My Corn Tale of Woe

Let me set the stage: we moved on to these lovely 10 acres two years ago and started learning about the farmer who lived here before us.  He really had the farming thing down pat.  He had cows up in the pasture, the apple orchard for cider apples, and in the low part, by the street, he grew corn.  The whole front was corn.  Not only that, but he dry farmed it.  Meaning, after maybe an initial watering, he didn’t water it at all.  Not only that, but it was delicious.  And he used the stalks to feed his cows.

So we had to grow corn.

But instead of the wise old farmer, it was just dumb old us.  And we have no idea what we’re doing.  I picked what sounded like a good type of corn, white and sweet, and planted it.  We have no clue about dry farming; we watered our corn.  It came up, looking promising.

And then I suddenly took a full time job over the summer and basically left the whole garden to Jason.

Have I mentioned that the garden is about 1/3 of an acre?  Not all corn, of course, but it included a large patch.

Anyway, time slipped away from us and before we knew it the corn was over-ripe.  Yucky.  Gluey and tasteless.  We let it just sit there and dry up.  After the season was over, we harvested an insane amount of dried corn – seed for next year.  I wound up giving away the vast majority at a seed exchange.  But we kept some for this year.

Take two with the corn.  No excuses this time – I have taken the summer off and we’ve been down in the garden a lot.  We kept taste-testing the corn, and it wasn’t looking so good, again.  Finally, I noticed a trend: they were starting to get a little less awful.  So, today, when I picked one that tasted halfway okay, I decided it was time.  Harvested the whole lot.  Five big crates full.

An aside: hardly any photos because my bloody cell phone is on the fritz.  Again.

Anyway, Sarah and her friends helped with the harvest, and then Sarah and I shucked every single one and took a bite of every single one.  Five crates worth.  Raw.

More than half were rejected out of hand, and the others were deemed good enough or, with the tone of surprise, “Sweet!”  Those were few and far between, though, and really it was a matter of perspective.  I’m sure the professionally grown sweet corn would have put our best ones to shame.

So, tonight, I blanched, cooled, cut off the kernels and froze all the “good enough” corn.  It made three gallon-sized Ziploc bags worth.  Rather flat bags.  And the rejects are now two crates (shucked) of chicken food.  I’m hoping the lambs will eat the husks – I’ll try that tomorrow.

Cobs from "okays" on left, rejects on right.
Cobs from “okays” on left, rejects on right.

Between the initial taste-testing with Sarah, and the secondary testing I did after the blanching (some were definitively rejected), I’m REALLY SICK OF CORN.  I don’t know when I’ll ever be ready to face those bags in the freezer.  The thought makes me slightly nauseous.

Maybe we should just stick to tomatoes.

– LizzyIMG_0240

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Bumbling Along…

We didn’t mean to become beekeepers.

Not so soon, anyway.  It was on the list, but in the “some year down the road” category.  But last February I saw an ad on Craigslist for a whole setup of bee hive stuff that came with a wild swarm of bees, and we hopped in the truck to go get it all.  Got back home, set it up, and thought: “Oh crap.  Now what?”  We quickly took a beginner beekeeping class and found out all the things we were doing wrong.  We adjusted a few things, and then basically left them alone.

They started out as a very, very small colony but grew fantastically last spring.  We knew we weren’t supposed to take any honey the first year, to help them through the winter.  Over the summer they filled up two “brood boxes” with brood (babies) and some honey, as well as a “honey super” which is a smaller box just for honey.  And then we left them alone.

Which, it turns out, was a mistake.

Turns out, over the winter they filled their “brood boxes” with honey instead of brood.  Which left the queen bee with nowhere to lay her eggs.  From what we can figure, the worker bees knew eggs weren’t being laid, so they figured it must be the queen’s fault.  So they killed her and then tried to make a new queen, which didn’t work out.  By the time we looked into the brood boxes in mid-March, it was too late.  No queen, no babies, dying colony and LOTS AND LOTS OF HONEY.

At least there’s a bright side.

So, we rented an extractor and wound up with over FOUR GALLONS of honey.  We don’t even go through a quart a year.  That’s sixteen years worth of honey.  Yes, we’ll be selling some, and no, we don’t ship.  Except to our mothers, of course.

IMG_0062Jason with one frame of capped honey.

IMG_0071Uncapping with the special knife

IMG_0073The rented extractor, which spins the honey out.

IMG_0085Then we filter the honey through this fine mesh bag.

IMG_0097Pour it out into jars

IMG_0112And admire it!

IMG_0116It came out dark and complex, but with no bitterness.  Super sweet and delicious!

So that’s how we wound up, by our bumbling ignorance, destroying our colony of bees.  And getting a huge windfall of fantastic honey.  I’ve taken another beekeeping class, and it’s one of those “the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know” things.  Bee colonies are very complex, and million things can go wrong.  Several people in the class said their bees died, or left, and they got zero honey out of the deal.  So, we’ll start again with new bees next month, and try our best.  But if we screw up again, at least we’ve got sixteen years worth of honey.

