With that steep roof over the living room it looks as if we’re building a little gnome home here in the Hundred Acre Woods. So precious!

So wrong! Seems the folks who build trusses missed the mark by two feet and those forms, for which we waited a couple of weeks, will have to come down. Another couple of weeks until the correct forms can arrive, so the carpenters have been quite busy on the garage. Tyrone not happy, with the rain coming and no roof over the house.

So let me introduce these carpenters: Here are Eric, Doug, and Moise. (NOOOOO! “An error occurred in the download, try again later.” Phone call to MAC Force. Miles not in until Monday. I try again. “An error . . .” So, once again, no photos.)

“Tell me about Eric,” I say to Tyrone. “Does he have a family? Is he nice. Is he funny?”

“He’s married, has two kids. I don’t know if he’s funny. Why do you ask?”

“Vik wants to know. How about Doug and Moise? Are they funny?”

“Well, Moise doesn’t even talk, but he’s a great worker. Doug’s a fisherman, and me and him talk about baseball.”

There you go, Vik. Best I can do for now.

We had a good meeting with Steve, sitting under the Homestead Oak. He and Jarod of USF&W have been at work, and came up with a scheme whereby they pretty much divide the property in half. They take the floodplain and wetlands, leaving us the savanna and woods for grazing, and for Monarch and Fender’s Blue Butterfly habitats. Also, we get to keep the oak copse.

This is not to say they literally will own half the property, just that they’ll undertake restoration of same. To include vernal pools in the wetlands. A vernal pool is an ephemeral body of water which contains no outlet, which dries in the summer and fall. Important for aquatic species such as salamanders and for wild flowers, such as lomatium and meadowfoam. Hmm. And mosquitoes, maybe?

Later in the afternoon, Larry was at work with the weed whacker when Mike (Sheep Guy) stopped by. The drums are beating for that tractor for Larry, and Mike contributed his share. You Have to have a tractor. You can’t run 100 acres with a weed whacker, Larry. There followed some technical stuff about shear pins, fuel lines, etc. But he just wanted to tell us, he said, about our pear tree. Did we know of it? He and his wife stop by every evening to feed “the girls” and their calves, and note that they’ve eaten all the windfall pears, as well as all the fruit within reach. Is that okay with us?

But before we get a tractor, we do have to get the doors to the garage in place. Mike says anybody could come by, jack up our truck and take the tires. We’ve been lucky, he says, that the only vandalism so far had been the basketball hoop and stand that someone left by the side of the barn. Upon hearing this, we’ve decided to park the truck up by the construction until it’s safe to leave in the barn. We’re naive and innocent, but we probably shouldn’t be stupid as well. That tractor will have to park behind locked doors.

Meanwhile, we think about our orchard, and with what to underplant it. Steve suggests New Zealand, aka Dutch, clover. We should rake out the plot, then wait on the first rain. Which is this weekend, you’ll note. Then we are to broadcast the seed, and use something to drag the soil across it. A used bed-spring is good for this, he tells us. He means, dragged behind the not-yet existent tractor, I believe, but get a visual of Larry hauling such a thing through the trees behind him. Am relieved that we have, in addition to no tractor, no used bed-spring.

But the clover should be good for the “lawn” area around the house as well, as it’s perennial, low growing, fragrant, green through the dry season. The bees love it, and they’ll help with pollination. (I’d been imagining a little bare-foot time in this clover, but the bees put a stop to that fantasy.)

The rains have come, we’ve learned where we can get the clover seed as well as the little whirling device which spreads the seeds, and feel well on the way.

This Monday, I hope to find Miles, resolve the photo-to-blog issues, and send you a week’s worth of photos. Fingers crossed!