Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm

Even though everyone was watching the weather carefully, the day the cement was delivered ended up being one of those horrible rain storm days.  Luckily the loaded cement truck did not get stuck, but it lost control and could not stir, so Jeff had to get the tractor and spread a couple of loads of gravel to give some extra traction to the cement truck.  It made a terrible mess in the barnyard – but we’ll fix that later on a dry day.

Otherwise, everything went great!  The cement was poured in the barn, plus a section in front of the barn, as well as a small section in front of the house (this was with left-over cement).  It took a crew all day to smooth and level the cement.  What a difference this made in the barn!

We were lucky with this weekend’s weather – sunny and mid-50’s for both days, which meant we spent every minute we could working outside:

We got the last load of gravel into the barn (yeah!!!) and also finished building and filling the form outside the barn. 
We will have half of the front overhang concreted for now.  The other half will hopefully become our crush pad, which will need to be extended beyond the overhang to give us enough space for the wine press – looking to do that in the Spring.

Continued on the fence painting project – we used 4 gallons of paint on Sunday afternoon and got most of the fence along the road on the pond-side done.

We also made a decent dent into our huge mulch pile – got all the new blueberries and elderberry bushes done.  We’ve been working with mulch every evening last week, until it got too dark to see.  Now with the time change, we won’t be able to do any outside work during the week.

Earlier this week, Lars was walking into the upper part of the barn to get a tool for Jeff and an owl came swooping by him (they make no noise) – scared the heck out of him.  He shut the barn door and ran to the house to get Jeff – by the time they made it back, they just saw it fly through the one missing board on the back side of the barn – going sideways. 

This evening, as it was starting to get dark, Sam and Lars went into the barn with a camera – never thinking they would find it, but it was there, in the very top section of the barn – looking just like the image on wikipedia 🙂

Because of the awful weather, Jeff, Jens and Lars worked in the barn most of Saturday, while Tina finally painted her bathroom.  In the barn, the pointing between the rocks continues, but they also managed to put in two new windows.  This involved some pretty tricky rock stacking and pointing, to keep the window level.  One window is completely done, the second one still needs rocks and cement underneath: