The final clearing!

As you could see we started clearing our land 2 weeks ago, when my dad brought over his new tractor.  We have come a long way in 2 weeks.  What started as clearing for a playset, turned into a destroy the lot while having fun on the tractor time.  Yesterday we had to say good bye to the orange beast, but I think it has served us very well :)

On Sunday we hooked up the tiller attachment and it cleared the area, and made a nice bed for planting.  It was pretty amazing how much we were able to get done in such a short amount of time.  Now we have to get back to manually raking and seeding.

More clearing the land

We continue to work on clearing the area for the kids playset.
I also cleared a path up to the road on the opposite side of the lot.  We might be able to use that to drive down to the bottom, while we are working on putting grass in the back yard.

Our orchard

My parent bought honeycrisp apple trees for Nick and Maddy when they were born and we have those planted along the driveway.  Last fall in October we purchased a bunch more apple trees, when they went to 75% off.  We also picked up a flowering pear and a couple of pear trees.

I was worried about the trees, because of the lack of snow cover and occational cold temperature during the winter.  But they are budding out and look to be doing just fine.

Rock around the house

While Jen was working on seeding I was working on putting in edging, landscape fabric and rock down around the house. You haven't lived till you have hauled rocks of rocks around the house... You can see the bags in the lower picture. This is going around the garage on the Rich Valley side of the house.

Seeding the hillside

Here is the the hillside that runs next to our driveway. The driveway had to be brought up to grade with many dump trucks of fill... We starting seeding the area last weekend, then my folks brought over some extra straw bale then had gotten. Jen did most of the raking and seeding.