I think Winter will show up eventually but it is slow in arriving. We have had a couple of hard freezes and I have actually scraped ice off of the vehicle windshields twice. Mr Rainman came out last weekend for a couple of days to help me. It is nice to have the help and I am still healing up from the pneumonia, a little pericarditis tends to slow you down some. The Winter chores need to get done so we worked on that Saturday. We stripped the garden clean and rearranged the beds so that different vegetables would be planted in different bins in the spring. I dug up the other half of the potato bin. I did decide to leave the beets in the ground that I planted late this fall. The greenery is still intact and has not wilted so I am going to let them grow/hibernate until the greenery dies. I planted one bin three weeks earlier than the other and it is doing much better. We had never planted beets before so it is a great experiment. Once that was done and we had the garden area ready for Winter the bulbs were next.

I had an entire vegetable crisper bin in the fridge full of flower bulbs. It was time to get them planted before the ground froze solid. Since the rock wall is only completed on the right hand side of the bridge I only wanted to plant bulbs on that side. After much contemplation and input from various sources I am going to have to rip out about 15 feet of completed rock wall on the left hand side. When I dug down I found the original base stones and I was using those as they lay. The wall is kicking out the further I get toward the barn. So I need to tear it back and scoot it closer towards the house and keep it in line with the right hand side wall. I may even put up a stake with a string! We tore down the fence and I had to bring over five loads of dirt and a load of rocks to finish getting the flower bed lined and height correct. We opened up the packages and read the planting instructions to determine the height of the final plant. We tossed out the packages based on height then laid out all of the bulbs on the surface of the dirt. Once we had them all laid out we planted them. Surprisingly, there were a lot of bulbs. We ended up planting a bulb almost every six inches throughout the entire flower bed. The tallest flowers are toward the edge of the wall so they will shade the short plants. I realize that appears backwards when you are driving in and walking down the sidewalk but from the house we will see more flowers. Most of the short bulbs are early risers and like partial shade. We will know next year how they do but they are in the ground! Once that was done we laid out the fence over the top of the entire flower bed to keep Chance from digging up the bulbs. So far it has been one week and she has not dug up any bulbs. She has another hole to China started and it is deep enough now that when she goes in it she disappears. This hole is of course in the front yard.

Mr Rainman had to leave after a few hours so I spent the rest of the day on the tractor working on building up our dirt levee over by the old chicken coop. I had extended the hill last year but the cows had torn it down to only about six inches high. This time I piled up the dirt and then proceeded to drive on it every time I went back for another scoop of dirt. This really helped compact it down. Once I had the entire thing done I ran over it again in two directions to compact it one more time. I am only looking for about 16” of berm. Those last two horrible floods could have been diverted back into the stream bed with a 12” berm. I am just trying to get the flood precautions all finished. I have one more thing to do, there is a downed tree in the dry creek bed that is backing up water. I need to cut the middle out of the downed branch so it doesn’t create an artificial dam and flood out field #1. Once I get that done all of the flood precautions that should help if we get another bad flood will be in place. There is no guarantee they will work but honestly, I would rather do all the work, guess and take precautions and never find out if they were necessary! It has taken me years to rebuild all of the stuff torn out, or up or altered by the flooding.