The Truck Fiasco

Before I get to the truck fiasco I thought I would write about the progress we are making in our garden areas.  Mostly because I started to upload the pictures in the wrong order :-)

Isabella is our go to hard worker.  She and I were clearing the jungle we call the back yard.  Yesterday,  while I was out front working, Isabella said she wanted to continue in the back.  I didn't think she was actually going to do the above!  This is just a small little thing above, but she ended up cutting down two of our smaller trees!  By herself.  They were only about 4 inches or so in diameter.  A lot of progress has been made by her alone!

See these?  This is what we have been up against in the back yard.  Like I said the other day, the picture that Flannery took was of the easy stuff we were digging up.

 Doesn't she look like she is having fun?  Actually my girls much prefer to work outside than inside!

 Saoirse did a wonderful job of hauling off the stuff we chopped down.

The goats did their best to help :-)  You see all that brush in the foreground?  That's the stuff we were up against. 

 How does one get any work done with little boys who want to run off?  With a port-a-crib!  Life saver I tell ya.

 Flannery requested that I take a picture of her shoveling.  She was helping to keep the dirt coming so my newspapers wouldn't fly away. 



I'm standing over at the dirt pile, and from there you can see how the boys are doing.  You can ever so slightly see the newspapers off to the left.  Our front yard slopes down, away from the house.  

 This dirt pile has been a blessing in so many ways.  Not only for the dirt itself, but it keeps the older two boys occupied!

 This is something that Isabella found when she was clearing the back yard.  Anyone know what it is?  We find the strangest things around here!


 

 More dirt fun.  Too  much dirt fun actually...

This little hand is responsible for losing this....

The boys decided it would be fun to hide their petshops in the dirt.  Um, yeah....now they don't know where they are!!  We found three of them today.  I'm not sure how many are still left.  

The found petshops needed a bath :-) 

 Oh, look, more things found!

 This picture is too funny!  Flannery took all the pictures in this post, but two.

 She was trying to get a picture of the frog in mid jump.  She came close.

 My work in progress.  The row is over 36 feet long!  Today I got far enough to make it past the smaller trees, so the current rows are probably 48 or so feet long.  This is where the fruit trees will go.

A free tip....don't let your newspapers sit out and get wet....it makes it a LOT harder and more time consuming to work with them.  Ask me how I know.  I am sure this could have been done in half the time.  I almost thought of scraping the wet papers and starting with fresh ones, but that seemed like a waste.  I am happy to say that we only have about 20 newspapers left!!!  I'm definitely going to have to make a run for more.  As of last night, we now have two loads of mulch on top of some of the papers.  Many more loads will be needed to cover it to the depth we need it at.

 Jed, climbing the 'mountain'.  We've had lots of baths going on around here.  But dirt is good, right?




 Ok.  On to the truck fiasco.  A few days ago Jeremiah brought back a load of mulch while it was dark out.  The destination for that particular load was in front of the goat barn.  I had explained that it was like quick sand back there.  Jeremiah thought I was only talking about the area right in front of the goat barn.  He found out the hard way that the whole middle area was like quick sand as well.


  

 It was forcasted to rain the following day.  We tried to get it out that night, but it was stuck tight!  The under belly of his truck was resting on the ground.

 After asking our church group if anyone had any chain, we had to go out and buy some. One end secured here...

 ...the other to my van.  Now, I know our van has some V-8 engine or such, but I really, really didn't think we were going to get it out of there.  At least not without a lot of effort.  I was wrong.  Jeremiah told me to go really slow.  I can't believe how easily the van pulled it out!

 You can see the tire coming up.

 Now it's out, and I just had to pull it to the gate.

 From my view I could see we were making a big mess of the yard!  Not that it isn't a mess normally.

 Yay!  It's free!

That's a whole lot o mud.  It was easy to pull out, but now Jeremiah's truck is kind of shaking when he is driving.  There wasn't much to do about that.  There was no way for anyone to get behind his truck to pull it out as they would have sunk as well.

That's a day in the life of us :-)