Showing posts with label hay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hay. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

That Time of Year

We did a little running around today. Before I left, the field in front of our house looked like this:


Yes, it's that time of year. . . May. That's when the farmers do their first cutting of hay in our area. It was all cut and fluffed up when we left. When we returned, it looked like this:



and this:


I think a hayfield looks so pretty, but I have been sniffling a little today. I wonder why?

Also before we left, the mommy robin was standing guard over her nest. She decided to lay her eggs in the bird feeder at the end of the grapevines. The babies are very big now and ready to fly out.


When we returned, they had left the nest, but were still looking for their mama to feed them.
.




This is the second family of robins we have watched grow up and leave their nest. There is another one in the blackberry patch where the eggs haven't hatched yet. I'm starting to feel like our yard is a robin motel. . . with no vacancies!

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

It's a Dirty Job, But...

somebody has to do it.


Now that's a lot of hay!


Guess Who....




By the time you get to the end of this post, you will feel like you need a bath.

We have been working on this drainage ditch project for weeks. My son is a perfectionist and he had to have the slope and everything just right. Ever since we've lived here (just about all our married life), we've had a drainage problem at the side of our yard. The kids loved it when they were little. After a big rain, we would have huge puddles of water down there and they'd run through them and splash around and they'd watch the night crawlers float by. Well, that part was fun, but what wasn't fun was it staying wet and damp for days at a time. We'd squish around waiting for it to dry enough to cut the grass.

So it was my son's idea to do something about it.

We dug the ditch by hand, made sure the pitch was just right, shoveled gravel into it by hand, put the pipes in (and made sure the slope on them was just right), shoveled more gravel over the pipe and then shoveled the dirt back over everything. We ran out of dirt and had to take some from the garden, then yesterday the next door neighbor's project of digging up their driveway and sidewalk provided us with a large pile of dirt to use. We also wrapped the pipe and gravel with some type of cloth that water can penetrate, but it also keeps the dirt from getting in the holes of the pipe.

It took a couple of weeks, but today we finished!

We put down grass seeds and covered them with hay.



Boy it was a dirty job!


I repeat, it was a dirty job!


This picture reminds me of the little boy in the Peanuts comic strip.
I think Pig-Pen was his name.


I helped, but he didn't want to take my picture. You will have to take my word for it. I helped with the digging, shoveling, and seeding, and so did my husband and youngest son. We even had a few of Andrew's friends help with the digging.

I'm tired and I'm glad this project is over. Now, let the rains begin.

Anyone feel like taking a bath now?