– Lizzy

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Root Cellar

It’s about time I post about the root cellar. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there’s no way any family of three can grow this much produce without figuring out some way to store it all. That means a lot of canning, a lot of drying, and the need for a cool, ventilated room to keep it in. Plus we have plenty of six-packs and wine bottles of hard cider, currently hiding underneath a staircase, that are in need of a new home. That’s a lot of space – and space, unfortunately, is something we lack.

In many parts of the country homes are equipped with a cellar, or basement. In New England, where I grew up, we had a good 1,000 square feet of perfectly liveable, if a little spidery, extra space. That basement, which was made  up of three distinct sections, was home to my father’s work bench (seldom used), our weight bench (used even less), a laundry room (used daily), and even a decent-sized pub complete with a bar, couches, a stereo and even a bumper pool table (used the most). The damn thing even had swinging saloon doors.

Not here in the West Coast, though. For some reason every house has only a shallow, forbidding, cobwebbed mouse habitat commonly known as the crawl space.

As in, the only way to get around in there is to crawl. And if the parade of plumbers, electricians and other contractors we’ve had around here are to be believed, I, as a homeowner, should already have done plenty of crawling. I mean, you’d think that for every other new homeowner clamping a mag-lite between their teeth, kicking out the small, ground-level screen window and diving into the abyss is an act undertaken before the moving truck has even backed out of the driveway.

Me, I haven’t gone down there since moving in. Okay, so I did send Sarah down there once, but that hardly counts. I mean, she was the one who wanted to play with the flash light.

Anyway, the point is there’s no room at all to store anything down there. Skeletal remains, maybe, but quart jars of dilly beans? Not bloody likely.

It just so happens that we don’t have a heck of a lot of pantry space inside the house either, so we knew we’d have to come up with another idea.

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What we did have was a steep hill, running behind the house and abutting the parking area, that had sort of become the dumping ground for old lumber. So, we thought, why not excavate here, throw in an 8 X 10 structure, run a ventilation pipe up skyward, and fill back in? Instant Root Cellar!

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Of course I’m misusing the word “instant” here; it turned out to be a pretty large contracting job that took twice as long to complete as originally planned. Ultimately, we didn’t excavate as deeply into the hill as we would have liked (due to safety concerns), and consequently the front of the structure sticks out from, rather than is flush with, the side of the hill. That forced us to build some retaining walls on either side to prevent the still-loose dirt from sliding down and around the front due to rain or just plain gravity.

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One of the neat consequences of all this is that, for a time at least, Sarah had a very large pile of dirt to climb on and play around in for several weeks….

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Notice how easily all of that dirt could slide down around the front corners, particularly after a heavy rain. Which is exactly what happened when the project was interrupted by several days of downpours, a mess that resulted in our door being sealed closed by almost a foot of heavy, wet mud.

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And here’s what it looks like now. Inside we’ve got a dirt floor, decent ventilation, and plenty of space for shelving. No electricity, of course, but we’ve inserted a piece of PVC pipe in the cement and through a retaining wall to allow for the use of an extension cord to power any lights, fans or wide-screen tv’s we might want to have in there (you have to admit–it does look like the perfect man-cave). Come Spring we’ll throw some seeds down along the top and sides, and with a little luck we’ll eventually get some good ground cover for erosion control. I’ll build a ramp, and maybe even landscape a bit around the front.

But at least it’s done before next summer. Whew!

-Jason

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Enough About the Garden Already!

It has just this morning occurred to me, as I fired up the computer and looked over our past blog posts, that I haven’t written anything since June. As in six months ago. Ugh. I mean, it was a busy summer, don’t get me wrong, but really? Thank goodness Lizzy stepped in; if maintaining and updating this blog were solely my responsibility you’d just now be reading about how exhausting our moving day was.

I’d love to attribute my lack of posting to laziness, but there’s more to it than that. I won’t bore you about it now, though.

Anyway, it looks like Lizzy, in her last post, pretty much wrapped up all the garden stuff. If you read it you got the gist: we wound up with boatloads of veggies. Way more than a family of three could ever dream of eating its way through. This is, by now, old news. Still, I feel like I should post one last pic:

Lizzy, do you hate tomatoes yet?
Lizzy, do you hate tomatoes yet?

That’s a lot of tomatoes. I wish I could tell you that was our haul for the year, but no – what you see here represents maybe 1/8th of what we grew. As Lizzy alluded to in her earlier post we dried them, canned them, froze them, made them into paste, threw them at solicitors and, of course, ate them fresh – and still had many tomatoes rot on the vine.

So…maybe next year we’ll do fewer tomatoes.

Anyway, as I said, let’s consider the garden wrapped up. Enough already!

Of the many non-garden related projects we’ve undertaken these last months, the largest by far, and most significant in terms of preparing ourselves for a sustainable life, are fencing the properties and constructing a root cellar in the hill directly behind the house.

