Logging

 
Sunday was a full day of logging which cleared more trees around the housing site. Don and Scott were a great team!

31st Anniversary

 
A rainy day turned into a beautiful evening, so instead of sitting inside at a restaurant, we bought picnic food and celebrated on the property. Don gave me a Bocce Ball game setso we played a game of Bocce too

Catamount North

The land was the main attraction, but to really enjoy it, we want to live on it. So finding a builder to help us design and build a suitable house to best take advantage of the property was important. After careful research, we asked Catamount North Construction if they would be our design/build people. Take a look at some of their highly crafted work at www.catnorth.com

Couldn't wait

Don couldn't wait to move in before tapping trees for sap, so he made arrangements with a sugaring friend to boil his sap into syrup. It's delicious, and has been used on many mornings of pancakes and evenings on ice-cream.

Pond Site?

We're hoping a pollywog filled puddle (that has been full since extracting the tractor from the place last fall) means we may have a good spot to put pond. Time and drier weather, (and maybe a hydrogeologist) will tell.

STUCK

Apparently, according to all questioned in my non-statistical survey, anyone who has ever owned a tractor, has gotten it stuck at one time or another. I managed to enter that demographic early on.

Saturday was another day of clearing trees around the house and driveway site. We're saving the big, straight logs for out buildings (like a sugar house and chicken coop), shorter logs will go into the wood pile, but the scrappy stuff went into a bonfire, which made a great way to cook lunch.

The sad part of brush hogging was all the disruption I caused to the creatures living in the trees and brush. I'm afraid I exposed a few field mice to the keen eye of the passing hawks and the resident owls. At least the little nests in the trees were already vacated of their families.

Brush Hog: A heavily built rotary mower that attaches to the back of a farm tractor via a three point hitch. Good for wacking through dense plant growth. Who knew? I learned how to cut down everything in my path with the brush hog behind me. Ahead....I had a great view. Tractors measure hours, not miles. I put double digit hours on the tractor while brush hogging. Thank goodness for MP3 players and pod casts.

Farm Equipment

We closed on the purchase of the land the morning of September 30. That same afternoon, Don finalized the purchase of his new (to him) tractor. The first order of business would be to brush-hog the fields. I'm learning all sorts of new farming terms....like 'brush hogging'.

In the beginning

June 2009, we get a call from a close friend offering us to purchase a piece of land he has owned for many years. It was 42 acres of land on Sherman Hollow Road in Hinesburg. It consists of 37 acres of open fields, used for farming, and 7 acres of woods. Don has been hunting on the land for many years, and was familiar with almost every inch of it. After not too much thinking, we said yes.