One question answered, but another still to be found.

Yup. One question has been answered. Our yard is thick with Elderberries.
This is going to be a picture heavy post, if my phone connection will hold up.

Remember the berries that looked like grapes? Those are still here, too.

Some of the leaves look a little like grape leaves, some obviously don't.
I know that BEES like them. Or wasps or yellow jackets or some such. You might be able to see one in that third picture. They were all over the bushes by the old barn.

I've done a lot of laundry here. Between mud, dust and the week on the road; I am mostly caught up. But I dry the laundry on a clothes line so the rain is a bit limiting there.

I saw a snake last week. Stopped me in my tracks. One of many 'farm' critters I am terrified of. A mocking bird had been chasing something. I was going to check my laundry and scared the bird. Then I saw what it had been chasing. A HUGE (to me, haha) snake was headed toward the porch. Roughly 3 to 4 feet long with a mosaic pattern. I did not have my camera and I did not go to get it. I did not move.
I stood there until it turned away from the steps and went into the, as yet unmowed, Johnson grass by the porch. Then I turned around and went up on the porch from the other side of the house.
Yes I did walk all the way around.
I told hubby about the snake, but it had already disappeared by then.
I identified it from the internet later as a rat snake.
Hope it eats all the mice and rats. Be fine with me.
With fields across the street from us, and fields behind us, I'm sure it finds plenty to eat.

Hope you all have a blessed Sunday. I am listening to thunder between the rain. ♥

Friday Farm post

We got to the farm Saturday afternoon. This is what we found.

The Johnson Grass wasn't too bad yet.

We also found this.

Now let's see if I can get this to work...



Sorry about the fingers. Don't watch if you get dizzy easily. It was my first try at a video and I am obviously clueless, haha!

There will be more to follow on this topic.

Hope you all have a wonderful, blessed weekend! :o)

Noxious weed

When we got to the farm in December. It almost looked good.
I say almost because I don't think anything we have done so far has done anything to get rid of the Johnson grass. This is what greeted us.

A shot at eye level.

This shot, I held the camera over my head.

I know it looks dead, and I'm hoping it is; but I'm pretty sure it's just dormant. When we cleared the space where we usually park the RV, there were hundreds of the little white root things that propagate the menace.
Oh well. Won't be long and with daily mowing we hopefully will kill it off.
Happy Wednesday! :-)

What to talk about today?

Hard to believe it's the end of August!
Been hard to post lately. Can't seem to concentrate on blogger and it seems blogger doesn't want to work right anyway.
As you know, our trip to the farm didn't go at all like we might have expected.
We didn't get there until about 1030 at night. I do not like night arrivals.
Even with the dark though, it wasn't hard to see that everything had grown like crazy. July and August are usually the hottest months anyway, and as those of you who live in the South know, this year has been exceptionally so.
I did take a few pictures in the dark.

Notice we have no driveway visible upon arrival.




This is a shot towards the trailer. The light is the security light that the electric company maintains. I think it costs around $8 a month. A fair enough price to not be totally in the dark.



The Johnson grass had gone crazy.



This is our Chevy 2500 pickup, almost engulfed by Johnson grass.



Yes, it was taller than our truck. Annoying and a bit depressing. Hubby said to not let it get to me, but ugh.

I'm guessing there is a backyard here somewhere. It's just crazy that this is barely 3 months' growth.



Here you can see the actual grass is not as tall as the Johnson grass.



That's the burn pile. We didn't actually burn last time because it was so dry. The Johnson grass seems to love it. :/
Hope you can see the pictures okay. I shrunk them all down because I don't have the option to shrink in the blog any more. I decided to just use Webshots for now, since that is where I keep all my online photos right now anyway.
If you can't see the pictures very well, just click on the album link for August 2011, and it will take you to my album where you can see the pictures.

That's all for now. Back to reading up on you all. :-)

When it rains it pours

Not.
Not the good kind of rain, anyway.
Johnson Grass has practically taken over the main yard. Was not happy.
We arrived about 1030 PM. To no water. The pump was out. Went into town and got water and went to bed about midnight.
Hubby has done some troubleshooting. Some resister or something burned out. I am guessing we lost power at some point and the pump lost prime and that was the result.
We filled a couple buckets with water today so we have enough to flush the toilet at least.
Today, the A/C keeps cutting off. Don't know what's going on there, so probably will have to cut this trip short to bring the trailer back to NC to have that looked at.
Just hope we can get the pump working before we have to leave.

