Tuesday, June 18, 2024

The Daisy Murders

 

Looks pretty innocent, right? Hiding behind that "fresh as a daisy" trope... but let me tell you, the daisies were threatening to take over the horse field.


This is a small corner of what's left. The entire field was wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast daisies. We're talking a sea of the things. Yes, they are pretty but not only will Neko not eat them, but they crowd out useful stuff like grass. So I embarked on a daisy eridacation program. Pretty brutal!

Culling several dozen and putting them in vases was effective on a small scale, adding simple lovliness to our house but more drastic measures were required. I donned a pair of gloves, got my sharp, pointed shovel and spent a couple of hours laboriously digging hundreds of clumps out. I succeeded in clearing (maybe) the top third of the field but my hands were really tired and it was going to take weeks to eliminate the rest of these suckers.

Yesterday, I brought out the heavy weapons, fired up the mower and proceeded to chomp them all down. This took me two hours but it wasn't as hot as the rest of this week is going to be and I didn't want this invasion of floral hegemony to set seed and utterly defeat me.

And... Look!! A sea of green! (For scale, that small brown thing to the left of the tree is Neko. Puts into prospective just how much mowing I did. Yes, thank you, my legs were tired afterwards!) But I was satisfied with my handiwork and it was kind of fun as the clumps of daisies gave up easily- no match for raging machinery. You can't see it in the above picture, but there is still a small ring of daisies down by the fence line. I'm not done pushing up those daisies!!





Friday, June 7, 2024

Breakin' Rocks in the Hot Sun...


Here we are on another tip to the quarry (aka "The Moon") for a load of processed stone or "gravel". I love going there as it really is other wordly. All these guys are driving around really fast in giant trucks and hugumungous earth-moving vehicles. They look just like the toy trucks we played with as kids- only blown up a million times. 

It's a bit intimidating, too as everything is on an super human scale: equipment, random piles of rock and sand. Like that pile above? It's about 25 feet tall. 


The unhelpful woman at the quarry office told Bob that the stuff we were looking for was "on the other side of the asphalt processing plant". Uh... is that it? We circled around for around for a while before stopping a man in one of those afore-mentioned giant Tonka toys. He very nicely gave us a personal escort to the appropriate pile. We made it out alive!

So we arrived back at the driveway, which had developed a few sizeable holes. Equipped with our state-of-the-art shovels and rake, we commenced to explore all the joys of what chain-gang work must feel like on a very humid day.

One hole down and only ten or so more to go! 


Would you look at that?! Cleaned all that 3/4" processed stone and the driveway is much better for it! It was about 3/4 of a ton of stone, so we were kind of tired out after wards but look at the finished driveway:

A much smoother ride! Yay! (Until next time, becasue as carefully as you fill the holes, the gravel inevitably kicks back out and craters appeear...)