I know our southerly neighbors got a dose of Debby in the past few days. Not a major storm by any means, but these slow moving rain dumpers often cause quite a lot of flood damage to homes, farms, businesses, and infrastructure so I hope all who got it before us came through with little to no impact.
Here in central NC, as late as a couple days ago, we were projected to get 10” to 12” of rain. I think they’ve cut that some now. Even if just a two day rain event without much wind (about the best we could hope for) it seemed to be appropriate to do a whatever maintenance and touch up was needed on the drainage around the houses. We live on a ridge that slopes down for a few hundred yards to the end where it drops off precipitously so the goal is to split up that water that comes off the road and out of the yards away from the houses to get it into the pond or creek without erosion. There were a few areas needing touching up which went pretty quickly with the boxblade.
This area catches water coming from three directions and shoots it all down to the emergency spillway on the pond. With some of our recent 3” in an hour thunderstorms, water was shooting across to the right side of the road, then running back across at an angle toward the ditch on the left side, cutting an angular ditch across the road.
Cut down the edge on the right side a bit and added a turnout where it was making its 90 degree turn back across the road.
This was the first time I’d done anything with the boxblade since adjusting its hitch to allow the hydraulic toplink to push it past level to back drag and more aggressively cut with the rear blade. I’d about forgotten how sweet it is to back drag with the boxblade instead of the bucket.
This tree up by the road keeps encompassing the overhead power line where it hits the pole to run down and then underground to our houses. It’s nowhere near our house and I’d just as soon remove it entirely but wife likes it so it stays. Been needing to get it off the line for a while now. Power company didn’t seem interested in doing anything about it and with a storm coming in, seemed like a good time to do some pruning. Used a manual pole saw on a 18’ fiberglass pole.
Grapple made quick work of removing the limbs to the brush pile. It’s back in its bay inside now with the grapple n the front and generator on the back.
Then noticed there were still a few peaches on the peach tree . There were two peach trees kind of under a bunch of hardwoods here when my parents moved here 35 years ago. Dad had a small orchard but these weren’t part of that. One is dead now and the other about half dead. Wife and I have been here 28 years. In that time, every year, squirrels or deer or neighbor kids or something gets the handful of peaches just before they’re to the point they could finish ripening off the tree. Yesterday we picked the entire crop. Six. 35 years and we got a grand all time total of 6. Considering I didn’t plant this tree, tend this tree, fertilize this tree, or do anything else to make these peaches appear, I was pretty pleased. They were quite good.
So now we’re stuck inside watching it rain buckets and catching up on the Olympics we DVR’d. Was just thinking this is pretty boring, but boring is good today. Anything exciting would likely be bad. Glad we have the generator. Wouldn’t hurt my feelings at all to roll it right back into storage.