Christmas Lights & One Fast Project

We started out the day with a quick trip to Fillmore for a few groceries.  Also, I made a deposit and a payment.  We prepared our Christmas cards.  I updated our label list. Carol mailed them.

We have Christmas presents to wrap.  I built a small rack to hold a roll of wrapping paper.  I used long roll I thought, for the measurements.  It turned out that there were several rolls longer.  The one i built fits our kitchen table.  It can be fastened to the table on the far end and the whole table is available for pulling the paper.  

I use two small clamps.  One on each end.  I made long square piece of wood to hold the roll of paper.  It is easily moved for and other roll of paper.

The ice display continues to grow.  The following pictures are of the same things but from different angles.

 This show the branch from the nearby sycamore tree that is bent over with the weight of the ice.

The pictures I took were so shaky that I got the tripod for the next pictures.  They are still a little shaky.  The first picture was taken from the road.  The flash shows the dried up plants in the native garden.

 The picture below clearly shows the red light on the Christmas wreaths.

Comments and questions are welcome

Prunning, DI, & Christmas Lights.

I am looking for the  Christmas lights.  They were in totes and boxes in several places around the garage.  First I found boxes of magazines and books.   I saved some books that I wanted to keep and re-boxed the rest of them and they are in the trunk of the car. I put some of them in the trunk yesterday afternoon.  Carol and I then drove to Fillmore and left them at the DI.    
This is not much of a picture.  But it is a box of bowels, ceramic mugs, and other things that I didn't dig deep enough to see what they were.  I was going to put a label on this box listing some of the contents inside so I would not have to open the box again.

I have a box of unshelled beans.  It took me about a half hour to end up with a couple of pounds of dry beans.

There is a box of in-threshed seeds of the Salvia Pachyphylla.  Threshing would empty a box and the seeds could be put in a small coin envelop. I could go into detail of the threshing procedure, but ill keep it simple.  I rubbed the in-threshed seed between my leather gloves.  I brought the fan from my bedroom and winnowed.  the chaff blew out and the seeds fell back into the bucket.  I used a sieve to let the seeds  fall through and I discarded the chaff.  I used a fine sieve and the small chaff fell out.  With a straw in my mouth I could blow out the lighter chaff particles.

The wind a couple of days ago had messed up the two wreaths.  I added a few more stems and wired them in.  I have a large needle use for closing burlap bags.  I attached the wire to the needle and pushing it up down through the wreath as was able to make the stems more secure.  I added two stems each with red berries to give a little more color.

It took me a couple of hours to prune the yew bushes.  It looks a lot better.  The picture is of one on the left and the other one on the right.

The nights are a little colder.  I am building an ice display. The photos below show it.

We drove to the Fillmore DI and left there boxes of books and magazines, and a few other things.

I spent the rest of the afternoon putting up the Christmas lights.  I did the Maple tree,  part of the Linden tree, and covered the two yew bushes.  I am about half was finished.  The maple tree is quite tall.  I used an oak stick from last year and made it longer by inserting into a PVC pile.  I had to carve the oak so it would fit into the PVC pipe.  The top of the oak is forked some.

 Below is the connection between the oak and the PVC pipe.  It is cold and my hands were a little shaky.  Hence, fuzzy photos.

Comments and questions are welcome.

Warm First and Wind &Storm Second

Saturday, Robert and Frank were here.  They thinned the plants in three of the raised beds.  Here most of the plants were removed.  A few were transplanted, and bunch of onions were pulled.

 

These don't look like they have been thinned, but they have.

Today, I tried my hand at building some Christmas wreaths.  I cut off branches of yews, pinion pine, ponderosa pine, red dogwood, and arborvitae.  I started to make the wreathes in the house, but I changed to greenhouse three because of the mess I would make in the kitchen.

 I watched a YouTube video that showed me how to do it.  I made the first one and it just didn't hang right.  I watched the video again and found my mistake.  Using a different method of tying the cuttings to the arbor, I made the second one.  It hung really well.  I took the first one apart and rebuilt it.

 Here is where I took it apart.

I drilled a hole between a couple of bricks in the pillars on both sides of the porch.  The wreath on the left pillar.  And the wreath on the right side.

Here are both of them.

With the wreaths finished and cold weather approaching, I moved the tractor for house five to house three.  Earlier this morning I started the compressor, but it was too cold.  I tried again this afternoon and it started right up.  After the tank was full, I pulled the compressor to house five where I put air in the tractor tires.  It start right up.  The bucket was on the tractor so I hauled five buckets full.  to a new garden west of house five. I don't know for sure what to plant there.

Then I drove the tractor to the north door of house three.  I had to cut branches off two different trees to make to the door.  I filled soil on both sides of the threshold in order to drive in.  I moved a few things in house three around to make room for the tractor.

The weather has really cooled.  I turned the water on so pipes would not freeze and the water to ice creation.  We will watch it grow as the freezing weather continues.

The birds were eating the sunflower seeds that fell to the ground.  The feeder was empty and I was going to fill it tomorrow, but did so today.

Comments and questions are welcome