A Family Adventure


in the mountains, ocean, and air

weekend update

May 1, 2012
Emilie Phillips

We had a very effective weekend. I started Saturday by planting the hardiest of the plants I had bought. There is not much top soil around our house, so I had to import a bunch from the loam pile at the other end of the yard. That pile is well over my head, so it may just be that we need to bring it all back to the house and spread it around. I worry about messing up drainage, though by bringing the ground around the house up too much. While I was working with the loam pile, I noticed there were some blueberries growing on top. So I transplanted one of them to the front of the house. There was not much more I could do with the plants given the frost warnings, but I did line the one walkway through the future plant bed with rocks.

 

Then I switched to cleaning up the yard. Our yard has a lot of dead fall. About 30 or 40 years ago (guessing from tree ages), the property was logged, so there is old debris lying around from that opperation. Then when we moved in, we had all the pine logged and made a new mess. Then last fall we had the early snow storm which cracked all our oaks in half or worse. Since I did not have the power tools out to deal with the still half attached oaks, I concentrated on the downed debris in one area. I also found an old metal fence post. It is slow work, so it ended up being a postage size area I cleaned up.

 

Then Tyson and I took our trash and recycling to the dump (including the fence post). On the way back I showed Tyson an old mill dam in one of the state forests. I had missed it last time I was there, but some of the old gears are lying in the stream a little ways below the dam.

 

That afternoon, I switched to staining a wood access ladder we are going to put up in the house. I had procrastinated on that until the garage warmed up. Meanwhile Tyson got out the chain saw and worked on the worst of the oaks that had actually fallen into the airport property. He made great progress chopping them up, but when I finished staining he was still hauling piles of branches. With two of us the cleanup went faster. There is still tons more to do in that area, but with the worst of the storm damage removed, it looks better from the house and from the airport.

 

All that yard work pretty well tired us out. My legs were quite sore. So we treated ourselves to dinner out.

 

Sunday morning, there was a break in the prevalent windy conditions, so I flew Tyson to breakfast. Then we went over to his grandmother’s to go kayaking. I fell asleep on the ride home. My body was really hoping I could be lazy the rest of the evening, but no, I varnished the ladder. So now all that project needs is to be mounted to the wall.