Oh, the trees we planted last trip? Well, they're sort of okay. They still have some green leaves anyway. And they have some brown. I'm hoping it's just all the hot weather has been hard on them, and they aren't sick or something.

Final oh before I go, haha. The old cub cadet we were using for a mule? It blew a fuse, too. Between all the hot temps here and him using it for a mower today (it is still a mower, just the transmission slips a lot when it gets hot. we had it fixed but it still does it); the hood (bonnet to some of you) warped from the heat.
Yup. You read right. It warped.
When the mower quit, he opened the cover to look at the engine and it just kind of bent in on itself.

What the heck.

At least the trip here was relatively painless.

Hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Have a blessed week!

On the road again. Just can't wait to get on the road again...

I am guessing that shortly after 12 noon EST, we will be on the road to the retirement property. I will try to keep up, but there is no telling what sort of internet time we'll have.
I am just hoping that at least some of the weed killer worked.
Hoping not to see this when we pull into the yard.

Especially now that I know it's poisonous to animals (except mice, apparently) when there is a drought.
I mentioned it to hubby and he said he did know that it is poisonous when stressed, so we will have to work harder to get rid of it. There was some in the pasture, too.

Oh well. In a day or two we'll know. We might actually drive like normal people this time instead of driving straight through like he's been doing. We'll see about that, too. ;-)

Hope you all have a safe, blessed weekend!

4 days to our next trip

Have another sleep study. This time at the hospital, since the CPAP machine is not the miracle cure for me that it is for most people. I find it annoying. The small mask is a bit too small, the medium mask is a bit too big, they both tend to leak and they really bother my eyes and throat. We'll see what the hospital comes up with, if anything.

Friday after hubby gets off work, we leave on our next trip to the retirement property to mow and see if the weed killer did anything about this.

Hubby really wants to get rid of the Johnson grass. The closer we get to retirement, though, the less I want to be using pesticides. Once we get there and can keep it mowed, that should hopefully take care of the problem more naturally. In this spot at least, tilling is not an option. The septic leach field is here.
Johnson grass is one of those things where people don't clearly think out all the ramifications before they do something. Like Kudzu, Nutria and allowing exotic species to be imported for people to own.
Ah well. We'll just keep plugging away and see what happens.

Hope you're all having a blessed week!

What a trip

Lots of pictures. Mostly of before. All we did was mow, and we didn't get all that done. Lots of poison ivy, too.
Oh well. We did have really nice weather. Dry though. Which is good and bad. Made for lots of laundry.

This picture was taken at eye-level in the back yard after hubby had mowed a couple pathways. It's Johnson grass.

No back yard this trip. All my hard work to clear the back of the house. I guess I should be glad I can still see the back of the house.

I was excited when I saw what looked like peas. :)

There were hundreds, if not thousands of these all over the farm and pasture. But, as near as we can tell they are wild peas, which are poisonous and not field peas, which would be useful.

I was happy to see the bit of fence line that I cleared had remained clear. :)
Something to show for the poison ivy rash I had, haha!

You can see there, behind the pump house, no green on that little bit of fence there.

There were lots of HUGE thistles with spines that I wondered how they didn't puncture the mower tires.

There were a lot more than what I took pictures of. That's just to show you the size of the thistles.

I think I'll stop here for now.

Crazy weather around the country. Thoughts and prayers to all affected by the latest tornado in Missouri. ♥

Almost Friday

We're heading back home tomorrow. Got a lot of mowing done. Would have done more, but we're trying to get rid of the Johnson grass before we move down here, so we did some spraying. I'm not real hot on that, but since we don't have anyone who can do the mowing any more, that's how we've decided to handle it.

It was kind of disappointing, but really not a surprise I guess, to see all the grass after almost nothing in February. The Johnson grass is like, 10-12 feet high in some places. And of course there are vines and poison ivy all over everything, too.

A handful of cattle egrets came to watch us mow the pasture. They wanted to be sure we did a good job and to help us with the little lizards and snakes and such. ;)
No pictures because it is way too dry and dusty right now to trust taking the camera out mowing, sorry. I did take pictures this trip. Not as many as other times; but I took some and I'll post them after we're home.

Those of you who have red dirt, is there anything in particular you need to do to increase the fertility? Do you just make compost, or do you put down lime, or what?
Inquiring minds want to know.  ;)

Happy Friday to you all!

Wordless Wednesday