One of the things on this side of the house that we want to save is an old cellar hole. There was a house and barn on this property long before we owned it, probably abandoned a hundred years ago or so. The house existed on the Marlow tax map in 1860. One of the neat things about the cellar hole is that it’s almost covered with day lilies that have spread and spread over the years. When we first moved to Marlow, everyone called our place “the old Jones’ place”, never mind that the Jones hadn’t been here for a hundred years. The road we live on (Mack Hill Road) was sometimes called the Old Jones Road. It’s really tempting to re-use all of these old stones for new things, but I’d love to get this cleared out enough and put in a rock garden or something instead.
We worked outside a lot today — beautiful weather, temps in the upper 50s, clear blue skies. We decided to attack the slash pile that’s been bugging us for so long. We’ve tried to burn it before, but never with much luck. Fires are weird things — hard to keep going, but dangerous, easy to spread. This slash is mostly left over stuff from a timber cut in 1988, old rotten pine. But it’s right next to the house, and quite the eyesore. Once we got it going, it burned two full truck loads of brush, and at almost 9:00 tonight, it’s still going strong, though contained.
Frank got his tractor up and running today. It took a jump from his truck to start though, plus needed to have it’s front tires pumped up. He started a small fire while he was jumping it, thought he’d burnt out the ignition thingie, but all ended up well.
He also pulled the plow off of his old work truck. It took the gentle persuasion of a sledge hammer to actually get the darn thing off. But I finally think I see the usefulness of this ugly old truck. He drove it into the woods where he’d cut earlier, and we loaded it up with brush, and piled it on the fire.
The only trees even thinking of blooming are the crab apples and the red maples. None of our other trees have buds on them that I can see.
The pond water is clear and beautiful, but we can’t seem to keep the water level up as high as we think it should go. Maybe the pump thing with the drain in it sunk over the winter? It looks lower, and the water barely covers the gravel at the edges of the pond.