August! It's my birthday month. By this time I was getting burned out from grading and cutting trees. I was also stressing myself out. For my birth month I decided to celebrate myself by taking it easy. That being said I did still do work on the land, just not as intensely.
Picnic dinner with the girls
Local Donut is my favorite! They have incredible flavors. This was my birthday breakfast. Frangipane filled donut with blueberry glaze topped with blueberry compote... I'm drooling thinking about. I mean seriously doesn't get better than that for me.
Two of my favorite humans gifted me these flowers from their garden and a personalized birthday card
A few days after my birthday this crazy Colombian showed up.
With his older brother. Lalo fell in love with the tractor lol
They hung out for about 4 days, we cleared small trees over the septic site but mostly did this. Talked, caught up, bonded. All that good stuff. Someone even cried... and it wasn't me. Good times.
Went canoeing
With friends!
A different time they showed us this sweet swimming hole
At the end of the month we slipped in the removal of a culvert. If you read the previous posts, it's the one I worked on first, culvert number 7. I have a few photos of before and the start of digging with the tractor, then a video of getting the culverts out (again it was two separate culverts put next to each other, except this time there was a space between them full of dirt so nothing was flowing out!)
Before we started
getting closer
Here is a video of getting each culvert out (explicit language, if watching with kids)
The culverts were removed, dropped them at our dump site which is a large dump truck stuck in the earth on our land. We have been putting certain items in the back of it. We also cleaned up the ditch this created to have good water flow in mud season. We may put a new culvert later but it's not a priority right now.
Video of us dropping off the old culvert at the dump truck and me being my goofball self with the commentary...
That brings us to September! The two major projects were cutting down a large maple and a five day culvert replacement! First, the large maple looked half dead and was situated too close to our build site. It had the potential to fall on the house so we decided to get rid of it now.
I hoped this would give an idea of how big the tree is
Before we could even get started on the maple there were about a half dozen or more smaller trees we removed around it to make working on it manageable.
Me hacking at it. I like to think I was helpful, Matthew definitely did most of the effective work.
Here's the video of me talking about the project and getting down the first section
This is what we were working with on the inside, it made it easier to know when we could use a chainsaw for some of the work.
Second section down, totally missed recording it happen
Video of the last section (explicit language, if watching with kids)
After the tree was down we had to clean it up and buck the wood. Along with the smaller trees we started with, we ended up with a lot of wood piles, this is just one with some brush in the background.
While the weather was good Matthew wanted to attempt mounting the snowblower to the tractor to make sure it went smoothly, worked and we weren't missing any pieces. It all went fine!
first step, remove bucket
second step attach thingy to tractor
last step attach snowblower! Success
I imagine Matthew would be very disappointed I called the attachment a thingy, but he is working and I can't ask right now. After all that he then went in reverse to put the bucket back on. We will reattach the snowblower in early November, ideally before the first big snow.
Next and largest project so far, culvert replacement. Culverts 3 and 4 need to be completely replaced. We did Culvert 4 because it was easier to start with and we only had enough culverts for the one. At the time the place we ordered from didn't have enough for both culverts. Culvert 4 had, like the others so far, two culverts with ends lined up. The problem here is the culvert was too small, the water in mud season was flowing over the road. We decided to replace it with TWO larger culverts side by side. It was 15" wide, we bought two 18" by 20 ft long culverts. Now, we didn't think about getting those home from the store, we ended up cutting them in half to fit them on the trailer, which worked great. Before installing them we taped them together with... something like plumbing tape. I don't remember the name, I watched a video with professionals doing it and I got the same stuff.
New culverts
My gold chains lol we used these a LOT to move large rocks/boulders
Like this! I don't know how many we moved before we even started digging, maybe a half dozen
Video of breaking ground and starting the dig, mostly videos here on out.
Day one part two, totally missed recording the second culvert removal. Oh, and didn't use hand tools like I said we were going to in the video, and following videos for that matter. We used the tractor as much as possible.
Day two
Day three (only worked half the day because it was fall equinox)
Day four (another half day, we had two meetings in the morning so started late)
Day five! I'm over it by day five.
To round out the month I went on an awesome last minute overnight canoe camping trip with a friend.
Alright people, that's it! We are all caught up and at this point, don't see any more posts coming for a while. Thinking I'll keep with the same format of posting a two month summary. So, maybe new post in December.
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