Sod Bustin’

February 18, 2024

Howdy there, folks,

Well, winter keeps chugging along out here on the ranch, with gloriously sunny days teasing us about spring being right around the corner.  Before you get too taken away with that, though, a cold and snowy night will set you straight really quickly.  Add some of our good, ol' New Mexican wind and we're definitely still in the middle of winter.  I've started working on a walkway to lead up to the front door of the boss's new house.  The walkway has been laid out for some time now, probably since last July or so, but its style and substance has changed a few times.  Initially, I installed metal landscape edging up and down the walkway on both sides last summer, leaving it bare in the middle for whatever future stones or pavers we would eventually go with for the project.  Then, after staring at them for a few months as the rest of the yard took shape, the boss decided that she didn't want those and just wanted a path snaking through the rest of the landscaping, sans edging.  At that point, the seeding from last summer had begun to establish itself and really had begun to start to look green all over.  So, I've been using up all of the left-over flagstone from all of the patios that we made here over the last few years, slowly but surely cutting up and chiseling apart the huge oversized stones that come on the pallets, leaving many scraps and pieces remaining.  I laid it out initially, trying to hasten my gait with my short, little legs to account for other walkway users.  This was not quite how the boss wanted it, so, before actually digging the stones into the ground and laying landscaping fabric down underneath of them, I had to move them a few times closer and farther away until I got the spacing just right.  Now, saying just right is a purely subjective thing, but we settled on something that everyone was happy with.  Then, after chiseling just the outline of the stones into the ground, I realized that I had to instead remove all the dirt from the pathway and put the stones back down on top of some sand, so as to make them level.  This has been the current project that has been taking up most of my days, after taking care of bird baths and bird feeders each morning(and the horses, too, before work).  I would say that right before starting the project we had almost ten pallets of all of the remnant flagstone pieces, some no bigger than a brick, others as wide and deep as a huge pizza tray!  I'm pretty sure that when we're all said and done, that there won't be any flagstone left...that's the idea anyway.  We shall see.

Other than that and tearing up all the sod from the backyard that wasn't growing anything green, I also had to bring a big stone bench up from the pond to put behind the boss's house.  That was quite a project for an afternoon.  First of all, I had to get the tractor down to a spot not too far from the edge of the pond and maneuver it so as not to end up going into the pond.  There wasn't too much wiggle room, but I ended up making out alright.  However, I needed all of the straps that I had to attach to the forks of the tractor so that I could lift the huge stones out of the ground that served as the bench's supports.  Of course, once I got them up to the barns, they've just been sitting there as I currently don't have a home for them.  On another day, I had to trim back hard all of the trees that are close to the solar panels that are connected to our house and the casita.  I just kind of went nuts with the chainsaw and ended up making such a big pile of branches that it took multiple trips with the backhoe to haul everything away to the arroyo that we fill up with brush piles and weeds and such.  The solar array for the boss's new house is spread out on the roofs of the new house and barns, so they never have anything growing up and shading them, but, of course, they are a little harder to clean off in the winter when we get snowstorms.  The array by our house can be done from the ground, but up there I have to crawl up a ladder and balance on top of it just so that I can reach the panels with my ten-foot-long snow squeegee.  This time of year the snow melts really quickly right after it stops falling, but it does affect our solar output so I try to get on it as soon as I can.  Meanwhile, Erin is busy filling up and tearing out sheets on her pad of graph paper as she keeps playing with ideas about what to do with the garden this year.  We're up to version 6.0 and counting.  And, she'll usually wait til the last minute to put it in sometime in May and will have it all changed again at that point, too!  Besides that, as usual, she's also making something new with her sourdough every week and is always finding new recipes to make.

So, now for some more weekly pictures to share with everyone.  First up, two shots that I played around with a little bit, first of the dogs dashing through the field and then Freedom mugging for the camera by the feed buggy.  Then, Buck in his backyard keeping an eye on me and the backhoe.  Next, four shots of our dogs out running before dark, the first three out in the big field and the last one with them checking out the pile of sod.  Then, one of Erin's favorite wines that she hadn't had in a long time that I found for Erin in Santa Fe one day.  Next, two more shots of Freedom at the morning feeding, a shot of Hidalgo's new low starch feed and then some of the horses lazing the day away, in and out of the sun and always out of the wind.  Finally, three shots of me digging that stone bench out of the ground down by the pond and then a final shot of all the sod that I scraped off in the backyard(by hand, unfortunately, as the backhoe was only useful for hauling it away.) That's it for this week!

See you soon.