The Beautiful Orchard

There was a time last fall when the orchard looked like this: a tangled mass of green on the other side of the pasture fence.

We couldn't see through it. We couldn't walk through it. Beau (poor thing) got trapped in there and Adam had to rescue him! It was that thick.
Here's that same stretch of fence, today.

I'm immensely proud of Adam for the brutally hard work of clearing that piece of ground, and of Peter too, who did a lot of heavy clearing when he was home. I helped, but there's only so much a woman over fifty can do in such a mass of vine-and-pine.
After the initial clearing, the vines on the orchard floor were coming back:

Adam couldn't use his scythe in there because the previous owner had put about 25 metal re-bar stakes in the ground to support the wooden sides of the long raised beds. One good wack on a metal stake and the damage to his scythe would have been serious. So ... he push-mowed it.

I helped by going ahead as an emissary to rid the world of branches and wads of vine. Doesn't it look grand?

I just love it. The only sad thing is that almost all of those trees standing nobly down the center line are DEAD. Ah well. You can't have 'em all!
The grape vines, however, are not dead.

Someday, I'd love to put a table and chairs in the orchard to have tea while the apple blossoms are blowing around in April. Please come!