Saskatoons

I almost forgot about our Saskatoon orchard experience...let's start by saying this; one long time customer of the previous owner was so put off by the state of the orchard she wouldn't even pick them.  To say they were overgrown would be an understatement....sadly when left un-pruned the bushes went wild and grew and grew....unfortunately when something puts that much energy into growing there is not much left for producing fruit and our bushes were terribly sparse with it.....We have a few containers of berries  and they are very tasty in our fruit smoothies..... on the upside we have the winter to plan our strategy for cleaning up the orchard....

30 holes...that's how many

Just so you know, a tractor and 8' auger still take a considerable amount of time and energy to dig thirty 12" X 6' holes in the clay....thanks again Brad.  Of course the wearing out of his little tractor spurred him to create a quick attach system for his bale spike and bucket on the other tractor, and of course, led to us spending some time putting together one half of one tractor with the other half of another tractor...that was cool. So thirty holes...and then they had to be filled with 8' railway ties....those are heavy....  well at least the foundation for the barn is below frost line and solid.
We decided on a 20' X 50' steel arch barn.  once we got the first three panels up with the help of our wonderful niece Rachel and her beau Andrew, Amanda and I are putting it together one arch at a time after work.  It takes us 1-1.5 hours each arch and easily a third of that time is spent together in the bucket of the tractor 10-14 feet in the air!  Tractors make great scaffolding....sort of.  Steel barns are quite simple to put together and I am thankful because I am a simple guy.

How many holes!

One every five feet!  Jumpin Jimminies!!  I get ahead of myself.  Wow so much has happened since we got the chickens.  Our sweet puppies discovered the chickens....hmmmm and almost a trip off the farm.  Well to be fair only claire and not maria was doing the killing, but maria was more than happy to munch away on the fresh kills.  All in all they only got 3 of the chickens and only roosters, whew.  Good thing we were home at the time and heard the excited barking the duo of death were emitting.  From dogs to people, we had a fantastic time when a whole bunch of family and friends got together for a day of turning chickens into food and BBQ over a nice fire.  It is a wonderfully rich life when one can be surrounded, at least on occasion, by good people.  Kari now has a freezer full of farm fresh chickens.  A couple of weeks from now we hope to duplicate the experience when our chickens are ready.  So we tore down the only leaning barn.  It went down slicker than snot.  It was leaning so much that all it took was the removal of a laaaarge dog house than was holding it partially up and pushing it past a fence post holding a corner of the barn up....and down she came.  Thanks so much to Manny and Brad whom helped immensely with the demolition...we will have a huge bonfire this holiday season....hopefully with all the wonderful people we had at our last gathering...