Preparedness

This weekend was all about preparing for the future (i.e. winter). I spent Saturday in the garden weeding around the plants and picking strawberries. I froze another two bags making a total of four gallon-sized bags of strawberries in the freezer. Because I'm OCD I would have kept on picking them through June and ended up with more strawberries than I could eat in an entire winter. But my neighbor mentioned that she would like to take some because they are going to try and make a strawberry-rhubarb wine (they're big into making wine). So I gave her the rest of my strawberries through the end of the season. I'll pick them, but I won't mind because I won't have to do anything else with them- I'm just the supplier.

Last year Art cut up an oak tree trunk and put the sections on our wagon rack. Now that it's summer and it's hay season we knew we would need that rack in about a month or so and we decided that it was a good day to split some wood. Yes, it was a humid 96 degrees, but we enjoy the heat so it didn't bother us at all. Of course, my only job is to flip the lever that makes the splitter go back and forth so Art may think differently about working in such heat. Each section of log was about 150-200 pounds. We saved the biggest for the last as Art couldn't quite lift it and instead rolled it from the wagon to the splitter (the one in the picture- Art estimated that it weighed about 350 pounds. How he got it from the field to his truck to the wagon rack I'll never know). We got all the wood split- about six weeks worth of wood for the winter. The worst part, in my opinion, is putting it all away. We stacked most of it, but then decided it was getting late and the rest will stay until another day.