Rain Day

 Good morning friends!  Hope you all had a great week! 

We went out at 8am and started shoveling hay/poop, but only got five wagon loads done before it started to rain. I have been really struggling with my health, so didn't think getting cold and wet was a good idea, so called it quits for the day. We are supposed to have rain till Sunday so I'll have the rest of today and tomorrow off hay/poop shoveling. Hopefully I can get a new art design done! 

I doubt five wagon loads is noticeable, but I took my normal after work pic. That's 60 wagon loads moved so far. We are basically moving ten wagon loads an hour, so 6 minutes a wagon load. 

This pic is of one of my Saxony ducks playing in a poop/pee/water puddle in the cow area. Interestingly, this area never pooled water before! So gross and so frustrating. We are going to have to even that out.

Have a great weekend friends! hugs and love!

Another 20 loads

 Good day friends!

We got another 20 wagon loads of poop/hay moved today. My body hurts so damn bad, it's hard to function.

We have now moved 55 wagon loads of hay/poop from off the ground. I got my wagon last year off Amazon. so glad I got it! It's been a huge help! It's a big wagon; 53" x 24" x 27" and holds up to 440 pounds. 

The hay/poop is so gross. Makes me feel sick. Yuck! :( If we are careful. we can roll it, which makes it easy to pick up and allows us to move rolls of it. 

I'm not sure if it looks any different, but it is 20 wagon loads less. We just keep taking it off the top. It should all be flat. 

It's supposed to rain tomorrow, so hopefully a day off! Hugs and love! Be safe friends!

Back to Work

 Good day friends! Hope you are all doing well! It rained here the last two days. It was great. I got to sit on my butt on the couch, watched TV and made art! My poor beat up body was so very happy for the break

Today, it's back to work time.

I'm back to cleaning up hay and poop ... soooo much hay and poop!!! 

We moved twenty wagon loads of the hay/poop today We are going to try to focus on moving twenty wagon loads a day (when the weather is ok). Twenty wagon loads in thirty days should get it done ... right?

The front part of the area, the part with all the hay, should be flat with the back part of the land, so the poop/hay has to be several feet deep. Everything below the surface is really wet and heavy, so we tried taking off the top layer in the hopes that the middle layers would dry up some. It's much lighter when it's dry than wet!

We'll get this done eventually! We are determined! Just want to get out beautiful camping/fire pit/BBQ area back to what it was. 

Working away

 Was out working at 8am again today. I'm so exhausted and sore, I'm feeling very discouraged.

Today, we worked on moving more hay. Insects and mice underneath it, so horribly yucky :(

We also got to work on removing three metal rod that were left in the ground. They are going to seriously injure someone (they had something to do with the electric fence and of course the cow owners just left them here for me to deal with)

We tried pulling them out, but they wouldn't budge. They are about 4 feet long, so about 3 feet into the ground. The best we could do was dig down around them and cut them off below ground level. 

I also almost broke my damn ankle again today. I stepped into one of their fence post holes! They took out the fence post and left the hole! what assholes! 

The hole is so deep; my hand is in the hole and not even touching the bottom! An animal could of easily broken their leg in the hole! Says everything about the cow owners; they don't care about anyone or anything, but themselves. Horrible people. 

Wishing you all a great day! It's supposed to rain here tomorrow, so I'm hoping to get the day off from physical labour! :) Hugs and love!

Started cleaning up the Hay

Poop mountain is officially done! Thank Fortuna! We moved about 70 wagon loads of poop. Each wagon load was well over 150 pounds. I could not move the wagon when it was full. It was simply too heavy for me! We have a big farm wagon. It is suppose to hold 440 pounds, but still got bent hauling all the poop :(

We have now started moving the hay that's on the ground. It is of course mixed with poop and pee. In places it's about 3 feet deep. 

It goes back about twenty feet. 

I have no idea how we are going to move all that by hand. I guess the same way we moved poop mountain, one shovel load at a time. It's really depressing. 

This is a pic of about half the trees we've now cut down/trimmed due to cow damage. We are slowly bringing them out and adding them to the pile. 

Two funny pics to end with- The ducks are idiots. They literally laid eggs IN the pond. First pic is an egg I grab that was in the water at the edge of the pond and the second pic is of an egg in the water!

