Fencing Progress and Other Weekend Adventures

Over the weekend, we continued to work on fencing. We almost finished up the last side. Jeff had to work by himself on Saturday morning, as I had to be in the kitchen preparing a meal to share with friends who came over for Saturday afternoon and evening.

Saturday afternoon was overcast, perfect for burning a pile (and taking a break from fencing) so that is what Jeff and the other dad did. You’d think we’d be done with burning brush piles by now. We almost are.

While the men gathered brush to keep the fire burning, the kids played all over the place. There were our three children and our friends’ three older children (their two youngers in the house with the moms). They spent much time at the Big Tree, near the burning brush pile. Haniya, Naomi and our friends’ daughter climbed higher than any of them has ever climbed before. They only stopped going higher after the other dad said, “I don’t want to go to the hospital today.” The tree is about 90 feet tall and we figure they were up at about 60 feet (at the red X in the photo below). Haniya was in the tree when I took this photo, but you can’t see her for the branches. I am just shocked and somewhat scared by their adventuring. I’ll leave the adventuring up to them as I am quite happy here on land.

My previous post on the Big Tree (June 2006), shares how we measured its height and more about it.

Here’s another adventure. Perhaps we should call it an experiment. We have many trees that we don’t wish for goats to eat. Jeff read on the internet that they won’t come near trees that are rubbed with their own poop. Excuse my word choice. So Jeff and the kids got some goat poop from the neighbor (who is giving us our first goats) and mixed it in 5-gallon buckets with water. Mashed it all up. Actually, Jeff couldn’t do the mixing because of his hand injury, so he said I should go ahead. I’m not in the habit of refusing my husband, but I did refuse to mash that poop with water. I know I could have done it if it were a matter of life and death, but since my life wasn’t in any danger, I said no. No, no, no. Noami did the mashing, blessing her heart.

Then she and Mikah and Haniya went around our property brushing the poop-water on the trees with big paintbrushes. They finished “painting” 1/4 of the trees yesterday afternoon. Now that they have a week off school before we go to our reduced summer school schedule (of math and reading every day) they have plenty of time to finish that up! Poor kids. But… the sooner they finish, the sooner we get those goats. They are going to spend half the day today painting. Like I said, this is an experiment. We’ll see if it works to protect our trees.

Meanwhile, and before she joined Naomi and Mikah with the “painting”, Haniya went around cutting out bracken ferns. We have sword ferns and bracken ferns, the latter of which is poisonous to goats. The job of cutting out the ferns isn’t finished and might never be. We read that goats only eat the bracken ferns if they don’t have anything else to eat. Since our place has an abundance of the weeds goats love — poison oak, blackberries, strawberries, thistles — we hope they’ll be fed well enough to leave the bracken ferns alone. Another experiment.

Naomi, Mikah and Jeff all have bits of poison oak rashes on them. Not too bad. I wonder if we’re getting used to the poison oak? We’ve really been in it thick. Not only is it growing up like crazy right now, but we’re all over it with the fencing.

As it stands now, the fencing is just about done on the perimeter. What we’re finishing up are the front corners as they come up the driveway. Jeff and I finished one of those driveway corners yesterday afternoon (Sunday). The other we plan to finish tonight. We’ll put up a temporary gate with another of the cattle panels. Then we have to temporarily shield the barn, garage and house with panels. We won’t do a permanent fence around those areas and up the rest of the drive until we finish other projects that share the same space.

Here are some pretty views of our property and the fencing we completed on Friday and Saturday.