Fish fry on the Farm

Last week we invited our Tree Farm friends and family over for a night of food and music. Similar to our wine night back in June, we wanted this to be a fun, social outing - bringing people together and to the Farm not necessarily for an educational purpose but to relax and enjoy the outdoors. (And give a hip-hip-hooray to Joe on his award!)

However, the weather forecast was predicting Mother Nature was finally going to give us some rain, so we moved the event indoors. On the flip side, our barn cleans up awfully nice!

Joel helped us with a delicious cheese course and we had our new, beautiful mugs on hand to hold everyone's drink of choice.

Thank you Deneen Pottery - we couldn't love the mugs more!

About the time the caterers had the fish fry ready, some ominous clouds started rolling in. 

It's a bird.. no a plane!.. No, definitely a hot air balloon

This morning Arik ran into the office yelling "Holly, you don't want to miss this! And grab a camera!"

Arik never yells... or runs... so I knew this was serious! I grabbed the camera and followed him outside. This is what we saw:

Computer-holder-upper-thinger

The last few weeks have been full of activity here on Arington Tree Farm. September 20 was the move in date for the new office space. I had a few responsibilities leading into that date, one of which was to build a desk for Holly. My hope was to use some of the live edged Bur oak. However, it is still being kiln dried and therefore unavailable. My only other option was using the lumber from my sawmill test drive.

For the desk frame I used 1"x3" rectangular steel tubing. My hope was that the desk design would allow for access from either side. The rectangular steel tubing added a dimensional depth to the legs over the square tubing that I have used in previous projects.

The photo below shows the for legs cut to length. Also shown in the photo are levelers on the bottom of the legs. These allow the desk to be adjusted for an uneven floor.

Perfect day for a swim

The temperatures in the second half of the summer have sure changed from the cool and rainy June. The work project that this blog entry focuses on is a project perfect for a warm day. 

Remember our pesky resident beaver? Our last battle with him was in December and all signs indicate I was victorious as we haven't seen it since. 

However, the damage that was incurred from the beaver was still noticeable as the Kitchi-Manitou pond level was precariously high due to a plugged pipe. The only solution was to go for a swim and get things flowing again by unclogging the pipe.

The future is in our hands

During the last few weeks of my internship at the farm we  spent the majority of our time in the Walbridge Woods. While working on the approximately 15 acre forest, we constantly heard birds calling, saw chipmunks playing and were fully aware that the mosquitoes were alive and well. We even saw a painted turtle scoot across the trail the other day.

Prairie in progress!

Remember when our prairie field looked like this:

And then like this:

Now it looks like this!