Fence Posts and Other Things

The week before last, Dane got all the logs drug up here from the forest, and since he has been cutting fence posts and putting them along the new fence line.



He has learned to make pretty straight cuts with the chainsaw.



After cutting three or four logs, he had most of the posts he needed, so we have a lot more wood left for other things. You can see some of the cut posts along the chicken yard fence line.


Here is a picture of the posts that he has put in for the front gate.


We enjoyed a walk to the neighbor's property to pick pears this past Sabbath morning.




On the way there, we saw this bamboo shoot (Elijah is standing in front of it) that was tiny two weeks ago, but as you can see the bamboo grows very quickly around here.


After we picked pears, we went to check the banana plants to see if the bananas were ripe yet, but they are still too small.



This pretty plant was growing near the bananas.



And this is the view from the banana plants. You can see our house off in the distance.



And on our way back to the house, we found a wild squash vine and picked two nice sized squash and have enjoyed eating them the past couple of days. We love finding wild things to eat around here. We are so thankful that even when some of our crops are struggling, the Lord has blessed us with other fruit of the land.

Yesterday afternoon, we went down to the river to swim and our neighbor, Javier was there fishing. After swimming for a while, he, Dane, and David decided to climb the cliff that separates that particular part of the river from the rest of our property, and they made a very interesting discovery. They found one of our missing goats, or at least her skull. The one that escaped fifteen minutes after Dane got her home from the man he had bought her from. She had made herself at home in a cleft of the cliff and apparently the strap that Dane had wrapped around her horns had gotten stuck on a spine and she had gotten tangled up around some other trees. It appears that she lived there comfortably for a while before becoming tangled. Though we are sad that we lost her, we are glad to know what became of her. Maybe someday we will discover what happened to the mother and her baby that escaped a few weeks later.

Lastly, here is a picture of a strange little bug that Dane found the other day. It was very brightly colored, orange and blue, and ran around with its tail curled up in the air in a defensive mode like a scorpion.

Logging

The past few weeks Dane has been logging in the jungle close to the river. He found several dead trees there that he is harvesting to make fence posts. The work has been a bit treacherous since the trees overlooked an approximate eight foot drop off onto a twenty foot ledge that overlooked another sixty foot drop off (does that make sense?).

First he macheted a path through the jungle so that he could get the track vehicle down there to haul up the trees. This path clearing took nearly a full two weeks.

Thank the Lord Dane had his trusty crew, Elijah and David, along to help with the task.

After much work, the track vehicle made its way down the new path.












One of the trees was a bit tricky to cut down. Dane had a plan to cut it so that it wouldn't fall down the cliff; however, when the tree started to shift as he was cutting, the chainsaw got stuck. He was able to get the chainsaw out minus the chain. Afterward, he put a used chain on the chainsaw and finally got the tree cut down (and no, it didn't slide down the cliff), but the one mishap ended up taking an entire day.



A couple of the trees that Dane was harvesting were on the ledge, eight feet below the tractor, and the one tree above it that had been troublesome to cut down was huge, so hauling the trees up and around the path Dane had cleared took a lot of trial and error too. Unfortunately, the pictures do not give a clear picture of the terrain - the drop off and angles cannot be made out.











Dane used the track vehicle, chains, a hoist, and a rachet and straps to get the trees up onto the path.

















Since then, Dane has been hauling the trees up log by log and dusty log rider (child) by dusty log rider (child).






This is a picture of about half of the logs that he has gotten up to the house so far.







Hauling up the logs will take at least another day or two, and then Dane hopes to start cutting fence posts for a new five acre pasture for the cows. The plan is that our new fence line will also enclose the area around the house and allow us to put a gate in at the property's entrance.


On another note, I forgot to mention in my last post that Dane had completed half of the second story floor in the house, so now he and I have a sort of loft bedroom. In the picture, you can see the beginnings of a wall that he put up that will separate this part of the second story into two rooms.






For now, the children are still sleeping downstairs because it is too dangerous for them upstairs until more walls are built. However, the absence of our bed downstairs gives us all a lot more room.

Other things that are going on around the farm......

The corn in the field close to the house is past the edible stage now, so the rest will be allowed to dry for the animals. But the corn field down the way, is flowering, so we hope to be eating corn again soon. The black beans are growing well and right now look and taste like green beans (which explains why our neighbors, that had never eaten green beans, want to peel the green beans that we give them in order to eat the seeds). The watermelons, cantaloupe, and tomatoes are ripening and thankfully we got to enjoy our firstfruits of those this past week.

We have also had what looks like an end to the drought! It has rained nearly every day for the past week. Praise the Lord! The springs are replenishing, which means now we don't have to pump as much water up from the lower spring to the cows.

Well that's all that I have for this post.

Have a blessed Sabbath day,

Jessica