Catching Up

Wow – it’s been a long time!  Several people have mentioned that they missed seeing my updates, so I will spend the next couple of posts getting you caught up on life at Glenmore.

We spent all of last year doing huge projects like building the barn, clearing land and building fence.  This summer, we are transitioning to smaller projects.  Among other things, we have done some painting, remodeled a bathroom, replanted pastures and had several big trees cut down.

We had one tree leaning over the house, so the insurance company wanted it removed. We also had several other trees that we thought were at risk for falling either onto the house or Gator’s shop.  Don’t let me give you the impression that we cut them down ourselves – we do most of the work around here, but that was too much for us!  As I have mentioned before, most of our trees are between 80 and 100 years old and many of them are hollow and have dead branches.

Phase one of our plan was just to get the trees cut down that were posing a problem – so nine of them came down.  We saved most of the wood that we will burn over the winter in our new heating fireplace (another of this year’s projects), but we were able to sell one section of a walnut tree to a sawmill which managed to pay a lot of the bill to have the rest of them cut down.

We have started growing new trees from seeds that we’ve collected this spring.  In the coming years, we will have a few trees taken down a year and we will start planting the saplings that came from the old trees to replace them.  Hopefully we will have a second generation of trees that will last another hundred years!