Bee Tree Farm

It was dry enough to go out to the land and work today. Kind of.

I guess at this point, it’s all relative. Since it wasn’t actually raining, it had to be dry enough to work, right? Let’s put it this way, I only got my 4 wheel drive tractor stuck once. 20 minutes later, after creatively using the backhoe and bucket is ways that the original manufacturer would surely not recommend, I was free again. There were a couple of close calls where I would hit an especially soft spot and start sliding sideways, but I was able to keep enough forward momentum to pull through. I’d like to pretend I was annoyed, but let’s be honest, I had a lot of fun playing in the mud today.

The other day, Jenna and I discussed the next couple of steps of our plan. One of which was to start creating the individual pastures so we can separate the animals when we start building. So, we sketched out how we want our pastures to look. Then I pulled out my new favorite tool for picturing the land from a birds eye view…Google Earth. I drew in what we thought were reasonable sized pastures.

Then I punched in the coordinates of those corners into my iPhone GPS program (MotionX) in order to physically mark those off at the land. Again, this whole GPS/iPhone/Google Earth combination is way too cool. While at the land today, I launched the GPS program and told it to take me to these points. I was able to easily navigate to these “waypoints”. After walking to these points, I realized we needed to adjust those spots a little bit to better utilize the area. So, I marked off these new spots on my phone to overlay on Google Earth later. The pic above represents this second iteration. With these new spots marked off, Jenna and I focused on clearing a section along one of the fence lines today (see rectangle below. I couldn’t help myself).

We were making good progress today until a cold front blew in with a vengeance. Something pissed Mother Nature off something fierce. Up until about 3:00, the sun was shining, the wind was calm, and the temp was around 60. Perfect. Well, it was around that time that ‘ol Mrs. Nature decided we had had enough nice weather. Jenna had just commented on the line of clouds that had just showed up on the horizon when a COLD gust of wind came busting through. The temp dropped about 20 degrees in 10 minutes and was accompanied by heavy winds. So, we packed up and headed home. Overall it was a good, productive day. I would have liked to hang out and have a beer after our hard work, but that just wasn’t in the cards today. I am really looking forward to the warmer days of spring.