Taking Back the Land

Since I got back, there is a lot of deferred maintenance needing to be done, and so that’s the name of the game since I got back. Much of the spring time was spent working on figuring what’s going on with the land, what needs to be tended to, and what needs to be prioritized. Fortunately, most everything is in a good state of affairs. Since I got back, there is a lot of deferred maintenance needing to be done, and so that’s the name of the game since I got back. Much of the spring time was spent working on figuring out what’s going on with the land, what needs to be tended to, and what needs to be prioritized. Fortunately, most everything is in a good state of affairs.

Roads are in okay condition at this point, but they are going to need to get a box blade on there soon. Unfortunately, nobody has a tractor or box blade to repair the road. The local rental place has a tractor, but it’s not allowed to have the excavator on the back taken off. Nor is it strong enough to do this type of work. So, road stuff will need to happen in the future once I have a plan. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that throwing rock onto it will work until the sub surface is reworked. Probably needs some new water bars as well.

Fortunately, the kind farmer continues to cut the grass for me. And by that, I mean he is actively growing and harvesting hay off the land. That’s a huge help for me because the land can regrow forests extremely quickly in this area. However, the area of the orchard became extremely overgrown and lots of volunteer trees (with super sharp thorns) came up.

Pardon the terrible image quality. But as you can see lots of new volunteer trees came up and need to be removed. Time to get to work, one by one.

For this job, I started off using a new hand saw my mom got me for Christmas. But after a few hours and a good workout, I realized this just wasn’t going to work out. So at that point I moved over to a reciprocating saw. It was just too much to tackle by hand, and this made the job much easier.

Couple of the many piles of volunteer trees I made. These are just drying out right now. I think I am going to try and figure out how to get these made into mulch for the small stuff, and probably some of the bigger stuff will end up in the camp fire. At this point, it has been cut and dried for a few months so it’s good to go. Sadly, some of the stumps are starting to regrow, so that’s going to be some more work later on.

Weird thing: I have no idea what caused it but after doing work on the trees I had a massive out break of hives. Like, super bad… worst in my life. Doctors couldn’t figure out what it was. They were telling me must be some sort of poison ivy, but that 1) doesn’t exist up there (or at least I have not seen it yet), and 2) It was too early in the season and even if it was there it would not have emerged yet. Got put on two rounds of steroids and antihistamines. Still unclear if it helped or it just went away naturally, but it was two not fun weeks until it went away. Only time something like that has happened since I started working out there.