves for around $200 (plus a lot of work). But why not have the original installation company come out and see if they could repair any cuts to the line? So we did. The same day that our neighbors decided to take down their wooden fence and to have a different company (who installed the buried fence on the neighbors' lawn on our other side) give an estimate to wire their yard.

Gabby and I missed these events because she FINALLY got to go to the orthodontist (after two months). That was a weird process with parking lot text messages that we'd arrived, masks, sanitizing, and me being sent back to the car to wait. Anyway, Buck said "our" company could make repairs, set us up with a battery replacement subscription, drop off some flags, do some training, etc. etc. More than the $$$ to do it ourselves, but not as outrageous as putting in a whole new system for the big yard.

In the meantime, our neighbors went ahead with their new underground fence installation. We watched as this tall, skinny kid maneuvered this huge ground cutting/wire-laying machine up and down our insane hills. When he stopped to rest, Buck asked him if he wanted to take a look at our system, to see if it was fixable and compatible with their company's product. 

Well, ya! Who is going to turn down an unexpected cash offer? :) Once they finished at our neighbors', they simply walked over to our yard. I found a cord in the shed that made the thing in the garage work and the two yard guys started their inspection. They had a swingy microphone dealie on a rope and when it found our buried wire it hummed. They walked the whoooooole yard, front, back, even behind the coop and it only stopped humming twice! That meant only two breaks in the system. 

They brought that crazy machine up the hill and fixed the big break, and they fixed the wire break by the driveway. Within 45 minutes, our entire yard was up and running with an underground fence! We found the collar and unopened batteries (in the same kitchen drawer the last owners had dropped them in when they moved out). They amazingly still work! 

We really felt like God set that up for us. We had no intentions of fixing the fence, even a few days before, and boom, it was done--for $100! This is also cool, because when/if Caelan does the service dog training program again, she can use the electric fence to exercise the dogs, and they need exercise! We may even try to teach our old dog new tricks. We'd have to buy a bigger collar, but he would probably like having the run of the yard. Muri is still a bit young and new to us to start training, but Caelan is getting in buried fence training practice with our neighbors' dogs (who are freaked out to go into their yard because of the rather too-intense training they received by the installers).





And our final big project of the day: here's a little before and after of the tree-clearing process. Buck's chainsaw definitely kicked things up a notch. He pulled down more trees in minutes than we did in hours! He also set up a burn barrel to get rid of last year's cuttings. We decided to drag all the newly cut trees and the trees we'd dragged down the hill back up the hill behind a screen of four really big trees that we decided to keep. Granted these have the cedar apple rust on them, so we also bought some fruit tree spray that we're going to give a go once it stops raining.

Despite the gloomy sky in picture two, the hill really does look a lot nicer and cleaner and hopefully has a better chance at growing pretty things like wildflowers and blossoming trees now that the nutrient suckers are fought way back. All in a day's work!