Winter/Fall Gardening

In the midst of our post-thanksgiving lounging this morning we learned that Grandfather was out working on the garden. We quickly dressed and went to join him. His garden has become rather overgrown the past two years. This year in particular. Last November, a couple days before thanksgiving he fell from a barn roof and suffered a very serious break to his ankle. Needless to say, a lot of his projects have gone with minimal attention. The garden fence was not only suffering rotten posts but at least half of it is/was completely covered in wild blackberries. Today we continued the previously begun project of tearing out parts of the fence and getting rid of some of the brambles. Also we worked on pruning some of the trees. Grandfather wants to expand the area under the protection of fencing, which suits us just fine as we will be using the space as well. There is SO much work to be done, but hopefully we will get around to doing it all and have a nice gardening area ready come spring. The biggest and most important project will be the fence. Around here it is absolutely pointless to have a vegetable (or flower for that matter) garden without a very tall fence. Unless your point was to feed the deer...

Here critter #2 is listening to the flames crackle after Papa has jumped on the pile "to give it more oxygen" :)

Tackling an old plum tree. This tree has gorgeous dark red plums. All the fruit trees are suffering badly from years of not being pruned. None of us know exactly what we are doing. But we dive in with a will. Cutting dead branches and branches that are rubbing against one another is not so bad. Trying to shape the tree and cut out excess branches to leave only the best ones is something of a mystery.

Now Grandfather has the leaf blower out to get the fire going. The boys love to hang on to it and feel really big helping with the fire.

More than once when I was sawing at near-dead apple branches with this beauty, I thought longingly of a man with a chainsaw cutting through the limb like it was butter. But, sadly, no chainsaws were in evidence today.

Learning to tie his boots...

And, last but not least...

Tonight's the night. :) Hurray! Less than 2 1/2 hours to go...