Have you ever just felt like you have been so busy for so long and still don’t have anything to show for all of your efforts and hard work? That’s kind of the way we’ve been feeling for awhile now even to the point we have been MIA on the blog. Along with trying to do all of our normal daily routines, garden, and animals we have been trying to work on clearing that patch of land we bulldozed back in January.

Bulldozing Trees with a D4K Caterpillar

We have decided we are going to just continue on clearing it ourselves even though it was a big job (bigger than we had imagined). We have also come to terms with the fact this process was going to take much longer than we originally had speculated. To add to the sheer size of this job, we constantly have difficulty getting days off of work together from our public jobs to work on the land. We do have many Sundays off together, but with church very little gets accomplished at the land on those days. So many times Jon would go down on his days off when I was working at my public job and work by himself. But slowly, very slowly, progress was being made.

 

Progress?

 

We have “enjoyed” many a bonfire.

Then the summer was just so hot, it was about unbearable to burn so we did take a short break. But just as soon as it began to cool off just a bit we were back at it. Oh, did I mention we don’t have a tractor yet? Other than the stumps Jon pulled up with his truck and a chain, this is all manual physical labor and we have been feeling very old and very out of shape. Most days we did not take any pictures because we were too dirty and working too hard to even think about it.

However, Saturday we actually had a day off together and we were out there working. Late in the day I stepped back and just looked and was amazed. At that point I had to take some pictures with my phone. Finally, with big smiles on our faces we could see this thing, this very big thing starting to take shape.

The Land is Starting to Take Shape

You can see the large pine tree in the background as proof this is the same patch of land. You can actually see a half descent patch there in the background that Jon hopes to temporarily fence off and plant in next season.

Can You See the Makings of a Garden?

We have decided this immovable, nonburnable, gargantuan root ball will be here for our great, great, great, grandchildren to enjoy and took our pictures with it for the sake of posterity.

 

 

 

These humongous root balls are beasts! Sometimes they have taken more than one bonfire on different days to get them completely gone.

 

As you can see there is still much work to be done and at the pace we are going it maybe 4 or more years before we get this area done. But still slow progress is better than no progress at all. Every day that we have worked out here has been hard, but rewarding. What else would we do with all of our free time anyway right?

The Land Series:
Closed on the Land
Exploring the Land
Bulldozing a Patch of the Land
Clearing Land the Hard Way
Clearing the Land – Finally a “Little” Progress