excavation
I feel like I’ve been starting every post with some version of “this week has been hectic”, but it has been absolutely true for the last couple of weeks. The last few days have been particularly exciting though! Amidst my panic about being ready for the perimeter fence install, our neighbor Alan texted that he wanted to come up to talk about our ‘projects’. Just an aside here, when you live in the country and you go somewhere, you are always either going up there or down there. We always had trouble with our old next door neighbors because there was a valley between the properties, so we had to go down and then up to get there in either direction. We were never sure what the right terminology was so we awkwardly changed back and forth. “OK, I’ll be down… er… up in a minute.” Thank goodness we moved and solved that problem.
I wasn’t totally sure what he meant about my ‘projects’ because we had only talked about one project - buying a few loads of gravel for the driveway and the barn gutters. Apparently he had been thinking overnight about what we had going on with our culvert plan and fence project, and he had a few suggestions. His family owned this property for multiple generations and now the extended family makes up most of our neighbors, so his knowledge of the area, and this property in particular, is super valuable. I am the queen of the run on sentence.
This property is VERY wet and the soil has a high clay content. I’m not sure if this is true everywhere, but it is everywhere I’ve stuck a shovel in the ground. As you can imagine, t’s not great for drainage. Over time, lots of work has been done to manage the water, but ditches and drains need to be maintained to keep working as effectively as they can. I knew this in a sort of nebulous way, but had no idea how we were going to go about it. Until our kind neighbor volunteered to come up here so I can pick his brain!
This discussion involved:
- Finding out that due to a miscommunication, I bought a very undersized culvert pipe for the gate between the 4 acre field and the big pasture.
- Heavy equipment operators laughing at how long turning compost would take for me and my little tractor. ( I said a couple hours, but more realistically, half a day)
- Me apologizing in advance of cutting down a cedar tree with root rot. (I feel like it was technically their tree in a way?)
- A discussion of why I can’t really delay the fence installation. (in the end, the installation was delayed for rain)
- Recommendations for where the fence should actually go. ( I had planned a different route because I don’t have the means to clear ground for the fence to go closer to the property line.)
- Begging for help on extremely short notice.
He agreed to help me the following day to address at least some of these issues. I find that living in a farm community, if I keep talking and seeming more and more incompetent (which comes naturally for me) that eventually people will feel bad enough and help you. Just to be clear, I am paying him, the begging was for the tight timeline.
I want to talk briefly about using heavy equipment. I regularly dig up concrete and sod and all kinds of things that I don’t intend to. It’s getting to be less frequent now, but it is really hard (as a novice) to judge exactly where your bucket is. On a tractor you really can’t see well, but the main thing is just that the loader is so powerful that you don’t feel that you are digging the wrong thing. At the old farm we rented the tiniest excavator, like if it was a baby, it would only be like a month old, and I STILL dug up concrete. The really awkward part about that example is that immediately before I dug up the barn floor, I yelled, “I AM SO GOOD AT THIS!”. Wrong.
This makes this delicate trench digging with this huge machine even more impressive.
Chris installed the ground system for our electric fence energizer at the end of last summer. There are 3-6 foot rods that he drove in the ground. Based on my observations from a safe distance, I think he cussed them right into the ground, but at one point he did break a sledge hammer and go buy a new one. All three of them were sticking about 6 inches out of the ground and couldn’t be driven any further. We had to move on to other projects, so this is where they have stayed and the cable connecting everything has just been laying on the ground. It’s OK, it worked fine that way through the winter, but it was time to fix it.
Once the trench was complete, we moved on to turning the compost which took approximately 15 minutes with this huge excavator.
Just before lunch, the wind grabbed my straw hat and when it blew back, the chin string scraped my earring out of my ear. I was walking down the driveway so it fell onto the gravel. I looked around for a long time and then Chris got home and he looked and then we all looked and it was nowhere to be found. I really only wear the one pair of earrings, so losing one would be upsetting, but I kind of feel like you never find anything when you are looking for it. Like you need to let it come to you. Plus, there was work to be done! So we moved on.
After lunch, they brought back a metal detector!! It turns out that old farm driveways are made entirely of buried screws and bits of metal, so that made searching tough. However, after approximately 2 minutes of metal detecting, Alan's right hand man looked down and said, “there it is!”. See what I mean? Looking for things is fruitless because they will show themselves to you when the time is right.
The afternoon work was knocking down brush, the dying cedar tree, and clearing ditches. They didn’t need me for any of this. They probably didn’t need me in the morning either, but I like to stand around with a shovel and seem like I’m a part of the gang. Chris and I worked on moving the ram pen and manure which I am going to post about another time… maybe.
The ditches are AMAZING though! So satisfying to see the rainwater know where to go. I have been looking at them at chore times and making a bunch of boring videos. What’s the saying, “dull as ditchwater”? I find ditchwater to be pretty exciting!