Back at it Outside!

Posted on Sunday, September 16, 2007 at 08:50

I apologize that it has been three long weeks since we have posted an entry here. As some of you already knew, for the past three years my dad had been battling prostate cancer, bone cancer and eventually even brain cancer. We had to take this time off from blogging to be with him in his last days. His body finally gave up the fight last Friday, September 7th.

Although he is now absent from this earth, he is present with the Lord in heaven! I rejoice in that fact but even still it has been a sad time for our family. It has been pretty rough and we haven't done much in the garden except pick more tomatoes. I even let the groundhog have his fill.

We are now ready to start writing regularly again I hope. Yesterday we worked outside all day in the woods at the back of our yard and we are pretty tired. We had to do this because last week when I was going back and forth to the hospice unit, the electric company decided that they needed to upgrade the power lines that go through there. They had some of our trees cut down and many more trees trimmed. Unfortunately they left ALL of the debris for us to deal with. Yesterday was our first attempt at cleaning it up.

I used the chainsaw to cut the big pieces to be split later. Ma and the girls carried out limbs and smaller logs. What made this difficult is that the whole wooded area is a pretty steep hill and the downed trees are at the bottom, next to the creek. We planned to use our chipper/shredder to mulch up all of the branches, but we discovered that we have a lot of branches that are too big for it.

Plan B is that we need to burn much of it. We used to have a small fire ring behind the garden, but that disappeared with the garden expansion this year. We were tired of dragging out wood anyway, so Ma and I decided to carry up rocks from the creek instead - much easier, right?

After a great deal of effort, we had enough rocks to make a bigger new fire ring. We dug out a hole and built the ring. I concreted the rocks together, so this ring is a bit more permanent than our last one.

You can see the garden in the background of the above picture. Here is the final product from the other direction:

Tonight we will have our first official camp fire in it. I can just taste the marshmallows! We still have a lot of work to do with the woods, as well as many other outdoor projects. I need to finish building the deck railings and the pergola. We want to build new compost bins and cold frames for the garden, and fence the garden in.

Good thing we built that fire ring. To get everything done this fall, we will be needing it to stay warm because by the time we finish everything, there will be snow on the ground!

We will keep you up to date on our progress. Ma will post again soon as well. It is still a difficult time for our family, so bear with us. In several past posts, we asked for prayer from you during this time. Thank you so much for praying for us. We have felt those prayers. God is so good!

Have a great Lord's day!

Many blessings,

-Pa

Untitled Comment

Posted by Laura @ the Peanut Patch on Sunday, September 16, 2007 at 04:24 - Link

So sorry to hear of your dad's passing. We'll be keeping you in our prayers in the days to come...