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.

I really didn’t think there were still this large of an elk herd in southern Colorado, but what do I know. Pretty impressive.

Bought the used manure spreader a few months ago but just couldn’t find time to get the compost spread onto the back field until today. Used the dump trailer to move 5 loads back to the edge of the field first.

Learned a critical lesson when I filled the manure spreader then hitched it to the tractor and pulled it into the back. Well, with the manure spreader fully loaded, going down a very steep hill caused the trailer to start pushing the tractor. Luckily the hill wasn’t that long but it sure was close to pushing the tractor sideways which would have been a disaster.

Actually spreading the compost was pretty easy, especially since my good friend JJ let me borrow his tractor to load the spreader, otherwise I would have had to unhitch, load, then hitch for every spreader load. There were many!