April 19th and still snowing

Seems like it should be time for the snow to be over but it's snowed twice this week. It snowed enough on Monday that they got the plows out (we had been speculating that they had already removed the plows from the town trucks).

Monday's snow melted. At 6:00 am this morning, there was no snow. The picture below was shot at 8:30 am. It melted again through the day and now it's dumping again.

We've had Nicko and Maya here this week while their parents visit Iceland. We've had a number of activities going on.

• I burned my last brush pile on Tuesday. With all of the snow that was on the pile,I wondered if I'd even be able to get it started. It wound up being the easiest burn of the year.
• Kristen and Maya have been sewing some clothes for Maya's American Girl dolls. Maya's been doing most of the stitching by hand.
• Kristen has wanted a raised strawberry bed back by her raised vegetable beds. I built her one on Wednesday and sited it just across the creek from the vegetable beds. The vegetable beds are both 4' x 8' and the strawberry bed is 2' x 8'.

The strawberry bed it to the right and back behind the vegetable beds,

-JC-

I'm a Lumberjack and That's OK

Well, not really..

Kristen has been after me to build a raised strawberry bed over on the other side of the creek that runs along the edge of the lawn. Her concern was a dead tree that she says has concerned her every time that she works with the vegetable beds. Naturally, that tree had to come down before work on the raised bed could commence.

After watching some This Old House and purchasing some tree felling wedges, I was confident that I could drop the tree across my burn area on the other side of the creek. It didn't quite work out that way.

The tree fell exactly where Kristen was afraid that it would go. It went right across the center of where the strawberry bed will be. It crushed the corner of the fence around one of the vegetable beds. This was easy to fix and did no damage to the actual bed.

The trunk was about 12" thick at the base and was about 75' high (I measured it once it was down). It came within about 6" of hitting the garage.

Here are a couple of pictures that Kristen took (as evidence for the next time that I go to cut down a tree):

I had obviously already started on the cleanup here. That's the stump back behind the leftmost of the 2 rocks at the top-left part of the picture. The bent corner post is at a 45 degree angle. The taller post is one of the bird houses that I had moved to safty (nice try!).

This bird house was unscathed (actually, they both came through fine).

-JC-