Washing your car outside, on a beautifully sunny day, will no doubt cause the rain clouds to form, right?  Apparently, demolishing a part of someone else’s house might also do the same! This weekend, we took a break from our own projects around here to help some friends demolish part of their house.  They’ve hired contractors and architects for the difficult part of their upcoming remodel, but allowed their friends the joy of demolishing the old addition to the house.  This isn’t our first experience with demolition, as we had to demolish part of our own house in 1998 after the house flooded.  I have to say though, it is our favorite part of any remodeling project!

Then, after four months without rainfall, the gardens, and our friends with the recently demolished piece of their house, were treated to a surprise rain shower Sunday night.  Not much, just 0.30 inches.  Our last significant rainfall here was in May.  This is our first rain of the 2009-2010 ‘rain year’ (Meteorologists classify a rain year as running from July 1st, to June 30th of the following year). Hopefully our friends will have their house sealed back up before any more significant rainfall occurs!

In other news, “Wally” is turning out to have been an excellent investment, and has devoured the vast majority of decaying tree branches and leaves that we needed to clean up.  It’s taken us two weekends to catch up on the chipping and shredding, but it’s amazing how relatively small the pile is of shredded mulch, compared to the masses of branches and leaves we started with.  Without the chipper-shredder, this entire project would be even more overwhelming than it already is.

Now that the tree branches have been cleared out of the way, we spent the last part of the afternoon yesterday marking out fence post positions around the perimeter of the soon-to-be orchard and vegetable garden area.  In the interests of making the fence somewhat less visible on the hill, we’ve extended the projected fence line by approximately 200 feet to run it back behind some of the trees on the uphill side of the slope.  We’ll need to buy another section of fence for this, but we do have enough fence stakes to get started, hopefully in the next week or two…