I Need A Weekend to Recover...

So much happened this weekend!

There was quite a storm that moved through on Sunday morning. It was dark as night and pouring rain and Art was looking out the window when the wind picked up. He quickly decided that standing next to a window with 70 mph winds was not a good idea. But the storm moved out almost as quickly as it came in and I spent part of the afternoon cleaning up branches from the yard. We have a large, 50ish foot tree on the back corner of our property that for years Art told me was an oak. I know very little about trees and, honestly, I didn't care enough to find out for sure. This last year he finally told me that it was some kind of maple. Anyway, this used-to-be-an-oak-now-a-maple tree split right down the middle in the high winds. A few years ago, Art was burning a pile of old branches and it scorched one side of the tree (I told him it was too close) and now part of the tree is dead. Art's mostly upset that the apparently health half of the tree was the half that fell. He's got a big clean-up job ahead of him- my only hope is that the farmer who has planted his beans in that field won't drive by, see the tree laying on his yet-to-be-sprouted beans and demand payment for crop loss.

We lost another chicken on Saturday. We hadn't caught anything but a cat in the live traps (she was not happy) but we knew they were raccoons. I always thought that raccoons were nocturnal, but the chicken we lost on Saturday was taken around 3:00 in the afternoon. We locked the chickens up and decided to leave them locked up until we caught that damn raccoon. For several nights we sat on our lawn chairs facing the barn while we have our nightly cocktail hour. We never did see anything. So we deduced that the raccoon must be coming from inside the barn. Art went up to the hay loft Monday and, low and behold, found a mother raccoon and two young raccoons. They no longer live in the barn and the chickens all cackled with glee as we let them out to roam the wild (relatively) safe from harm.

Otherwise I spent most of the weekend (when it wasn't raining) picking mustard in the hay field. Last year I thought it looked so pretty, all those delicate yellow flowers dappling the hay field until I found out that it was wild mustard and was incredibly invasive. So little by little we have been out in the field, pulling it by the roots. We have about 3/4 of the field done and a large pile of mustard plants in the barn. I'm sure the neighbors think we are crazy picking weeds by hand (we know this because everyone slows waaay down when they drive by), but you can't spray for mustard weed, because every grass, clover and alfalfa plant in that field are technically 'weeds' so we'd end up killing everything and besides, we're not into that. Art has been helping some, but honestly, he's the worst weeder ever. Maybe it's my obsessive compulsiveness, but I like to pick every mustard plant I see, large or small, whereas Art likes the instant gratification of pulling up a huge plant. He complains that his hands are too large to pick the smaller ones and that it's the larger, stalkier plants that make the hay bitter and difficult to dry. I tried to give a short lesson on plant biology in the field, stating that those small plants that don't pose a threat this year, will actually grow larger by next year. Amazing!! But I still ended up trailing after him, picking all the plants he missed. I finally told him to just go do something else and let me do it. This may have been his plan all along...

Amazingly enough, Buddy hung out in the field with us. He wasn't even locked outside. What is earth-shattering about this is that Buddy had the option to go inside where he could safely sleep on the couch, but he wanted to stay out in the field with us. He was almost like a real-life farm dog!

I always love when summer comes because there is so much to do, but I feel like I need a weekend to recover from my weekend. As you can see, so do Art and Buddy: