Sometimes all you have to do is ask

I take walks during my breaks at work and I admire all the trees and garden in the neighborhood surrounding my work. Some of these gardens are in little streets and some of the trees are in the cementary that's about a block away. One thing I noticed while walking is that there are lots and homes that have either tall grasses or fruit bearing trees without any work being done to them. I found myself working up my courage to go up the the homes to see if I could pick up the dropped fruit or to cut down the grass.  It's been strangely positive in that people will gladly allow me to pick up all the dropped fruit or will allow me to go into the lots and cut down grass whenever I can. Although I think I would still have to build up the courage to go to new people and ask, sometimes all that it takes is that little bit of effort to go up and ask. I think it helps out many of us; I get to feed my animals and use extra fruit and they get a clean area without too many rotting fruit. Next time you see an oportunity, I would highly recommend that you take that chance.

willkommen, приветствие, bienvenidos!

We've noticed that we've had a few visitors from Germany and Russia as well as South America. We just wanted to say welcome and sorry that Blogger is not very friendly with allowing comments to post. Feel free to email us if you have any questions or if there is anything in particular that you would like to see. We will be posting up a few more posts on slaughtering animals as well as preparing them for the freezer or for curing. Welcome and we hope you enjoy!

The Howling of the Wind

We will hit our four year mark on the 29th of June and I can honestly say that every year has brought different climate. We had flooding issues the first two years with somewhere in the 20 inch/year rate and then only 10 inches last year and a whopping 3 something inches this year since July. The only thing that seems to be somewhat permanent is that we usually always have wind. We've had 60 mph wind gusts this weekend which means I'll have to see how many more almonds and peaches we lost due to them being knocked off the trees. It's interesting to see the growth of some of the trees because you can tell just how windy a year was depending on the angle of their growth pattern. Some trees like the pistachios show drastic leans as they were planted three years ago when we also had gusts of winds that were reported in the 80 mph range.
Last night we could hear the whole house as the gusts would come in. We could also hear debris that was picked up and thrown about. We'll have to see what was displaced in our yard. Luckily, I spent Saturday picking up garbage brought in from our surrounding neighbors' yards (bags and other such things) so we will hopefully still have a pretty clean backyard. I luckily forgot to close the livingroom glass door all the way and it made a great pathway for the wind to flow from the screen windows in the front to the screened door in the livingroom. The house did not creak as much as it could, but it made a great environment for Ivan and I to snuggle in and just dream the night away. (If you get a chance ask me about Ivan learning to not drink water laying down and about how much cats puking in the night sucks.)
Of course with the wind being as constant as it usually is we were thinking about adding wind power after we install solar. If solar provides all the power we need we might forego it, but we'll still have it as an option for the future.