Landed Gentry June/July 2020

 As you are well aware this time of year brought on more challenges, not only were we at the beginning of this pandemic, but America was smacked in the face with it's internal illness of racism. There are many reasons this has been a tough year. Having the land has been one of the greatest blessings I've had, my husband being number one. June was spent doing a lot of internal work as well as the external work on the land. I graded the road, protested, read how to be an Anti racist by Ibram X. Kendi and took in the beauty of nature as it blossomed on the land. 

By mid June we were able to get to work on the second culvert. The cement we (mostly matthew) poured had plenty of time to harden and we were ready to build up the road. 

This is a before photo, except we already got started, this was after at least one load of rock was dumped. It worked like the first culvert, he dumped rock or dirt, I evened it out.

This is the after shot, it was a good days work, a lot easier than the first culvert.

Towards the end of the month we were in strawberry season! I found an organic u-pick farm and got to work. I, all by my big girl self, picked 12lbs of strawberries! I brought them home, processed them, and froze the majority of it. I've been using them in smoothies, making strawberry ginger jam and still have plenty for the winter.

At the start of July we got visitors. Matthews parents came to spend 4th of July with us. It was the first time we spent on the land and didn't work our butts off the whole time. Having them around... it was like we gave ourselves permission to take it easy and just take it in. We spent almost the whole time like this... 

Hanging out talking. We got them to swim in the pond! Sorry, no photos of that.

So part of the road work is clearing trees that are too close and/or blocking sunlight. This was my first time felling a tree of this size and doing it alone. You can make out my little yellow chainsaw, my favorite toy.

I took down two trees that day, this was the other one, you can see how much sun is on the road compared to the area where we still need to remove trees that is shaded. This was tiring work, but I felt like a badass.

New toy! We need a snowblower for this winter, we got lucky and found one on craigslist for way cheaper than we thought we'd find. It is pretty heavy and Matthew figured out a cleaver way to strap it to the bucket so we could get it off the trailer and place it next to our other toy the brush hog, which somehow I failed to ever take a photo of getting and using. 

That's pretty much it. I didn't take photos every time I was on the land. I did a lot of grading, we did a lot of tree removal and there is so much more to do. We plan to continue working on the land in the winter. We can still remove trees while the road is covered in snow.