Cutting Down a Tree

January 6, 2015

Time to Mulch!

Working

We headed over to my Aunt’s and Uncle’s house to help them landscape their front yard.



There used to be a lot of unseemly plants and ivy growing in this area, so the plants were pulled out, the weed fabric was pulled up and we smoothed the ground out.

Sep 5 11

Mowing @ the Bauwens’ House

  Today we drove down to the Bauwen’s house to help them mow their lawn.  The grass was waist-height when they first arrived from Detroit, so they had to brush hog the field before mowing it.  There were a lot of grass clippings we had to rake up and haul away before we could begin mowing.

  Noah had a good time driving the pick up truck we used to haul off the grass. He said that he got about 30 minutes of driving in, but most of the time he was in reverse!

 

Benjamin on the tractor

While we were working on the yard Deanna was dismissed from the hospital and her family drove her home. A lot of friends and family stopped by to visit with her and say goodbye.

  The Bauwens will be leaving tomorrow for Detroit. 

Working in the Gardens & in the Treetops

   We were very busy today working in the yard and in the garden.  I did a lot of shoveling, Benjamin resembled a monkey as he pruned the trees and we also planted a few more plants and mulched another section of the yard.

   I worked on turning up the soil for the “East” garden.  It was quite a job using the Maddox to bust up the chunks of sod.

 

 

 

 

 

Benjamin trimming the trees

Benjamin thinks he remembers reading about a woodpecker that’ll place acorns inside of a tree, but he can’t remember for sure what species it was.

Noah cut down some bamboo to use as posts for the tomatoes to grow on.

The west garden mulched

 

The new blackberry patch

Gardening

We’ve decided that’d we’d like to do some gardening this year, so we’ve begun to prepare for planting this week. Now that it’s stopped raining and we’ve gotten the water in the basement under control we’ve been able to get a few things done.

Stacking wood

I am planting a few grape plants for this year, but I’ll also be trying to rejuvenate our old, very-neglected, grape vines.  I keep on kidding that at the end of the year I’ll have some “Vintage 2011” in the cellar.  Noah wants me to see me barefoot stomping on grapes…

I had to dig out a few holes for the new posts.

 

Of course, we also had to plant the un-productive flowers for looks.

 

 

Okay, maybe it’s worth it!

Mulching the Yard

Yay! It’s mulching day!

I’ve always enjoyed mulching our yard because of the huge difference it can make in such a short period of time.

Thankfully we’ve already gotten both riding lawn mowers running, although the mower won’t engage on one of them.

 

We had to make a couple of berms last year to help manage the enormous amounts of water that are eroding our yard.  We’ll also add some ornamental plants to the berm.

 

We’ve also ordered some grass plugs that should hopefully transform this yard into a lawn.

September 30-Photos

We continued our little pond renovation today and are pretty happy with how the pond area turned out. We'll put some mulch and plants where the pond used to be.
We also built a retaining wall to help with some erosion problems we have in our yard.
You can see the first post about this pond on September 1.

July 22, 2009

This morning Noah took a peek at the other tractor that won’t start up. He played with it a little bit and got it to startup and run just fine. I sure could have used another driver while I was mowing yesterday!
We went into town to pick up the paint we needed for the gables and we also grabbed some pizzas and ravioli to eat while we’re working.
After getting back home in the afternoon, Benjamin began cleaning the white lamp post at the end of our driveway and my Mom began painting above (not on top off) the garage door. I began to wash down the second gable.
Benjamin and Noah had planned to go down to the creek yesterday, but the rain had stopped them and they went down there to fish today.
While Mom painted and I washed the gable we listened to the CDs of Paul Jehle from Liberty Day 2009. He does an excellent job in breaking down the doctrine of interposition and then applies to the government today.
We had also picked up a new door knob from the store to replace the broken one on the deck. I thought it’d be easy, but for some odd reasons it took us a long time to put on.
Replace deck door knob
Wash gable II & III
Wash white lamp post
Paint over garage door

July 21, 2009

After a fairly late night we got up and attached the new mower blade onto the mower deck. After getting the mower deck hooked up I began mowing the yard-it felt good to be on the tractor again!

Some pop-up storms later in the day slowed us down a bit because we couldn’t continue to paint.

We did the following:

Repair tractor blade
Paint screen door
Paint front door area and other trim areas
Mow grass
Tonight I made some excellent cookies and some sweet tea which was quite an accomplishment for me. Because of my slightly inferior housekeeping skills I have been nicknamed, “Domestic Disaster” and “Culinary Catastrophe.”

July 20, 2009

We got up early and after breakfast we wrote a list of projects to work on during the next six weeks before we put our house on the market. However, I’m sure that the list will be twice as long before we’re done because we continually add projects to the list.
Benjamin washed down the garage door and painted it very white-a little too white!
We washed down one of the three gables and hope to be painting it tomorrow.
Noah took apart the down spout of the guttering system and cleaned it out. It had gotten clogged up and the water wasn’t flowing away from the house last time it rained.
I recently cleared some area of our yard that had “grown up” in the past couple years. WE have a few grape vines so I had to be careful when I was cutting all of the underbrush down. There were also a whole lot of thorns so I was pretty thankful for my leather work gloves! Anyway, I dragged all of the branches and thorn-um-plants to a burn pile.
I also stripped some old caulking from a window with a screw driver and utility knife.
“Replace Porch Carpet” is on the list so I pulled off the old carpet and scraped some of the adhesive away. Benjamin & Mom washed the old carpet and put it on the deck.
We have three riding lawn mowers. Zero work. We haven’t mowed in a month (the day before we left for Boston) and although the grass isn’t too tall for tennis shoes it’s still pretty dangerous for sandals.,.
This spring we had gotten two of the tractors fixed, but a mower blade was bent on one and another one won’t even start up. We took off the mower deck and tried to bend the broken blade back in place (try saying that five times fast!!) However, we couldn’t pry it in place plus it wasn’t pliable enough to position it (alright enough with the tongue twisters.)
Tonight we went to Sears & K-Mart to pick up a new mower blade and some paint that wasn’t so white. However, the paint area had been removed and the paint areas at the other stores had already closed down.

Today we marked off:
Replace light bulb in white lamp post
Gather aluminum cans to recycle
Haul away branches
Remove caulking from Noah’s window
Wash down garage door
Paint garage door
Wash down front porch area
Wash gables I II & III
Clean gutter extensions
Clean porch carpet