May 18, 2016 Tractor Day #4 After Pictures

This is the bulk of what got done that wasn't burning wood in the meadows.

This is the view from the back gate.

This is the view from the East fence at the East Meadow Burn Pile.
The fire pile has shrunk up a bit.

This is a view of the West Meadow Burn Pile.

May 16, 2016 Scotty Squirrel

While we were cleaning up this little ground squirrel kept popping up. This picture was taken inside the container at the very back where we were storing some tomato cages. As Ann went back to take a picture Scotty screamed at her, but didn't move. 

Scotty seemed to be everywhere. I almost ran him over with the excavator, and would have except Ann was riding shotgun and called him out. 

Scotty

May 15, 2016: Puppies are on the way!

The Cinnamon Bear lost her mucus plug and her temp is a low 98 degrees. Looks like puppies arrive tonight!

May 15, 2016 Bonus Tractor Day #4 Day 3

I almost got through all of this without one picture of
the excavator putting stuff into a dumpster.
Manly - Yes?

We were supposed to have Sunday off, but still had four hours left on the rental so  . . . Bonus! A rainy day, but not too wet to make a big difference.

Starting off a little later than before, we took a side trip to look at some old aluminum lamp posts I had found laying in a guy's truck that were reclaimed from an old farmhouse built in the post war period of the last century (maybe my longest run-on sentence ever (six verbs)). They were fantastic. One has one light and a mailbox, the other has four lights. So I bought them. More to follow on this later when we figure out what to do with them

We arrived at the Farm to find our new neighbor, Lance, already at work cutting up the Motor home, the mobile homes were already carted off. Ann's fires were still burning even though it was raining. She got things going again and I finished loading the dumpsters. We spent the rest of the day cleaning up, leveling the ground, and burning the last of the wood.

Tractor Day #4 was over at four, only taking three long days and one short one.

May 14, 2016 Tractor Day #4 day two

This is the pile when we started.
The shipping container is on the left,
the pile started about four feet past the doors.
Click on this for a bigger view.

By the time we got back to the Farm our fires had burned down, but one of them was still hot enough to jump right back into flames. Ann Started a new fire nearby the trash pile out of scrap wood from the trash. She is getting pretty good at starting fires. She had a huge fire going in a few minutes.

As I piled trash into the dumpsters using the excavator she picked out wooden debris to stoke the fire. Eventually she had a huge bonfire going while I went back and forth stoking the other fires with the tractor.

This is a view of the pile from the front.
The blue tarp in the foreground was the pile that the previous
owners had piled up when trying to prepare the place for sale.
The rock pile in the foreground is Polscher's Pile,
a donation to our project.

As it tuned out there was about a ton of metal in the trash. The roof from the mobile home, the body of the motor home, and one camper, plus the metal from the shed Jack knocked down on Tractor Day #2 all had to be pulled out of the trash and put into a pile of it's own.


At lunch time a couple of guys walked onto the Farm and ask whether we had plans for all of the steel framing left over from the mobile and motor homes. Needless to say we had none, so they began cutting them up with a welding torch and hauling it all away. Lance was the guy's name. He lives nearby and across the highway where he building trailers out of scrap steel. So the steel being carted off was a good for the both of us.

By the end of the day we had most of the dumpsters filled, most of the wood burned, and most of the steel removed, but the place was still quite a mess.