Snapshot Sat-er Monday!

Happy belated Saturday! The weather is fine and our schedules are opening up a bit more, so we'll be back (again) to weekly posting pronto.

Here's a view from the barn up the hill to the pasture. There's no way our walking lawnmower could even dent the mass of foliage up there. Right now, it's waiting for a riding lawnmower but until that happens it looks like something out of a Miyazaki movie!

View from the barn down towards the house. The fenced structure in the bottom left is the new dog kennel. The green house and raised veggie garden are off screen to the right. 

The other side, you can't quite make it out on this image but there's fencing in the woods in the top left. The wood frames in the center are the remains of the previous tenants' grape vines. It's so totally overgrown and rotted that you can't get access to anything. Sounds like a future project to me!

This guy has been lurking around the property, I want to clean and paint him eventually as decoration for my apartment, but I can't decide on a design.  The spiky plant of pain to the right is one of the prolific raspberries that torments- I mean resides on the property. They are everywhere!!

 We have so many ferns in the recesses of our property that some areas seem like it's Jurassic!

Where's Jeff Goldblum when you need him? 

 We currently have mountain strawberries, wild raspberries and wild blackberries blooming around the property. We will even have some blueberries, as the barrels mum planted last year have finally matured!

A better view of the dog kennel (complete with dog house and dog deck!) as well as the garden shed.

I spy with my big hetero-chromatic eyes... a tiny bench and a summer project! The house is set up with little sprinkling systems, but there's a fault in the line somewhere so they just make a mess. Mum plans on fixing them, but wants to do some research first. 

Big bowl o' chives! It needs to be split and r-epotted, but in the meantime it smells divine!

Everything is in bloom now- these rhododendrons are especially volumous outside the game room window

Close up of a blossom- so pretty!

We hired a survey company to reassess the far edge of the property last week. Our neighbor made a bunch of assumptions about the line between our properties and ended up damaging the treehouse in his attempt to "reclaim it." All is well now, but we opened up a dialog and got a legit survey crew out ASAP. We asked them to make really obvious markers of where our property ends and at this point we have to take their word for it, because their hefty 2x4 in cement markers are completely obscured by brush! One is so far down by the water, we couldn't find them even after some exploring. Up in the hinterlands of Jurassic river access, I found some really interesting remains. Completely clean, the head shape is to angular to be feline but much too large to be any rodentia we have seen around. Maybe weasel? Will research and let you know!