Spring Clean Up

Spring clean up was delayed for the last 5 days due to wind.  Now would have been the perfect time to have a wind turbine.  The wind was a constant 20-25 mph with gusts to 35-40 mph.  That would be enough to spin the electric meter right off the side of the house.

We were able to get in a good 3 days of raking before the winds picked up again.  Luckily this time the wind didn't stop us from our plan of attack.

Yesterday was chainsaw day.  Here in Michigan, we are losing our ash trees to the emerald ash borer.  Despite treating the trees with Bayer Systemic, we still lost several more ash trees.  These were iffy trees from the time we purchased the house so we were not completely shocked that they died.  We cut the three trees into firewood length and added that wood to the wood pile.  The brush was thrown into the fire pit.

Today we decided to continue with cleaning out the back fence line.  It is tedious work.  The most difficult part is working on the side of a hill and then having to bend over to pick up branches and vines.

During the clean up last year we found a large drainage tile that was without a cover.  Yesterday, I found a bright green frog just sitting in the bottom looking up.  He had this look on his little green face that said....."oh crap, how am I going to get out of here?"  R to the rescue.  He crawled down into the tile and brought him out and into the WIND.

We felt that we needed to cover the tile with something to keep future froggies and children from falling in and then not be able to get out.  I scoured the plywood pile and found a piece just big enough to cut a circle out of it.

It's not pretty, but until R can find a piece of thick steel or a stray man hole cover, it will have to do.

There was also several stumps that needed to be removed.  R used the chainsaw to score the top and then used wedges and a large sledgehammer to drive the wedges deep into the stump.  Since the stump was rotted, the wood split and we were able to remove most of the stump.

I also dug up several more pieces of slate and tried to level the dirt to eliminate some large holes and ruts.

Here is the before photo.

And the after photo.

It still looks bad, just not AS bad.


Next on the list.  Removing that large box elder stump directly behind the tile in the photo.