Fall of the Year

2 Cords stacked

I'm finally posting to the blog after a 6 month hiatus of spending all my free time at the barn. There was life BH and now there's life AH--that's life before horses and after horses. My poor yard has been growing a bad case of Maine Yahhd Disease--stuff left lying around all summer, leaves coming down and burying said stuff, and junk I need to deal with--old broken wheelbarrow, dead table saw, cast-off windows that never made it into cold frames. So I vowed today to get some work done on the neglected home front. And since I did get in a morning ride and time with the ponies, I didn't feel guilty about spending the rest of the day working in the yard!

First up was to get the rest of the wood stacked. I've had nearly a cord sitting in the drive, waiting for me to get going on it. Due to my rotator cuff injury, I've been taking it slow and easy on the stacking. But I've been feeling a lot stronger, and decided to flex my muscles today! I even got out the maul and split some of the gigantic pieces. Those still sitting in front of the pile are tough ones I'm leaving for John to take a whack at. At its tallest, that pile is over 6 feet, probably closer to 7, especially near the back. But it was a good sense of accomplishment.

Adirondak Blues and Katahdins

Then I addressed the potatoes. I planted some of last year's leftover Adirondak Blues and Katahdins in one of the raised beds. What a surprise I got when I dug them up today! Not too many in quantity, but check out the size of some of these babies! And the grand winner is this one: a giant Katahdin that weighed in at 1 lb. 12 oz.--that's nearly a meal in itself!

Maple Sugaring season is upon us...

And what better way to do it than out of the back of the pickup! The days are too filled for us to run back and forth from barn to house, not to mention the price of gas! So we lugged all our equipment out to the barn and set up a drip spout to keep the "evaporator" boiling with a steady supply of sap.

While we boiled sap, we burned a pile of scrap fencing and downed limbs, bathed a couple of the horses and swept out the empty loft. After all this was done, we still had enough daylight to get Harley and Rolex Girl out for a short ride. I love these long daylight hours!