The enterance, The bone yard and POISON IVY....

We had heard that there was poison oak and ivy out here , but by the time we really started working on the land it had died back to sticks, so we did not recognize it . It can look like other plants so it is hard to notice it until you really observe its characteristics.

It is always shiny, has rounded edges on the leaves and there are always 3 leaves to the stem.

Soooooo, when we were clearing a space to start moving our building supplies , I was down on my knees pulling out the underbrush and I remember thinking "these kinda look like those pictures of the poison ivy"

So the next day I developed some bumps that looked like insect bites. I did not think too much about it until they really started multiplying fast!
They were everywhere and the more I scratched them the more they spread. It was soooo painful! I looked on the internet to see what I could do and found a site that had a lot of advice. Some of which made the rash worse, like taking a hot shower and scrubing the rash as hard as you can. I had welts over 60% of my body for a month and it was the most painful thing I had ever experienced!!
The way I got rid of it was to take a homepathic remedy for poison oak & ivy. It started to diminish right away. It also helped to take baking soda baths and then put aloe vera gel on afterwards.
I now know to be very aware of the plant as I walk around ( the best way to kill the Poison oak & ivy is to mix straight high acid vinegar with 1/4 cup of orange oil per gal and spray with a spayer that won't corrode. It is best to spay when is is hot and has not rained for a while) .
I now know that it looks like a bug bite when it first apears and never , never , never scratch it, this is what spreads it to other parts of your body. So at the first sign of it I take the homepathic mix and it might blister in the one place and run its course, but it is always gone within a few days. Putting "Technu", available at drug stores ,can help prevent the rash and it does seems to help keep it at bay once you know you have it.

When we set up the storage area, we picked a spot that would be out of the way yet easy to unload . We wanted to make sure we would not have to move everything until we are going to use it, so far so good !

We are starting to define the entrance. We wanted to have a place to pull off out of the road before going through the gate. That way we are off the main road when we need to open our gate.

The posts and fence are 8 ft tall . We chose field fencing (it starts out small near the ground and the spaces get larger as you go up) for the first 4 ft and barbed wire for the upper 4 ft. This way we can keep out dogs and other small animals near the ground and we have learned that because the deer are small around here they will not jump an eight foot fence.

We decided early on that making our place beautiful as well as functional was very important . It seems that it is a work in progress and we have islands of peace and moments of chaos that somehow even out in the end.