Raised bed for gardens & trimming the brush

Our friend Judy from Minnesota is spending a few days with us.  Whenever she comes, all she wants to do is work.  She even leaves her pair of work boots here ready for the next time she visits.  She enjoys doing carpentry kinds of things with Leann, but mostly she likes to trim brush in the woods.  We even made sure she had her own Fiskars trimmer to do her brushing.  And on her visit here this time, she was able to do both some carpentry AND some brush clearing in the woods, in between the times of drizzly rain.

First, they started on the raised beds. This is a pretty easy project but it saves us a lot of bending over tending our gardens.  All it takes are some long boards with 4x4 posts on each corner and one in the center.  Add the boards on the ends and you have a raised bed!

 Judy drilling pilot holes for screws

 Leann, self-described as "Measure once, cut twice" 

One long side done, one more in the garage, only the end boards yet to add.  And, of course, deciding where we want to place them this year.

Next came cutting brush in the woods.  We couldn't get too far into the woods back behind our house because our Ranger UTV (we call her Cammie) had a dead battery and a flat tire. And also, it's still so wet up there and hard to get around. [Update: Battery and tire are now fixed.  Yay!] Fortunately, we don't have to go far around here to find trees and limbs to clean up, so here are some pictures of them and their work.

Here's Leann getting some higher branches with her saw extension.

And Judy with her mighty Fiskars created lots of piles to clean up or use for small animal habitats.

Some other pictures I took today:

Those woodpeckers, pileated and others, are pretty in the woods, but can do great damage to trees.

More woodpecker holes. And that's Leann's yellow flicker house, as yet uninhabited, we think.

 The creek here on the bottom of the ravine looks like a muddy mess right now, but in a couple of weeks both sides of the creek will be covered with a carpet of blue forget-me-nots.

For now you'll just have to trust me on this one.

This cage is covering a giant asparagus patch we found a couple years ago.  Then last year, our first year living here full-time, we found that we had to keep it covered with this cage if we ever wanted any asparagus.  Lesson learned!

And growing on either side of this old log is a big patch of chives.  Baked potatoes anyone?

No sunshine today but isn't spring wonderful?