Unseen Progress

 

We haven’t had any major projects started or completed but each day we make baby steps towards completing the many tasks at hand and the projects that are nearest the top of the priority list. 

Somedays we work all day and there is nothing to show for it - Like today, we worked hard clearing some woods so we could get to the trash that the previous owners threw all over.   We spent all afternoon hauling tires, trash, rusted fencing and cutting down terrible thorn vines and dead trees.    When we were done it looked a million times better to US.  But any other person would just see woods the way it is meant to be.  So much of our time is spent picking up the previous owners trash.  Apparently they treated the entire land like a trash can.

One HUGE relief is that we finally caught the elusive, last, feral cat. (we had named him Chief- cause every cat,  even one you are trying to get rid of needs a name)  He was so creepy the way he skulked about, watched us from afar, and terrorized poor Gandalf.  Chief had been caught in one of the regular traps we got from the county but he managed to bang his way out of it and after that, he was wise to our plan.   My mom and I constructed a net trap and placed a plate of tuna in the center.  Claire was the lucky person who happened to be watching when he finally came around and ate the food.  Bam! Claire pulled the stings from inside the house and next thing he knew he was swinging in a net.   The rest of us were sifting garden dirt and didn’t see it – I am pretty bummed we didn’t get it on video.  Oh well.  Yay for Claire!

We are happy to announce that little Lance did NOT get parvo and he is in the clear now.  He is very much a puppy, which is trying a lot of the time but he really is quite smart.  He has already learned come, sit, lie down, and stay.   “No cat”  does not seem compute and no matter how many time he gets bopped in the face. He can NOT leave them alone.

Oh speaking of cats, our beloved Gandalf has been missing for about two weeks now.   We are afraid that he got caught by a coyote.  Poor guy.  He was a city cat and didn’t have country smarts.

 

We discovered that our property has a ton of blackberry bushes.  Apparently this is a common thing out here and no one shares my enthusiasm and excitement about it.  

 

Here is the best look we have had of our pond yet, we believe it is about half an acre. 

 

We can’t get to its shore easily and have tried to get a pond cleaning service to come out and look at it and give us a quote for clearing it and cleaning it but no one actually comes even after they say they will.  We have had a hard time getting people of various trades to come out to our property.  We need our well serviced, no one will come.   We need a quote on getting a concrete pad poured, no one will come.   I have found that businesses are run a lot differently out here.  They close so early and everything is much slower paced.   My mom and I walked in a store this week  and a lady announced “We are closing in 4 minutes!”   It was 4:26.  Seriously?  At the same time though the people here are all SO nice.  Young men especially are so polite.

We have now seen two water moccasins and one copperhead.   I was worried because it’s not even summer yet.  What is it going to be like in July when it is actually hot!   Josh and I decided it was necessary, if only for our peace of mind, that we buy snake boots for everyone.   I don’t usually spend $500 on anything let alone boots for the family but I am glad that we did.  Even this week I was able to search through the weeds for a water moccasin that got away without being concerned at all that it would bite me.   Sometimes peace of mind comes at a price.  Even if just one bite is prevented we will save thousands on an ER visit. (Plus the just the trauma of being bitten by a snake!)

Our door way is constantly blocked by boots.

 

My dad is busy all day, every day clearing trash from the former owners.   Fires are a regular occurrence. 

 This week he is dismantling the hog barn and using the materials to repair the chicken coop and soon, start on the goat barn.  

(this is the hog barn after some tear down.)

With the price of lumbar these days, we are glad that there are a lot of resources here already.

Jack spends several hours a day riding the tractor with Poppy,  moving things, clearing things, and tending the fire. 

  

We went exploring a little bit and found a tiny waterfall!

The flowers are blooming and I am trying to clear out over grown flower beds and rake up as much fallen leaves (which should have been done by the previous owners last fall!) to put in my large compost pile I started.

 

The kids and I love to look for and collect earthworms.   I can’t believe how plentiful they are here!  We have a tarp on the ground and several times a day we pull it back to find dozens of worms.

