One Acre Down….Two to Go

We worked away until a neighbor felt sorry enough for us to bring over a tractor with a mower.

Several neighbors wanted to hogbrush the land for us but we were finding all sorts of dangerous obstacles abandoned in the tall grass so we did a walk ahead of the tractor. We had so much out there. Junk. Metal. Pieces of rotten wood. Rocks. Tons and tons of rocks.

We only have this much more to deal with……….

and then some.

My personal projects? I took care of the ancient apple tree. It was being strangled out by all kinds of wild things.

I also sprayed it with a solution of soap and water. I had bought pesticides but lost my nerve at the last minute. Just couldn’t do it. I don’t know if the soap will work or not. Some of the apples already have worms but many don’t. The tree will be pruned in January.

Another one that I worked on deligently was the raspberry patch. It looked like this when I stumbled upon it.

This isn’t all of it either. It turns to the right and continues for several feet. The problem here, besides the tangled mess it is, was that its a thorny black cap berry. We harvested as we went along and got about a gallon full of the berries in over the course of several hours. It now looks like this.

I notice grape leaves growing along with the berry on some trellises to the right. I also notice tons more scattered around here and there in other areas of the land but not black caps, bigger, maybe true raspberry and of course-all thorny.

I froze some up at the farm and I made a brandy infusion while there. Recipe will be up at my personal cookbook site along with photo.

When I came home, I made jam.

Our well is being drilled as we speak. Will be writing about water rations some time soon, maybe tomorrow. It wasn’t hard but it was not a pleasure exactly either.