Another nice walk with my wonderful frontier wife.

Busy Saturday, moved the chickens starting at 6am down to the bowl. We then did the chicken & turkey chores between a nice pool swim with Ace.

Rented the beach house in Rodanthe again this year and had almost the entire family down. Emily & Randy couldn’t make it as Randy has a new job, and of course Patrick is still hiking the CDT.

Beach is really taking a beating from the erosion, but there was still plenty of room at our end. I think Harvey is getting big enough be much more interested in it. When he is just a little older you won’t be able to keep him out of the water.

Mark D. called to ask if he could practice some pistol shooting at the farm with his girl friend, Elizabeth K. He also said he was planning to propose to her while they were here. I texted him an entire list of places on the farm that were private and romantic.

He stopped in when he got here and boy was he nervous, sweating like it was 100f. They went down the hill where I had setup the targets and I snapped the photo below.

They stopped back at the house before they left, both visibly happy and joyful. I asked where did you propose?

• Under the huge oak tree in the back field? No
• On the deck of the gray house? No
• On the dock overlooking the big pond ? No
• By the shady ford at Mine Run? No

He dropped to his knee right there where they were target practicing! A beautiful couple!

Might be one of my last chicken move days. Our intern and fiance have been doing much of the work for the last few moves. Only reason I was involved today was that the tractor was necessary to move the eggMobile. These moves typically consume at least 90 minutes. This is the third move for the ‘big’ hens, will be the last one around the orchard.

Our farm intern reports that when she went to check on the baby turkeys they were starting to roost! Apparently they have imprinted on her as their mother!

Patrick sent this beautiful video, must have been quite a hike up that high.

The farmer just harvested the wheat and planted the beans, so a short window to be able to drop some trees into the field without damaging crops. The frontier wife helped me, we started early but it was a very hot day. I’m not a particularly experienced chainsaw operator but all went well, was super careful with clearing around the trees for an escape route and placing the cuts properly.

Dropping the trees was easy, the trimming and cutting into log lengths and disposing of the branches was time consuming and tedious. When the tree is down and the branches under compression you have to be very careful not to either have the branch whip out and hit you or roll the tree onto you.

While I trimmed, the frontier wife used the tractor with the grapple to move the branch bundles off the field.

The next evening I was able to get the boom pole on the tractor and drag the logs back to the sawmill.

Lots of fruit in the orchard is ready to pick. Wild grapes are seen in many places on the farm. This year the peaches in the orchard are going crazy, literally breaking branches.