Man Work

There are days a man just needs to camo up and defend the homestead.

If the only people available to camo up with are girls, I suppose they will do.

But when you come down to it.

When you get right down to it…

A man’s work is a man’s work.

Like this gap between the property fence and the chicken yard. Completely overgrown with blackberry, ivy and hemlock. It needs to be cleaned out, before the hemlock flowers and drops thousands of seeds everywhere.

You don’t want just to cut them off. You need to get the roots right out of the ground.

Like this. That’s one blackberry plant that will never sprout again.

Not to worry, though, there are plenty more in there to take it’s place. The main effort for that day was to get the hemlock ripped out before it went to seed.

But also to get our water tank set up. We had kind of let that one go to the back burner for a bit because it was so dry out, there was no rain to collect. Mid week last week we had some rain forecast so we spent about 30 minutes getting the tank ready to receive it.

First we had to scrape all the wood chips off of it The chickens did not approve of the bare concrete look.

Then slide the tank underneath, and cut the downspouts to length.

Seppi is holding them in place with his shepherd’s staff. He uses the staff primarily to defend his sisters from rooster attack, like the good many that he is.

All ready to go (double checked to make sure the valve is closed).

Roughly 2″ of rain later, and the tank is just about half full!