Summer Time and the Living is Easy?

That's what the song says but I think it was written by a southerner about the south. It isn't quite true of the mountain west. There seems so much to do and so little time in which to do it. And no excuses like winter when you can blow almost everything but bring in more wood for the fire because of snow if you like.

In the frontier days the people trudged through the snow to the barn and fed the livestock and came back and sat before the fire and mended harnesses and tack. Summer and you were up at dawn and working all day long plowing and seeding and tending the crops and livestock. Trying to make the most out of the short growing season so you could make it through the winter with ample supplies.

Summer is about doing all the "fixing" that has to be done on the property and your house before winter gales set in. I usually don't start panicking about the fixing until September. June and July and August are about enjoying the outdoors but with fairs the first two months that gets a bit short sheeted as they say. With my last summer fair over I have time to tend to things here on the property. Yesterday I got out the riding mower and cut the "back 40." No, not 40 acres. Forty percent of my 2.3 acres. Later this week it is the walk behind mower and the enclosed 20.

When I first bought here I had a horse and llamas. I planted a mix of pasture seed in the back 40 to provide better nutrition for the livestock. Then I got rid of the livestock. I had hip tall grass that I thought I could hear pumas in. I let a neighbor harvest the grass for his livestock one year. And then started borrowing a riding mower to take the grass down twice a summer.

Several summers back my neighbor and I decided to go in halves on our own riding mower. It is stabled in the lean to attached to the feed shed I once used for the horse and llamas. This summer I have already mowed twice and am now totally aware that the mowing has thickened the grass and made mowing more a necessity. Realistically I think I am going to have to mow weekly through September.

I was considering goats or sheep but then I would have to trudge through the drifts in winter to feed them morning and night. Not to mention to mention the "fixing" of fence in September before the snow flies.