Today on the Homestead

We've been working to get the foundation prepped for the construction of the waterfowl house.  Our good neighbor brought in a load of coarse fill to level out the site.  Then as an addition of more fill, he also dug dirt out of an area in the hill at the back of our property we wanted leveled as an area in which to push plowed snow.  All this coarse fill contained many, many good-sized rocks which needed to be removed.

Our dear (and strong) daughter spent the whole day yesterday working on that small job while we made a supply run to the big city.  She filled a total of 78 buckets with rocks, loaded them onto the bed of her pick-up, drove them to our designated rock pile and unloaded them.  Seventy-eight buckets of rocks!  And she wasn't finished with the task.

Papa Pea went out to help her this morning and between them both they filled 46 more buckets for a grand total of 124 filled, hauled and dumped.  If we figured each bucketful weighed somewhere around 40 pounds, that means a total of nearly 5,000 pounds of rocks was moved.  Holy. big. job.

Next we were ready for the first load of Class 5 road material which is crushed gravel, sand and clay all mixed together.  No big rocks in it, thank gawd.  One more load of the same and we should be in business.

While all this was happening, I was working in the garden doing more clean-up and tilling.

More work on the recently plowed up area designated for the new raspberry patch and other plantings.

I harvested all but two of the pumpkins from my little pumpkin patch.  (Those two haven't turned orange yet for some reason.)  The crop was good this year undoubtedly because of our hot growing season.  That largest one on the left weighed in at 35 pounds!  Not a world record by any means, but a giant for my garden.

I dressed out the window boxes in their autumnal finery.

This is the small window box outside our bathroom window.  The Virginia Creeper, which is starting to turn its gorgeous fall color, completely covered this window and window box so I gave it a shave and haircut before I filled the window box.

It certainly looks as though we're going to have our best apple year yet.  Oh, to have enough good eating apples to last all winter!  And I can hardly wait for that first apple pie.

This bed was spread with compost and tilled up exactly three weeks ago.  Since then this thick green cover has appeared.  It took me a while to realize just what it was.  This was the bed where I had planted borage which was supposed to be good food for our honey bees.  It possibly would have been if the borage hadn't attracted huge amounts of bumble bees which seemed to keep the honey bees away.  I didn't think the full grown borage plants were very attractive so will find something else to plant for the bees next year.  Anyway, I had pulled all the borage out, but apparently it is self-seeding (in a big way), and this was the result.

Nothing like a good green manure crop tilled in to enrich the soil.

Hooray, hooray!  My fall planted shell peas are starting to form pods.

This is a new "purple" carrot variety, Dragon, I tried this year.  The slices went into our salads tonight.  So far, the flavor is pleasantly "carrot-y" but not very sweet.  Wonder if the flavor will change with storage in the root cellar?

That's a bit of what went on here today.  All day I thought it was Saturday instead of Friday.  I guess that's what happens when you're retired and don't have to keep a schedule or work anymore.  (Snort-snort.)