SOOOOO Much Happening!!

I really should do about 4 blogs this week, but I'm going to cram it all into one!  There has been so much going here at Elderberry!

First of all, we LOVE our new cabin porch and we are now having coffee at the cabin on Tuesday mornings.  Way fun!

AND we have hired a really cool company called Tributary to do a landscaping, erosion control and drainage plan for us.  They started work last week and it's amazing to watch.  Future blogs will show the progress of this site-wide project over the coming months.

And THEN hurricane Michael came through on Thursday and we lost power, so we all had an adventure for a couple of days until the power came back on Saturday afternoon (and probably everyone at Elderberry was in the shower at exactly the same time!).

Following the hurricane we have had a couple of absolutely beautiful fall days, including our workday today.  So here's a sampling from a very crazy week......

Spooky!  Actually, it's just our common house kitchen lit by candles and flashlights during the power outage!  We had a generator running for the fridge.  We had just bought a new whole-house generator to completely run the common house during outages, but it has not been hooked up yet!

Tuesday morning coffee on the new porch of our very old log cabin (we will be removing old siding this year to expose the hand-hewn logs).  We maybe should have made the porch a little bigger!

In addition to coffee at the cabin, there is a group that does tai chi on Tuesday mornings (right after coffee!).  We have a few old but usable barns  - a nice backdrop for tai chi.

The folks from Tributary getting started at the South Quad

Tearing things up with some serious equipment!

They brought in some enormous granite boulders - we couldn't resist playing on them.  Can you tell what Stewart and Karen are doing??

Mary loved the boulders too!

We couldn't believe all the work they did in just two days

Areas being prepared for boulders and for lots of new topsoil

This is as far as they got before the hurricane.  They will be back at it tomorrow!

Jon - painting doors at the common house at today's workday

Karen, Lucy and Ross also finishing up some of the common house painting project

We have a few black walnut trees - and more than a few black walnuts!  Rosemarie, Meg and Anne did a lot of walnut gathering, with Stewart carting them off to the woods.

The ground was littered with walnuts.  

Mary's grandson Miles and granddaughter Evey help gather the walnuts with encouragement from Meg

Pretty cute little walnut picker!

Mary came by to take a photo just as Joyce managed to spill paint.  She was putting a second coat on the common house doors (and on some of her clothes as well)

Mike and Karolyn staining the little bridge over the common house swale.  It look so much better! 

Rosemarie taught Miles and Evey how to pull weeds by the roots.  We always need weeders!