Spring Clean Up

Over the years we've collected bits and pieces of lots of peoples' projects--which we planned to incorporate into our own projects. When our projects reached completion, we found ourselves with a hillful of scraps--plastic, wood, metal--scattered across the breadth of the line where the two hills meet. We (maybe I) hoped to knock some of this back last year--but then our neighbor planted flowers on the entry point to our backyard. We didn't want to drive the truck over her flowers, so I looked at our untidy hill all winter. When spring came, my hope was to get the truck up the hill before the flowers went in and before the tall grasses and wild flowers grew on our second hill (which makes it much harder to find the things hidden in the foliage, and much tickier and buggier to work through). Well, that got accomplished . . . but then our neighbor planted her flowers while the truck was on top of the hill. Oye! Her husband said it was okay to drive down through their driveway, so it all worked out :) 

After I took the picture, I realized there were some debris slide possibilities, so I pulled a few more boards out of our second load pile (which is still on the hill) and some rusty nails out of the keep pile (which is much more neatly condensed on the hill), and I built some barricades around the sides. Graysen thought I was nuts for piling the truck so high, but not a thing fell out, woot! And getting rid of all this only cost us $25 at the recycling center :) That means fewer hidey-holes for the mice, snakes, grubs, wasps, ants, etc. on our property. I mean, they still have plenty of options, but at least we are not the ones providing them, ha!

Next load to go, plus a variety of things that found their way to the driveway. Oh, we did get the truck's previous rusty bumper into the scrap heap, so that makes me feel a lot better with all the little neighbor humans who like to frequent our yard, running around.

Burn pile, round one, of the year! Buck got this taken care of yesterday . . . along with spraying for ticks, spraying for moles/voles (of which we likely have trillions--going to give castor oil a try this year), spraying for weeds (well, this might still be in progress; we stopped by to see Gabby for a restock of supplies), and things are looking nice outside! Buck did a ton of work! There are lots of scrubby trees on my cut-down list, but I'll be patient with my lumberjacking for a little while longer ;)

MUCH smaller, neatly-ish stacked wood pile, ready for whatever project Graysen comes up with next!