That was the title of a book I had as a kid, about two bears that bought a farm and decided to become farmers. I remember it fondly. Now you can find it on Google Books. :)Sometimes I feel like Big Bear Dan and Little Bear Ben. Always something to learn and do. Fortunately I don't have to depend on supplying my own food for the winter...
Yesterday I had two young friends come by to spend a good bit of their day helping out. One cleaned the Airstream bathroom and kitchen to sparkling condition.
The other worked with me cutting down more than a dozen trees along the street. We managed to figure out a system that worked VERY well. I'd put a ladder up as high as I could reach on the tree, tie off a very long rope and then notch the tree with a chain saw so it would fall away from the pool area. Then we'd use the long rope attached to Eloise to pull over the tree. We started on the end of the row farthest from the pool and worked our way closer to it.
It was amazing how well it worked. I think these are swamp maples and they're not very strong and they snapped right where they were supposed to. It's a good feeling when a plan actually works. :) Once they were on the ground we'd cut off the top branches to be burned on the brush pile, the logs I'll cut up for firewood. The brush pile is now HUGE and may have to be rearranged before we light it, it's too close to some trees I really don't want to kill.
There are four trees along the road that are still on "my side" of the phone/CATV wires. Only one is close to the pool and will need special care coming down. All the others are either grown up between the two wires or are on the other side of the wires.
The ones that are not entangled and lean over the road will require a larger crew to drop. We'll need traffic control and more warm bodies to clear the road quickly. The trees that are between the two wires will be a problem. We'll have to get above the wires and cut off that portion, then cut just below the wires to free them from the entanglement, then cut at the normal height.
For anyone who cares: the reason they have to come down is two fold. The leaves in the pool are a maintainence issue, and their entanglement in the phone/CATV lines pose a potential hazard in an ice storm. We're leaving stumps and growth about five feet tall to maintain our privacy in that yard while a new line of bushes (lilacs and evergreens) and small trees (mostly dogwood) gets started behind them. Once the new screen has grown up, we'll cut the current trees flush with the ground.
The storage room isn't done yet, but we're pretty close. All that remains is mudding and painting and installing the lights. I'm going over today to put a coat of mud on and expect to be building shelves by Monday. Once shelving is in place, we'll give notice on our rental house and things kick into high gear to get ourselves moved onto the property.
We've mounted a fan on the south gable of the barn and it does a good job of taking the hot air off the top of the barn loft.
I put in twin unpowered vents on the north side to provide and "inlet" and relieve some of the heat problems there as well. We've caulked each seam, then painted the north end to match the south end. I'm not sure when we'll get to the trim, but that'll keep for a bit. The fellows who've been working with me the last few weeks did a great job on that.If you compare to how it looked a few years ago, we've come a long way. :)
Around the yard we've cut and widened the path up to what I call the "privy corner" so that I can manuver my "used to be a pick up truck bed" trailer (which we've dubbed Gavin McLoad, fans of Love Boat will understand) up there easier. Some debris isn't worth taking to the county dump, might as well let it rot in peace.
Gavin is full of metal debris at the moment. A friend will soon come to pick it up to recycle, I hope. It's astonishing how much metal junk we've picked up around the place. Everything from old gutters to fence wire to hot water heaters to you name it.
Sal worked very hard to get the pool up and running this year. The filter needed extensive repairs and replacements and she did a great job with it. The weather has been a little cool for extensive swimming, but it's almost August so I expect that will change at some point.
The pontoon boats are now tucked into a corner of the property that is out of the way. Hope to get them off the ground and back on wooden blocks, & covered with a tarp, soon. Nice to have that part of the yard freed up again. If you saw "Gods and Generals" you saw some of these boats. They're part of a larger collection that is a recreation of a Civil War era floating bridge, which I'm storing for a friend.Oh, and we've gotten new blades installed on Eloise so she's back to cutting grass and the lawns look marvelous. It took forever to get the right blades once one of the old ones snapped, but we finally managed. Now I just need to return the "wrong blades" to a very unresponsive seller on eBay...
We've had a fair amount of rain through the summer so far and things are still pretty green, which is great as long as I've got a good mower! :) Fortunately, now I have both the walk behind mower AND Eloise doing her thing. I mowed up on the hillside yesterday and it was so enjoyable to tool around up there and make sure the paths stayed open.
Well, time to hit the road and get spackle all over me. Like it was with the bears in the story, winter's coming. :)