   We throw them into the garden beds.   We have nearly a thousand in the beds so far.   Joy thinks there are more worms in our yard than in the entire state of AZ and I am beginning to agree with her.

 We have made some friends in the past few weeks - fellow homeschoolers from church who own an off road park in Hot Springs.   They had us over and took us on one of the trails.   If you look carefully that whitish building behind us is our church.  

 

I also met a friend at the Ladies' Bibles study.  She is older, and very wise as most older women are, which is why I enjoy their company so much.   She was kind enough to let us come over to her large property and she showed us around and gave us a truck bed load of her compost for our garden.  She also makes jellies from her blackberries and raspberries and elderberry syrup from the wild elderberries that grow here.  (I don't think there are any of those on our property unfortunately.)

Shoveling compost.

We are still working on sifting dirt to fill the last garden bed.   

The rain puts the operation to a stop for days as we have to wait for the dirt mounds to dry out.  It is super hard to sift wet dirt. 

 

It is supposed to rain every single day next week so we are trying to get as much outdoors stuff done in the next 3 days as we can.

House Tour and Other Happenings

As promised, I filmed a tour of house. 

I apologize that I move the camera around too fast and am not good on screen. 

The things I forgot to talk about in the video:  When we refinished the floor we stopped at the hallway and did not do the kids' rooms due to the fact that we will be tearing down walls and renovating.  That's why the floors look so bad still in their rooms. 

The little kitten that I said is available has since found a home.  Ember's babies however will still need homes.

The  day after we got Lucy and Lance home we noticed that Lucy was having diarrhea and acting lazy and lethargic.  Then she stopped eating.   We took her to the vet where they did a Parvo test on her and unfortunately it was positive.  The treatments started a $600 with no guarantee she would live.   I told the vet we would have to put her to sleep.  Thankfully, the vet also runs a non-profit for animals and because of Lucy’s adorable cuteness, she said she would take her and treat her and adopt her out if she gets better.   It was so sad to sign her over to the vet.  It’s crazy how attached I had become to that sweet little girl in the few days that we had her. 

  

The vet office was so kind.  They didn’t charge me a dime for the office visit or the parvo test.  The worst part about the situation is that Parvo is incredibly contagious and therefore Lance could get it too.   So far he has been fine and but I told the girls not to get anymore attached than they already are.

In other news, we accidentally caught a racoon!

 It was so fun to see a raccoon in real life.  None of us ever had.  This little guy was very docile and asleep when we found him.   We had to deliberately wake him.   He was confused and happily bounded into the woods when we released him.   The last cat is still on the loose.  He taunts us and watches our every move.  

This week we have been concentrating our efforts on building garden beds.   The soil here is good but because we are on the tail end of the Ozark mountains, it is chock full of rocks.   It would be impossible to have an in ground garden.  Well,  when we explored the barn a little while ago,  

we discovered that under the 3 inch layer of rat feces, there is a large amount of raw milled planks up in the hay loft of the barn.  (I have extensively googled Hanta virus and I believe we are going to live)

 

 We used them to build our garden beds along with some spider ridden tin that we found on the property.  (I have extensively googled brown recluses and I believe we are going to die.)  So far we have made 5 large beds. 

 

That is all we will do this spring.  We will add more later.   Filling the beds can be expensive (I know from my tiny container garden in AZ!)  I couldn’t justify buying soil so we came up with a solution.   My dad uses the tractor to get a load of dirt from the many piles on the property, 

 he made a sieve and he shovels the dirt into while we sift the rocks out of the dirt.  

 The good dirt falls into the wagon below where it gets wheeled to a bed and unloaded.

  

The large rocks are thrown in a pile to be used around the culverts my dad is making and the rest of the rocks and gravel are shoveled into the wheel barrow and used to fill in the pot holes and low spots on the loooong circular driveway out front. 

 

 We were about to spend hundreds of dollars on gravel but feel very resourceful killing 3 birds with one stone,  all for free from what we have on the land and little hard work. 

All the kids pitch in one way or another. Everyone feels satisfied after a good day’s work.    The only money we spent on them was for a truck load of compost that we drove to Little Rock for and that only cost $40 bucks for enough to top all of the beds.

