April 29, 2016 Busy With The Tractor

The pen for the new girls,
inside the run.

Prairie stars covering our
small meadow.

Wednesday 4/27. Our mostly cloudy sky soon became covered with a heavy overcast.  All day it looked as if rain would begin falling at any moment, but it didn't until 5:30 pm, and then it was just a short, light shower.  It sure smelled good though.

Because of the ominous looking clouds, I hung the wash inside.  After lunch I loaded the tractor bucket with small and tiny branches left from the trees we cut down.  JB took several loads to the small swale that needs to be build up a bit.

It was a chilly day, with a high of only 42.

Thursday 4/28. It was 44 and clear this morning.  After hanging a load of wash outside, we got busy removing ten rotten stumps.  It really wasn't too hard, using a shovel and the tractor bucket, but I did get my cardio in for the day.  JB took the very fertile, rotten wood to the swale and one load to the compost pile.  In the next few days I will work on leveling out everything we have dumped on the swale, then JB will cover it with dirt.

It looks very different with the stumps gone.  They were all old ones that have been here since we bought the property.  There are a lot of others that need to be removed, but we will just work our way out from the house.  Lots of other things need to be done first, now that these are gone.

We built the pen for the new girls inside the large pen.  Our current girls seemed a bit upset at losing some of their space, but they did give us three eggs today.

I noticed that, along with all the wild flowers, devils claw is popping up in many places.  It's going to be a real pain in the patootie to get rid of.

Large, dark clouds began arriving from the southwest about 2:00 pm.  Our high for the day was 61.  A very pleasant day with a breeze just light enough to cool me off when I started to overheat.  And, as often happens, the clouds split to the north and south, taking the rain with them.  Rain that we could see falling far from us.

We had several deer at Rose Camp today.  There was a group of six or seven early this morning that JB saw before I got up, just grazing on the slope of the south ridge.  Then this evening there was a family group of three just across the driveway, a stag with its short antlers just beginning to grow, a doe and a yearling.  We didn't let the dogs out.  Just watched them graze.

Friday 4/29. Today would have been my Mother's 93rd birthday.  She has been gone from this earthly plane for more than twenty years now.  However, it is also Dinga's eighth birthday.

Thought for the day: Flowers are the alphabet of angels, whereby they write on the hills and fields mysterious truths.  Benjamin Franklin