Firewood for the year 2021. Which made me think of the song, In the Year 2525....

,,,,Retired Mountain Man has been working at it all spring.  Yesterday he was skidding out sections of a tree that were too long.  When I arrived he had already skidded out one section.  Here's a photo of the trail.

This is the next section.

He was not sure it would work.  My job was to watch and let him know if he should keep moving (while I was recording the action).

Here's the action.  I have to admit that I had a difficult time multi-tasking, but Retired Mountain Man had it figured out and the tree came out to the road just fine.  It's best to watch the video full screen so that you can see what is happening.

He started sawing it up.  This is the first log.  It is huge!  And heavy!  These two sections filled the back of the pickup.

Here's the stack on the ground.  I think each log is a days worth of firewood.

After the wood it was time to get back to the gardens.  It's starting to look more like summer here.

We already had smokey haze from fires in Alberta.....

These stacks of wood are for 2019-20.   Yes, he already has the wood in for next winter.

  

This is the start of the wood for the following winter.

This is Retired Mountain Man's truck, which was used to haul the horse apples for my garden beds.  It is hauled on a tarp because loggers don't like manure in their pickups, but loggers do like corn on the cob. (from my Candy Corn which is growing like we were in Iowa)

Enjoy!

This and that and Memorial Day weekend.

We're always on the search for spring mushrooms.  We had good luck finding some really nice coral mushrooms last week.

They are one of my favorite mushrooms for spaghetti sauce.

We found enough for five trays for the food dehydrator. 

We finally have some nice blossoms around our place.  The sweet woodruff was out in full force in several of my beds.  The columbine just shows up wherever it wants and it's fine with me.

The flamingo is very happy the snow is gone.

We had a fierce wind storm on Friday and all day Saturday.  Luckily, we only had a couple of trees go down.  This one was a huge cottonwood down in what we call "the swamp".

Retired Mountain Man was hoping the root ball would fall back into the hole when he sawed off the tree....

 Don't ask how I missed it falling into the hole on the video, but I did.  By about 1 second....  Ugh!

But here is a photo of it with the stump back in place.  Now we will have lots of branches to clean up in the fall.

Most of my gardens survived the wind storm.  Everything is planted except the peppers and cucumbers.   I hope to get some of the peppers into the ground later today.

One more photo of my hostas.  Maybe some photos of the gardens tomorrow.

Retired Mountain Man is a veteran and we are remembering those who did not make it back home and those who have left us.   There are lots of reasons to be thankful and enjoy today.

On the hunt for mushrooms.

It's a bit of a hike to get to our favorite mushroom hunting spots, but it's worth it.  It's a beautiful walk.  Retired Mountain Man and I planned our day around this hike and it was very enjoyable.  I will admit that it's getting to be a bit steeper than it used to be.  How does that happen?

We set off on our trip with both dogs, Maggie and Thompson, to help us out.

We are hunting for morels, but we're really looking for any edible spring mushrooms.

We found these brain mushrooms, Gyromita Esculenta.  They are edible and we have eaten hundreds of them.  Some say that the darker colored ones should not be eaten, but at our age, we'll take our chances.   They haven't killed us yet.

We finally found the morels we were really looking for.  They are some of the best tasting mushrooms of all.  It doesn't matter if you saute' them in butter or batter them and fry them.  They taste like candy.  Yum!

They are hard to spot.....

We found about half a dozen in one spot and headed for the next one.

Another lovely lady slipper on the way.

We found about 18 more morels and then decided to head to the creek.

What's left of the Peton Dam.

It was feeling pretty warm by now and the dogs had a dip in Cougar Creek to cool off.

It was time to head back up the hill and yes, we were happy to see any spots in the trail that were shady.   I kept looking for a trillium, but didn't see any on this trip.  Retired Mountain Man says there was one further down the road but unfortunately, I didn't walk that direction.

We broke out of the woods enough to get a view of Middle Mountain and Green's Ridge.

When we got home I opened our bag and it's a pretty nice bunch of mushrooms.  There's probably about three meals worth.  Tonight's menu will be grilled elk burgers with morels sauteed in butter. 

Nice sunset colors tonight.