I envy all the pictures I see of people on social media going to festivals, sporting events and other outdoor activities in the spring. Each weekend around here these days seems to be spent working outside. Once the temps warm up, it’s go go go. I’ve come to the conclusion that I love winter so much because everything outside stops growing and the sun goes down at 5 PM.

The past few years were tough finding a balance between the daily farm chores while having little ones. The kiddos are finally at the age where they can come along to help us complete some of our daily chores. Besides the daily tasks of filling waters, feeders and collecting eggs, there are the maintenance chores such as cleaning out the coop, shoveling you-know-what in all the pastures, mowing the grass, edging, string trimming, cleaning gutters, herding snakes (really!), as well as pulling weeds and watering in the garden.

 

By now, you should all know I also love to throw some big projects into the picture. I have projects and renovations laid out respectively by year in my schedule so I can remind myself that they all don’t need tackling at the same time. In theory, this is all fine and dandy but it rarely leaves room for the “surprises” that pop up. Sometimes there are sick animals. Sometimes there are broken fences. Sometimes there are fallen trees. The list goes on and on.

 

 

This year, we’ve been thrown a curve ball from all the rains and erosion on our property. It’s been an ongoing problem that we thought had mostly been resolved not long after we moved here, but it reared it’s ugly head again. We’ve had several contractors come out to help us with the washout we are experiencing along our driveway as well as back by our warehouse. Our property happens to be at the bottom of a hill and has a pond that ALL the water runs towards. We get roadway runoff as well as all the rain water from two big farms that are uphill. It’s not pretty. This week we had 11 tons of river rock delivered, along with 27 tons of crusher run gravel, 2 trucks of sand, 20 yards of mulch, and a bobcat. We created some dry creek beds, repaired a falling retaining wall, filled in the washed out chicken coop run and replaced the mulch that has washed at the kennel. Now, we wait for the rains to come. I plan to park my happy A** (and a glass of wine) right next to those new creek beds as soon as the next heavy rains roll in to enjoy the new directed water routes through the yard.

So, if you want to hang out with the Paulk’s in the summer, we would love to see you. Just make sure you show up with shovels, power tools or gardening gloves. We’ll even feed you dinner and there’s always a cold beer (or glass of wine!) in the fridge. 😉