The First "I Think We Over Did It" Day of the gardening season.

Every gardener knows it, they know how it feels.  The everything hurts even my hair feeling after the first nice day of working outside after a long winter of inactivity.  That's how Barry and I feel today.  Even though we weren't planting, hoeing, tilling, or mowing, we were working towards this year's gardens.  You see, our new place has come with a wealth of work to do and not all of it directly related to our herbs.

Yesterday's chore looked something like this.  In fact, it looked worse than this because I took this picture half way through the day (so much for my commitment to document before and after photos of our work on the new farm). 

Actually, when we started yesterday morning there was a HUGE pile of broken wood in there too.  The kind with nails of every shape and kind all bent kitty wampus from when the wind took the structure down many years ago.  We spent the better part of the day removing nails and moving the old wood to a burn pile except the wood that was good enough to burn in the wood stove.  Pause here to give me an "awww" for ripping my favorite work pants in a nail.
Then we went to work removing the trees that had grown up in the space and in the end it looked pretty good.

It looked good, but we didn't.  Sore,  tired and by 6 PM almost unable to move. we realized we had experienced the first 'we-over-did-it' day of the year.  But by that time, the sun was going down, there was a good cloud cover moving in and although we hurt, it was a good hurt because we knew we had truly accomplished something. 

Our hope is to finish cleaning this up and then use the metal siding we take out to build a new wash/pack room in the barn and then use the old cattle gates in the barn to put on the poles you see in the photo for a new grape arbor.  We believe in recycling - mostly we're just cheap.  The spot will be perfect for grapes with shelter and plenty of sun and soil that should be rich as cattle were the last things to trod this soil.  Hopefully some tasty grape jelly will be in the future again in a year or two - for now, I just want a good hot soaking, or maybe a back rub and definitely some aspirin.