Today was the day when the last of the snow was finally gone and the road grit and firewood shrapnel needed to be cleaned up.
The Town of Jackson's plow truck, like most in Maine, has a large gritter on the back which spreads a mixture of sand, gravel and salt on the roads each winter. A major spring chore is cleaning up all thus material before the spring rains take it into the rivers, or before it gets picked up by the wind and blown in people's faces.
In our case, since the plow truck will frequently venture across our lawn, we have to rake it up and often reseed grass too. You can see the big piles to the left of our mailbox.
This nasty material had been frozen to the ground, but finally the ice was all gone. I hooked our York rake up to the Kubota and proceeded to rake it all up. There was much more than usual and so I needed a place to put it. At the back of the north paddock is a gate which has become overgrown with tall weeds and brambles, a gate we will need one day for access to a large area of potential new graze, and so I dumped it there on the theory that I could use it to make a roadway that wouldn't allow brambles to grow at all.
The firewood shrapnel was mixed in with the gravel, but I raked it out by hand and took it to one of our big brush piles.
Now the rain has started and the lawns are getting washed clean. By the end of next week they should begin to green up.
The lambs were not very happy to have to go out in the rain today. Can't say I blame them. It's blowing a houlie out there.
I have to go out later myself, for a search and rescue training. Oh well. Time to break out the old Goretex. I have some left over from my RAF Mountain Rescue days.
By the time this storm reaches Scotland it will be a real Force Ten Highland gale. I can remember some MRT training days like that.
Just a few.
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Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.
The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive and read backwards from there to get it in chronological order.
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