Several times now, we have all been busy with various tasks and one of us will realize that Jack is missing.   We call and call, and start to get worried and search for him just to find him fast asleep somewhere. 

  Apparently he just gets tired and puts himself to bed!

We have been soaking in the warmth and beauty of the season. 

Skipping rocks,

Picking flowers,

And beautiful walks.

I am in love.

 

Projects, (O)Possoms, and Puppies

 
Another week has flown by!   It is so strange how fast each day passes here.  We barely get started on school,  then suddenly it’s lunchtime. We go “to town” to run an errand or pick something up, and by the time we get back it’s time to start dinner.  

This week my mom and I re-tiled the entry way. 

Tile cutting level: Master

 

My mom is no stranger to a tile saw and we have tiled many a bathroom together so this job was easy but still took forever to get everything level and perfect.  (as perfect as possible when the subfloor has a high spot and the existing space for the tile isn’t plumb to the door.)

The kids are having a blast.  They spend so much time outdoors.

 

Toads!

 

Caterpillars!

 

Buttercups!

 

Dandelion chopping.

Throwing rocks into puddles (I realized that they have never had the opportunity to do this before!)

 

First time gardening.  Paige is so funny, she wears her overalls EVERY SINGLE DAY.  I try to wash them at night for her.

 Reassembling the playhouse from the move and planting flower seeds.

 

Deer in the front yard.

More trash collecting, sorting, and wood burning.

One evening, after it had rained in the afternoon,  I looked out the window and saw fog!  Just laying there on our field!  It is was spooky and magical at the same time.    The pictures don’t do it justice at all.

 

Ember is still pregnant.  She is like a ticking time bomb and whenever she disappears for a little while everyone looks for her hoping she is off having her babies somewhere in the house.   She is really a wonderful cat.   (better than the two we brought with us!)

She likes to sit on pillows.

We moved the mother cat with her babies from the chicken coop to inside so the babies will grow up around us and be friendly.   The mama, Missy, is happy to be inside the house I think – even though she is contained to a cage.

Our feral cat issue is ALMOST resolved.   We have caught all but 1 on the wild cats.  The remaining male is very sly.   We have not been able to outfox him since he last escaped one of our cages.  We are rigging up a snare trap with a net.   I am excited to try it out and see if we can get him.

We did catch a large opossum in one of the traps.  Wow, what ugly little creatures they are!   This guy was fun to look at and then we let him go.   He quickly lumbered off into the woods.    I am afraid that one of these nights we will catch a skunk.

Because of our cat trapping endeavors, the fine folks down at the Hot Springs Animal Shelter know us well.  I have driven there and have interacted more with them than anyone else in AR yet.  They are super nice and it's a great shelter.  We have been very impressed with them.  Because we have frequented the shelter so often, we saw that they had a group of puppies that were very cute (and very inexpensive!!!!)   They were too young to be adopted when we first saw them but after waiting a week and half they were available for adoption yesterday.   Josh picked out two and brought them home!  They are not from the same litter.  The brown is a female, hound mix and the black is a male, lab mix.

It has just been decided that their names are Lance and Lucy.

This little girl has stolen my heart for sure. 

.

Chickens and goats, here I come! (It will be a while still,  we have too much going on at the moment)

Our house has a huge wasp problem.  Years of neglect or perhaps complacency, has resulted in several, and I mean several wasp nests in the eaves of the deck.   Perhaps I am naïve but I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do and just let them rule our outside space. We are to subdue the earth, not let it terrorize us!   I went to battle and killed over 30.   There was probably more screaming and ducking than I care to admit.  The kids cheered me on. 

I feel like we made a good dent in them that day.   I sprayed their nests and have seen very few since.

My mom and I went to a Goodwill, they don’t hold a candle to the AZ Goodwills but they are better than the Tucson Goodwills.  While there, my mom bought this power wheel for the kids.  (The ones that can’t drive the Mule, ha)  They love trucking around the yard.  Man, these kids are spoiled!

Very soon I will post a video blog tour of our house and land.  I want to be able to document the progress and show anyone interested what we’ve got going on.