fenceposts
Good morning! Or good whatever time you are reading this! It’s a rainy Saturday morning and I am waiting for it to be light enough to go out and feed sheep. Or am I procrastinating going out to work in the rain? One can never tell.
So much is going on around here! Whipping The New Farm into shape is like training a young dog, you make huge leaps of progress that are so satisfying, but as the dog matures, it’s more about fine tuning and you have to work a lot harder to make smaller incremental progress. Unlike training a dog though, the huge leaps of progress on the farm are hard on my body!
As I think I mentioned in my previous post, our perimeter fence install is coming up soon! They said this week, but now the forecast is very wet, so I’m not sure what they will do. Working in the rain is one thing, but driving heavy equipment on soggy pastures is the real issue. I was just feeling prissy about how I don’t want muddy ruts on the property and then I remembered that literally yesterday our very kind neighbor did a TON of ditch digging and grading work here and the whole place is covered in mud and piles of soil, so really, what’s another few ruts? I’ll write about that work another time, it is extremely exciting!
The farm had quite a few fence posts of varying ages and level of deterioration around the barnyard. Actually it has a lot more in the hedgerows with some surprisingly robust barbed wire considering that is probably 50 years old, but those are a project for another time. We are installing new fencing around the barnyard with beautiful new, straight (I hope) posts, so all of these needed to go. We probably could have left them for the fence contractor, but I’m not sure and also I wanted to use them as free temporary borders for beds in the garden. All of these other projects cost money, so we are relishing anything that we can do for free.
This is jumping ahead a bit, but while we were laying out the beds with the fence posts, Chris said that in the future we should build brick wall borders and my heart exploded! I think we have a great partnership, and I selfishly think this because he goes along with pretty much all of my bad ideas (5 dogs anyone? moving a whole farm?) He just doesn’t always do it with a smile on his face. But now he’s proposing a difficult and time consuming project?? I’m in LOVE! All through the day of pulling fenceposts he was uncharacteristically chipper. It was weird, but I'll take what I can get.
I am too wimpy apparently to pull the fence posts up, even the ones that are really rotten. My only hope is for them to break, so Chris pulled them out and then I drove them in the tractor bucket over to the garden site. My contribution to the post removal was to push them over at ground level with the tractor bucket which was pretty effective, but the tractor can’t go everywhere. It was a lot of posts for a 1 acre barnyard.
Then we laid out the border beds. If you recall the garden plan, we are planning 3 or 4 foot deep beds around the perimeter. We put the more rotten posts at the back and the nicer looking posts in the front. I am working on a plan for a temporary garden fence, so once that is installed, it will help to hold those rotten posts in place. Hopefully.
It’s pretty windy here generally, but at this point in the day the wind really started buffeting us. It wasn’t pleasant, the neighbor was tilling up the hill from us and I felt like I was being sandblasted. A couple of days of rain was forecasted beginning that night, so we needed to get the garden laid out and get all of the fruit trees and currants planted. It was a super long day and in the end we just put the apple trees in semi-willy nilly. I had hoped to carefully measure and space the trees, but it was getting dark and we were exhausted and hungry. Oh, we also planted rhubarb!
This is going to seem like a tangent, but do not fear, I’m going to bring it back! We burn pellets for heat and they come in these thick plastic bags. It creates a lot of plastic waste that makes me uncomfortable. I tried to find bulk pellet delivery at the old farm, but I was unsuccessful. The pellets are super sensitive to moisture, so maybe bulk delivery isn’t a thing? I know vegetable farmers use plastic sheets between rows to keep the weeds down, so I decided that we could definitely find a use for the bags in the garden and around the farm and we started saving them. My idea for planting in these border beds without tilling them is to plant and then cover the surrounding grass with plastic and mulch. I am hoping that this will kill the grass and weeds and also sort of funnel rainwater directly onto the little baby plants? It could be a terrible failure and there might be something critical that I am overlooking, but the little rhubarbs are going to be the guinea pigs, so I will let you know!
I’m afraid photos of an entire day of work are just not that impressive, but here they are for your perusal. Hopefully they are the before photos of a beautiful future garden!