Thank the Gods for all the wonderful critters! They sure do make even the worst day better!

 

Almost done

We got more poop moved this morning. We are almost done moving/spreading poop mountain. 

The rain showed us that there is now a serious dip in the center of the area, so we've been trying to level it. We've been spreading the manure out in the area. Hopefully it will help raise it up and even things out. As we needed to flatten the manure down and a lawn roller costs $200, I came up with the idea of using the big snow shovel thing filled with rocks. It worked! Travis very slowly walked back and forth over the manure dragging it and it's compressing it all down 

We still obviously have a ton of work to do, but one step at a time! Once we get poop mountain done, we'll start on all the hay/poop on the ground. I'm afraid that's gonna be a harder job than moving poop mountain was. 

Thanks for all the kind works and encouragement everyone! Much apprecaited!

 

Making Progress

We are slowly making progress. Here's the newest addition to make progress photos. 

We are pulling some pretty crazy stuff out of the poop mountain. This stone is huge!

Another big stone, though half the size of the first one. The cows didn't kill the firepit. the plow did. The cows' owner plowed right over the firepit. 

We also pulled out some more little trees. 

A happier photo; we got this area done! Cleaned up, raked and grass seeded! It's a step!

Another chore to do! Rake the forests and break up the big clods of poop. Mother Nature will be such a big help restoring everything! 

I'm exhausted and in a crap ton of pain, but happy to be getting it done! 

 

April, 2021

Hi everyone! Sorry, I've sucked at blogging for the last year. Between health problems and work, there never seems to be the time/energy

Do you remember back in November 2019 when we very stupidly agreed to babysit a friend of a friend's cows and horses for 6-8 weeks? Well, they finally left at the beginning of March 2021. Fourteen months after they got here! FOURTEEN MONTHS! 

WOW!

The guys who own the cows blame the pandemic for how long it took, but really? We think that's just a convenient excuse. Heck, if they'd only been here 6-8 weeks they would of been long gone before the pandemic even hit! They totally lied and played us.

It was a really crappy 10 months (The first 3-4 months were fun). The cow owners only watered their cows for 3 out of the 14 months, so as we aren't complete assholes, we carried down big buckets of water for them every day. In 14 months, the poor animals were never brushed and their feet, teeth etc weren't cared for at all. The animals were so miserable! It was so hard on our hearts seeing the animals so poorly cared for. It was very stressful.

We thought the cows/horses were only going to be here for 6-8 weeks so allowed them to be put in our beautifully manicured camping/BBQ/fire pit area. They destroyed it. They knocked down trees, totaled the firepit., killed our Maypole, ripped Fairy doors off trees and crushed everything in their path. 

The guys were supposed to comeback and clean up the mess. We waited 6 weeks and guess what, they didn't come back, so we gave up and started cleaning it ourselves. I asked them to come back and help, and got treated rudely in response. 

Let's be honest, they never intended to come back. They totally used us and screwed us. Horrible people.

So, here's some pics

This is a pile of poop that has sat here for about 7-8 months. It's about 4 tons of poop. The cow owners plowed the area last summer and pushed it all into a pile (on our firepit), and then just left it there. They say they couldn't move it out of here because they broke their pickup truck. 

The top pic is when we started. the bottom pic is after a week of working on it. We are determined to have it all moved by the end of this week. 

This pic shows one of the homes that rodents have made under all the hay that was left on the ground. Wonderful! (insert sarcasm). Hope the cats are up to the flood of rodents hiding under the hay! So gross!

This is a pic of all the hay left on the ground. In places it's about two feet deep. That should be fun for us to clean. Once the mountain of poop is moved, we'll start on the hay.

This pic is of one of my Greenman ornaments. We found it in the middle of the pile of poop. The whole back side of it is gone. It was literally plowed into the giant pile of poop. 

This photo shows all the firepit stones and stumps that we have so far pulled out of the pile of poop. The guy literally plowed right over the firepit. We were shocked to find the stumps (We have four stumps around the firepit to use as little tables) literally in the 4 ton pile of poop!

And this last pic is something nice! A woodpecker :) We saw him when we were outside shoveling poop.