Vineyard and lumberjack news

Since we've been busy hosting and touring around, I took fewer pictures on daily walks in the vineyard. Until Sunday. We had a mostly sunny morning and I grabbed the camera. We had had some rain overnight and everything out there was glistening with raindrops in the sun.

The grapes are starting to mature.

As I mentioned yesterday, it's time to turn my attention back to the yard and garden. I've got to get the firewood cut and stacked for winter and my goal is to have that done over the next two weeks. I began this past weekend by cleaning up under the woodshed where I do the cutting. During the spring and summer, I had been throwing stray branches and twigs in there to keep them for kindling. So my first task was to break/cut those down and stack them.

Next I needed to cut up some of the larger tree limbs that I took down in the spring. That required reassembling the chainsaw (I took it apart to have the chain sharpened). After cutting up the stuff that was already in the shed, I raked up the stray leaves and sawdust for the compost pile.

Then I pulled in about four wheelbarrow-loads of logs from out in the back yard. They are the remnants of the trunks and large limbs of the two plum trees we lost to the February 2010 wind storm. I cut and stacked those yesterday.

Now I have a decision to make: do I start on the oak right away continue cutting the oak (I cut twenty logs yesterday), or take a day off to cut the grass? The rains we've had are causing the grass to grow quickly, so one day this week I will have to cut it. And that means picking up all the apples that have fallen from the trees since the last time I cut the grass.

Don't even talk to me about trimming the hedge. That chore is coming up in September.