Catching up - let's start with the weekend

Things are certainly picking up now at the farm!

Middle of last week I ran by the farm because I was in the neighborhood with our youngest son Jeremy. He hadn't been out to see the progress in a long time and we were curious how much of the insulation and rebar for the lower level floor was in. The day was pretty mild other than being VERY windy!

And we noticed something…

Some of our insulation has blown away.

That was really a lot of wind. Of course, it's always pretty breezy out there, but this was what our builder called "gale force" wind.

On Friday I took a little time off of work to go to the farm again. The maple tree on the West side of the house (the only tree of any size that will shade that hot side of the house) needed to be trimmed before the bulldozer came in to backfill around the foundation. Those big machines have a hard time avoiding low limbs, you know.

But I won't bore you with before and after photos. It still looks like a tree :-)

And that's not all we did with our weekend…we also saw a bunch of alpacas! The MOPACA show was at Hale Arena. So Brent and I headed down there in the morning to see how well the alpacas handled all that commotion. And we were quite impressed. They were calm and beautiful.

Here's a beautiful Suri from Hasselbring's Harmony Ranch in the show ring.

There were also people handspinning fiber and lots of product displays. It is really a very soft fiber and there are certainly a lot of talented knitters. Brent got his first pair of alpaca socks from a very nice couple with a Suri alpaca ranch in Tennessee. They also process fiber in a mill. Their ranch and mill are run entirely with solar generated electricity. We think we need to know them a little better.

We weren't finished with our busy weekend yet…

Our Kansas Conservation Tree seedlings were delivered to our house on Friday. So we took advantage of the beautiful day on Sunday to put our new little trees in the ground and meet with the contractor who will build the retaining walls around the new house.

Here I am with the first of the 25 cedars in the ground.

We planted over 100 seedlings: 25 cedars, 25 persimmons, 25 paw paw and 25 elderberry. The cedars are along the West (to replace the row of cedars we will lose when the road is improved) and the elderberries are along the South side of the garden space with a few also inside the cedars on the west and north sides of the property. The persimmons are mostly in the area North of the north-most driveway. And the pawpaws are down in the draw.

We spent 10 hours on the property on Sunday. And with a little help from our eldest son, Blaine, we got all the trees in the ground. It was wonderful...and exhausting. We loved every minute!