Moving Earth
November 20th, 2013 · No Comments · Posted in farming
Farms accumulate piles of stuff. Soil, rocks, wood, cars, old equipment–whatever the previous owners couldn’t find a place for, they left in a random series of piles.
We’ve got two big mounds of stones in the orchard. I’m guessing those are the stones that came out of the ground when the orchard was planted some six years ago. Our soil is full of stones.
There’s a saying up here that wherever three or more trees are growing, a dump is sure to follow. We had one of those in the upper pasture–with at least two out-of-commission automobiles–but we made the previous owners remove it as a condition of the purchase. But of course they left a ton of other old machinery–even a giant backhoe–gathering weeds along the hedgerows. It wasn’t until almost a year after we bought the place that the previous owner finally got most of that moved. He still has a couple of piles of old lumber to deal with, from a barn he tore down and never got around to rebuilding. We’re now talking about a big bonfire.
But we’re making some headway cleaning things up. We had the local excavating crew come in recently and remove a big pile of soil–covered with grass and small trees–from behind the goat shed where we plan to install permanent fencing. Then they tackled another pile overgrown with weeds along the hedgerow next to the permanent paddock, and what appeared to be a six-foot-tall mound of compost, also overgrown with grass. That and one pile of stones got dumped behind a hedgerow bordering a field at least an acre in size that was entirely covered with a giant stand of golden rod. We’d never been able to get into that field before. Howard, the chief operator, did a great job of smoothing everything over so we now have access from the driveway.
It’s amazing what you can do in a few hours with heavy equipment. As you can see in the photo, at one point the team had deployed a big bucket loader, a dump truck and a bull dozer. Turns out the quickest way to clear a hedgerow is not with a goat or a chain saw.
Here’s Howard leveling a pad for a future raised bed vegetable garden. Not too far in the future, either. My wife plans to have this garden up and running in the spring. This is one of the few “flat” areas on the property and it just happens to lie in our view out the living room windows, so it has to look good. This will be one big garden, a place to grow food for the table, to relax, to entertain.
I’d say we’re close to having the bones of this farm together.
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