I don’t recommend this to everyone but it certainly worked well when I had to cut some limbs from a tree which was too close to one of the farm buildings.
Before it got too soggy here in the winter I used the tractor backhoe to do several transplants around the farm. Originally in the mid 1990s, some plants just got planted in the wrong place, and it becomes obvious once they grow a bit. I find that transplanting trees works 80% of the time.
Some last minute fall work today as the weather is to turn cold and wet, with early snowfall. So today I put on my gardens compost from my steamy pile of a mixture of horse manure, seaweed, wood chips, local coffee shop coffee grounds and and household compost.
And getting a few more buckets of firewood was essential, as it looks like we are in for a cold wet winter from now on .
Other woodpeckers have been using the suet feeder outside my window this winter but this was the first time I had seen the Pileated woodpecker here. The photo was taken hastily through the salt-sprayed window while at my desk, thus the blur! We often see and hear these woodpeckers in the summer as they like the large old fir and alder trees along the property.
While we were away, high winds brought a power outage for a day and this casualty: A very old Bosc Pear tree fell over. Today I sawed off the branches and hauled them with the tractor up to the pile for chipping and turning into compost. Some of the 4inch sized branches I have saved for future mushroom logs.
Picked the Kiwi fruit today to move in to the refrigerator so they will last through the winter.
After thegarden fields were levelled, we got a heavy rain. However a afer a few dry days they were still able to finish the drainage ditch in the barn field and install heavy gauge 6 ” PVC drain pipe.
Alex and the backhoe operator were trying to get the leveling done today before the rains are scheduled to arrive.
Each year at this time of year we get a small number of sandhill cranes migrating over Southern Vancouver Island. Having grown up in Saskatchewan I was familiar with the migrating flocks with their characteristic warbling call. I was surprized to find that they also nested up the coast of British Columbia.
Today at noon we saw a pair right down in front of our house in the sheep pasture. Got a few hasty pictures:
This presentation by Krista Roessingh tells the story about one of their their nesting sites.
http://ecoreserves.bc.ca/2009/03/17/sandhill-crane-er-possibilities/
This summer, our son Alex and his partner Virginie have taken a year off for their Wind-whipped Farm , “the Local Food Box Project,” to improve infrastructure for their farming business. This week it has been the excavation of their garden area for the installation of weeping tile for drainage. The purpose is to allow them to get on the land a month or two earlier in the spring. I took this set of photos to show the extent of the job. It gave us a great opportunity to have a “window into the underground”, and see what the glaciers left 10,000 years ago.
