If you've been following my blog since I joined Hive or have gone back to see some of the older things I posted then you might be familiar with these guys:
When I moved into the house they were already resident in our field, albeit all overgrown with no trail connecting to them. The previous owner apparently liked to weld and had made these "Robots" specifically to live in the field. Here are a couple of (bad) shots of what they looked like when we walked the property the first time:
Since I decided to leave them be and make them a sort of upcycled feature of the trail system that we have been steadily expanding each year I added the solar light eyes to the one in front and the solar light antenna to the one in the back. I've been meaning to make an additional robot for about two years- ever since Sky started asking if we could.
Well today she has gone for a sleepover at her Nana's house and aside from the other yardwork I had to catch up on I also decided it was high time to expand the robot family. Hopefully she gets a kick out of them after I pick her up and we go for a walk 😁
Here is the first one, he's kind of like a puppet- you can move one of his arms and his head with the plastic levers from behind him. He's made with an old rusty hunk of steel that I think used to be part of a pedal powered sewing machine, some broken camp chair legs, some PVC tubes, and a broken bar stool seat with a dab of paint 😅
With Mel
Sneaking up on him! Love that he still looks like a robot from the other side 🙃
Here he is with the fam:
The other one I made is a little simpler... and sneakier 😉 They are clearly the red headed step robot of the family! This one is made with an old rusted 2 burner stove top, another one of those broken bar stools, and an old bent pitchfork.
I went back later on and added it's antenna, not sure if I like it better with it or not...
So there you have it. What do you think of my weird creations? The coolest thing is all of these materials were left by the previous owners. Now I've turned them into something fun!
The other thing I was up to in the field today was putting up supports for our heavily fruiting blueberries! I've been meaning to get around to it but the weather has been so miserable that I just didn't want to spend hours out there getting soaked. Today was glorious so I did everything I could to spend the whole day outside and catch up. I mowed, weedwhacked, edged, weeded, and built the robots above and the blueberry supports below.
Here's why I needed to get this done:
These are not happy blueberries! The amount of fruit on there makes ME happy, but they are not happy bent over like that!
These were made out of an old leaky hose, more scrap metal left behind by the previous owners and some string. So more upcycling! YAY! ♻️
Much happier with a little extra support! They will actually be able to ripen properly now!
On my last loop around the field this evening to get a few more pictures of everything I grabbed a handful for desert! These are just a few of the ripest ones from the one bush that is always early. Most of them are still really green. If I had left these on the bush the birds would have had them for supper or breakfast tomorrow morning. I don't mind the birds getting a few of them here and there but that's why we check them every morning on our walk and do a last loop in the evening after they've had all day to ripen- especially on a beautiful day like today.
NOM!
That's all from me for now!
JD