Mark relocated the hops up by the orchard.  I installed a drip line on a daily timer so water shouldn’t be a problem this year.  Expecting a big yield!!

New hops location

This red oak fell last year, and we’ve slowly been chipping away at it.  Today we cut off everything we thought we could split and moved the remaining trunk to an out of the way resting place.  JJ had his brand new John Deere tractor there to help as it was definitely a two-tractor job.  If it had gotten away from us when going down the hill it would have ended up in the pond.

Further down is a short video of the operation.

Double teaming the monster red oak

Seems like a good potential harvest to my un-professional eye.

Wheat

Another summer pool season begins.

We had originally decided to trim the leyland cyprus hedge along the driveway from 15ft to about 10ft. I stood in the pickup truck bed and did about 100ft of the hedge before I changed my mind. I didn’t want to be standing up here in the pickup truck year after year trimming these hedges. I moved the pickup truck and trimmed them down to about 5.5ft, a level I can easily reach without a ladder. They look a little rough now, but they really open up the view from the front of the house, I like it.

Here is what it looked like when I started today, as viewed from right in front of the porch.

What it looked like when I started today.

Initial hedge trim at about 10ft high

Here are some pictures of the final cuts, MUCH shorter.

Ended when the rain started, still have another 100 ft of the tallest bushes left.

And before the rain started.

Almost done for the day.

Spent an overnight, nice scenery and pictures.

This is going to be a blast!  I can see me and the wife lazily paddling an evening with cocktails in the cup holders.

Together with my neighbor we finally closed on the property purchase of the lot behind us. We ended up splitting it diagonally, with each of us getting roughly 30 acres.  My main motivation for the purchase was to eliminate the easement down our driveway, which had the effect that anyone could be on the property at any time and claim they were transiting the easement to the property in the back.

Below is a picture of Michael and my nephew Kevin removing approximately 1,900 ft of t-post fence that used to separate our properties.  Took them 2 days, but they did a good job.  We then opened up a path so we can directly access the center of the new property from our existing paths.

Removing a fence line is hard work!!

Path to new property

We received 2ft of snow down at the farm.  Didn’t make it down here for over a week, but when we did there was still a bunch of snow on the driveway.  The back blade on the tractor does a decent job of plowing the snow.  If I was there when it was snowing I think I would feel more comfortable with a tractor mounted snow blower,  2ft would be tough to push around with a back blade.

Here’s a video of Dad working the back blade

Dad working the back blade

Some of my nephew Matt’s buddies stopped by and took some beautiful video from their drones. Quite impressive what you can do with one of those puppies.  Scroll down to see the video I uploaded on YouTube.