December 29, 2008 ~ Beautiful Day

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The law of entropy keeps us busy. Our air compressor died a few months previously, so with some scraping of spare money and a little gritting of teeth, we went ahead and bought this little one that we could afford. We have to keep up on airing up tires and we use it a lot for blowing off equipment. It was 75 dollars, and still not very powerful. It takes a long time to air up the tires on the car. But it's ours and it does the job. Sort of.... Definitely better than the one that gasped it's last with a plume of smoke could now.



The day before, Michael and I had enjoyed a 75 degree Saturday out on our back porch target shooting with BB guns, reading, eating salads and drinking OJ. This day was considerably cooler, but we had a gate to put in the pasture fencing to make it easier for the neighbor to access the pasture with his tractor. Through this beautiful meadow next door!



So here is our bucket of tools we bring out to work on the electric fencing. We've got a spool of wire, some clips to fasten the wired to posts. Wire cutters...



Michael, preparing to make a cut in the wire so we can splice in gate handles.



Actually, I took that meadow picture AFTER the handles were put in, so check them out above. Here we are testing to make sure the electricity from the car battery down by the barn is making it all the way up through the handles we just spliced in.



Here's a closeup of the garden plot.
The reason for ripping the sod up into high piles before the freezing season is that the clods of dirt are difficult to garden in. Lifting the dirt up while wet causes the earth to break loose from itself as it repeatedly freezes and thaws all winter. Then tilling it in the spring gives a beautiful soft earth to plant in. On a smaller scale you can simply turn your little garden plot over with a shovel, then use a rotor tiller or hand cultivator to break it up in the spring.



We could not afford to buy alfalfa bales for the horses this winter. I tried to sell them, but with the economy so bad and the hay yields no better, no one wanted to buy them but for very cheap prices. You have to be careful. Cheap horses can end up at the butcher and shipped out of the country. I don't consider it worse to eat a horse than a cow, but when you have horses, you just think of them differently than food. So we didn't sell. We did get a wonderful deal on rolls of pasture hay, and the neighbor loaned us his broken hay ring feeder. Very nice!



Here we are taking about 1/2 an hour to air up the tires on the minivan.



Target shooting at old leaves.



This is the old pickup that I am trying to get running. We really need it as we haul a lot of stuff. But having a bit of trouble. We are trying several things.



Making sure we keep up on the pool so it's not a nightmare when warmer weather hits. So much easier to take care of jobs when they are not overwhelming. Our first year after my husband left us, the place was a disaster from him not wanting to do anything here. So we had an incredible amount of catch-up work to do. I'd like to work on new things this year, rather than repairing too many old things.



Have a great day!
Faith
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