Back at the farm....

Well, we arrived at the farm around 4:15am this morning. It was a long drive last night. Neil and I took turns driving and we still needed to pull over and sleep for a while. We were glad to crawl in bed once we got here!

We needed to drive all night because our new steel building was getting delivered this morning and we needed to be here to unload it. It is hard to believe that such a small pile of metal can turn into such a large building! Our neighbor Dan is going to be pouring the concrete pad for this building soon (I hope). I will post more photos as this job is completed.

Once the delivery was done we packed up the kids and went out to brunch as we didn't have much in the house to eat. Stopped in at Lowe's and Food Lion to get what we needed for the weekend and then headed home. The rest of the day we spent doing yard work. Neil raked all the leaves from around the house. He said he didn't think this had every been done before since their was glass and bits of shingle under the leaves. The house has had a metal roof for 5 years! The problem we have with stuff like dried leaves here is that unless we want to shift everything out we can't put it into our compost bins since it has so much trashy stuff in it. So, we have to pile it out by the junkpile in the woods until the time comes when that whole mess needs to be delt with.

Neil and I took turns with the JD push mover around the house and in the tight places and then I got to mow the large side yard with the Kabota tractor. Neil had them install a deck mower on the tractor when he bought it. It works great! After I finished the side yard and some of the larger bits around the house I headed out to the pasture. It was in bad shape after not being grazed most of last summer and fall. We did have a neighbor come and bushhog it down for us last fall but it has just been laid over since that time. I was pleased with how the pasture looked after the mowing. The deck mower did a pretty good job chewing up the large straw that was choking out the new grass from growing up. Made it much easier to walk through and for us to see the debri we needed to remove from the field. Bits of lumber, down fence posts, rocks, two big gopher holes that will need to be filled in. I am not too worried about gophers staying in the field once our LGDs are on patrol.

Neil took over mowing the pasture once the kids got tired and wanted me to go inside with them. I figure the cleared pasture is 7-8 acres and we managed to get about 1/5 of it mowed today.