This past weekend Josh, I, and my daughter Elsa headed down to do the monthly maintenance.
We chainsawed out the lowest-hanging branches, and Josh and his kids hauled off the brush.
Elsa personally tackled thinning out all of the dead and overgrown branches from the tree in the downhill corner of the cemetery:
Here is the freshly pruned tree. Hopefully this will allow more sun to get to the healthy and struggling branches so we don’t have to lop any more off.
We tested out some cleaner that is supposed to get rid of mold, mildew, moss, and lichen without attacking the headstones. It’s slow acting, so I will check on it next time we head down.
And we found yet another gravestone:
We also put down some new stakes to mark the graves. These will take the place of the little flags that we have been temporarily using to mark them with. These new stakes are more attractive and more durable against the weedeater. Eventually we will have the plot numbers on them.
Unfortunately, they are also more expensive 😐 
I was hoping to finishing mapping all the graves, but the photo capabilities of my drone are pretty lame, besides the fact I don’t really know the best way to spatially map out such an irregularly laid out piece of ground.
Here is where my drone almost went in the drink:
I did some research into how much it would cost to find all the graves in the cemetery with Ground Penetrating Radar. The quick answer is ‘a lot’, but I have reached out to a Missouri company for an actual quote.
And here is a nice picture of some moss.
