Sunday Not-Work Work

Oh my, what a day yesterday!  I wanted to work on the neglected back yard a bit.  It will soon be summer  and the backyard and other purely ornamental areas will be in nearly irredeemable disarray. (Yes, for some places in the yard and house summer gets here in a flash, if I’m not careful.) So to begin a weekly little ritual in hopes to stay on top of the “sittin’ yards”, Sunday is to putter in them. 

First thing to tackle, remember the storm photos of the ol’ cherry tree?  The tree wasn’t broken, it fell over, shoving roots down on one side and bringing them up on the other, only not as bad as some uprooted trees like fir trees.  But there would soon be a bigger mess to handle and a bigger mess to look at if we wait until summer to get to it. 

So I talked Dirt into joining me in my undertaking.  At first he was not happy, he doesn’t suffer ADD like I do, and his mind was on getting back out and finishing up the work he started Saturday, how noble.  But he acquiesced, mostly cuz I threatened to go get my own chain saw (I used to have my own chain saw. I know how to run one but mostly I just leave the sawing to Dirt and so my chain saw didn’t get replaced when it died).

The plan was to leave a tall stump of the Ol’ Cherry tree.  I had a silver vine climbing in the tree, I had separated a good chunk of it several weeks ago and was thinking of having an archway spanning from the old stump to the gate into the duck pasture to support it.

The weight of the upper limbs was amazing!  Some of the cuts that Dirt made made the tree crack and groan and crack some more.  Dirt thought that when he cut away the top of the tree that the stump would stand back up.  It didn’t.

We figured that the Lil’ Orange Tractor could shove it back up straight.  Before the tractor could come down and right the stump the rest of the trunk and big branches needed to be cut up and prepped for becoming fire wood or smoker wood. While Dirt did that I worked on some of the other flower beds while I secretly watched and made sure he was thinking about his cuts and not in a mindless hurry because I had asked him to do something other than what he had planned for his day. (Significance of that statement will be revealed in tomorrow’s post.)

Right when he was about to slice up one big trunk piece, I reminded him that he wanted to use a big wood plank for my counter top in the Market Shed.

Instead of cutting it up I went and got the tractor and we hauled it up to the garage until we decide how it will become a plank (by Dirt or a local saw mill).  It needed to be out of the way and out of the fray of firewood production.

Where was Bet during all this work..?

Where do you think she is?  I’ll reveal her location later in the post if you haven’t figured it out.

Back to what Dirt and I were doing.

I really thought that I needed the trunk to go back into place.  When it fell over it disrupted a lot of soil, I could see that I had already lost some of my bulbs, when I tried to retrieve them I couldn’t get in between the roots. In that exercise I could see that there were big open pockets where the soil will just keep on falling into.  Gardening nightmare!  Okay, maybe not nightmare, just a severely bad dream.

And if you can see the little baby trunk here at the bottom left of the picture, that is one of two of the little cherry trees that will take the place of the ol’ cherry tree, he needed to have soil nice and tight around his poor violated roots.

Dirt continued to slice up the trunk and limbs until we could bring the Lil’ tractor around to push the trunk back into place. 

Uh Ya.  No. 

So Dirt figured the Orange Beast would take care of it.  So the Beast came into the backyard, backed up to Cherry Hill Garden, the chain wrapped ‘round the middle of the stump, he pulled with the Beast while I shoved with the Lil’.  And still nothin’. 

Sorry we don’t have more pictures of the ordeal.  It was just Dirt and I,

Bet was elsewhere… Can you figure out where she is?  Any way, with just the two of us I needed to do more than sit on the tractor and take pictures.  Occasionally I got off the slowly sinking tractor to take a ‘nuther look at the situation, moved chain, moved branches…

But finally we gave up.  Now with the ground below Cherry Hill Garden totally tore up, two large divots in Cherry Lawn caused by the Beast, even though Dirt put boards under the tires, the stump barely budged.  Whoda thunk it!

Dirt moved the Beast out of the backyard and then moved on.  On to other more pleasurable jobs.  Did I mention that the weather yesterday was amazing?  Half way through our work I was whining for a Coke (I completely love Coke on a sunny nearly spring day while I am working hard in the garden).  It was a motersickle  sorta day.

Even though the rest of the week did not look motersickle friendly, it was necessary to make sure the ride was ready for spring, including washing off the winter dust. Very important.

So I was left to my own devises. 

Oooh maybe that was a bad thing  I drove the Lil’ many times in and out of the back yard, perhaps too many times.  Multiple tire tracks were there still this afternoon. 

Before Dirt abandoned me he cut off the remaining trunk.  (In the photo he is cutting off where the original trunk branched.)  Which! made a great new candidate for the slab counter top.  So after I was abandoned and trying to get the roots of the ol’ stump and the new little babies covered, I also needed to get that log up to where it would be safe, or at least it needed to be moved before August, which I figured might be the next time Dirt would be workin’ on the backyard.

I pretty much got this baby into the bucket, okay Dirt helped a little on the final roll when I hollered out to him.  Me and Lil’ Orange hauled it to the saw pile.

I worked on the area, widening a pathway and using the soil to fill in the holes in around the remaining stump.

Now we have a remaining, nearly mossy, stump for a remembrance of the the Ol’ Cherry Tree, that provided us with numerous cherry pies, lunches on the lawn in its shade and a couple of weddings beneath its giant verdant branches.

More settling needs to happen, the rain is helping with that today, but for the most part my work is done, save for the bulbs I did save from the nether lands to plant and some other little things to be planted and more sculpting on the path and adjacent beds.

Which, alone or with friends will be where I work again next Sunday, barring any urgent needs somewhere else on the farm.

I’m trying very hard to make sure nothing is forgotten that needn’t be forgotten, so I hope that I can make it back here next Sunday. 

Today Bet and I were attending to “crops” in the hoop house, high tunnel, in the Market Garden.

Lettuces, radiccio, and spinach went into some lovely warm ish soil under the cover of a high tunnel.

Tomorrow, oh who knows, I hate to say what I will be doing because not only do I always run under my own ADD but we also are under the gun of lambing season still.

But I do need at sometime this week to go north to the greenhouse supplier and the fertilizer (organic of course) man.  The weatherman is predicting stellar weather later on in the week, and fairly nice by day after tomorrow, so weather wise, I would much rather be in the car in the rain tomorrow than missing being on the farm in the sun.  No, I don’t like running errands in the rain, but I love being home when it is sunny, I always have work but the work without rain and the raingear always goes so much slower, time in town, seems to be the same no matter the weather.

Oh where was Bet this last Sunday?

Did you figure it out?

She was pruning trees.  I love to have all of us working on the same thing but sometimes lots of stuff needs to get done and not necessarily by six hands at the same time.  Yes, “many hands make light work” but the same is true of “divide and conquer”. 

Thanks for stopping by for the weekend wrap up Dear Reader, I sure hope your weekend was as fun and productive as ours here at Vicktory Farm & Gardens.