I mean, you can’t very well run a farm with livestock and such and not have a bunch of fencing, right? Apparently in many respects farm animals aren’t dissimilar to infant humans: they tend to eat lots of grass and dirt, poop everywhere, tear through neighbors’ living rooms, and then run into the street where they are instantly struck and killed by a truck delivering beef jerky to the liquor store down the road. Our plan is to avoid that sort of thing.

And a root cellar is a no-brainer if every year you’re going to grow and harvest, thanks to a garden plot the size of a football field, enough vegetables to feed the planet several times over. Did we mention that we grew a lot of vegetables? Well, we did. So many, in fact, that had we done this prior to 1984 the super group Band Aid would never have existed. That’s right – no depressing Christmas song thanking God for starving most of Africa. Heck, for all we know Bono might have given up music all together and switched to a more constructive career, like landscaping or owning a car wash. The thought absolutely boggles the mind.

Dammit, now I’m on about the garden again. Sorry.

There’s no way I’ll have enough room in this post to write about both the fencing and the root cellar, so I’ll stick with the fencing. I think we’ve written somewhere that Lizzy had found a good deal on tons of corner-posts, studded metal t-posts, and deer-fencing while browsing the Craig’s List “Farm and Garden” section.

I can't say with certainty that Sarah isn't somewhere underneath all of this.
I can’t say with certainty that Sarah isn’t somewhere underneath all of this.

They were basically half the price of brand-new material, so of course we couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Unfortunately, when I write that it was a “ton” of fencing I’m not being entirely accurate. It was more like two or three tons. The stuff was so heavy we had to borrow a burly neighbor and his utility truck to transport the metal material over the twenty-ish miles from Bonny Doon to Watsonville, and it still took us several trips. Separately, we used our pickup truck to move the corner posts (8 foot, 4×8 pressure treated. Maybe sixty of them) and that took two trips and nearly killed the poor truck. The experience was, in its back-breaking potential, second only to our experiment in building our own garden fence (http://wp.me/p1OmAa-cM if you’d like to revisit it).

IMG_2876But we got it done, and having all that inexpensive fencing proved to be huge for our budget. We did have, after all, several acres throughout two different parcels of very hilly land to fence in. Naturally, we weren’t about to undertake this sort of thing ourselves, so we found a good contractor – a guy who had worked for us before and we trusted – and began the process of transforming our open land into a place that goats and wee lambs can graze and frolic in safely and happily, at least until we eat them.

Each fenced-in section covers about three acres of land: the apple orchard below the house and the “upper pasture” extending from the driveway away from the house. Each has two 14 foot gates (for truck and tractor access) and a couple of 4 foot gates (for, you know, just people). Not included in the newly fenced-in areas are an access road we carved into the hill between the house and the orchard/chicken yard, the front plateaus by the main road (where the vegetable garden, burn pile and future olive grove are) a couple of acres of brush, bramble and eucalyptus behind the house, and the house and yard itself.

So here, at the risk of boring you with pictures of fences, are some pictures of fences:

Just getting started on the upper pasture.
Just getting started on the upper pasture.

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Look closely and you can see the house through the trees.
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The access road between the house and the orchard.
More access road. Access to what? How knows!
More access road. Access to what? Who knows!

So now that’s done. We’re eager to get our animals now, but first we have to provide some sort of shelter for them to sleep in. Of course that’ll involve me, lumber and power tools, so we may wait until this spring, as building anything larger than a coat rack involves more ambition than I have readily available, as well as many hours browsing YouTube for tutorials on how to use a hammer.

Next up, the root cellar!

-J.

Knee high by the 4th of July

The garden is really shaping up nowadays!  If we can only control the dang-blasted gophers, we should have a great harvest.  We are already drowning in lettuce, and took a stab at selling at our nearby Farmer’s Market.  Here’s a photo essay of the progress:

Here are the potatoes – flowering.
Sarah loves her sunflowers!
We grew a ton of lettuce – this is my favorite kind.
Fennel, spinach (bolting) and lettuce
Onion Land
Scarlet Runner Beans
Summer Squash
Winter Squash
Basil Land
Can you find a child in this corn?
There she is!
Tomato Land!
We like this weed (petunia!) so much we didn’t pull it.
Beans, beans the magical fruit…
We pull this weed – to cook and eat it! Purslane.
Can’t wait for the tomatoes to start ripening!
The chickens enjoy the bolted lettuce!
Ready to go to the Farmer’s Market…
Selling produce at the Market! Our first time!

You can find us – and many other wonderful vendors – at the Corralitos Farm/Garden Market, which is held in front of the Corralitos Cultural Center: 127 Hames Road.  Take a left just after the Corralitos Meat Market, and you’ll see the yellow sign and the blue awnings on the left.  The Market is open Sundays from 11:00 to 3:00.  The produce is all VERY local, organically grown, and very reasonably priced.  See you there!

– Lizzy

Not Your Garden Variety Garden – Part 2

Back to the garden. Now that the fence was finished (mostly), and the drip line installed, we had no more excuses – it was time to plant. But first we had to plan everything out in detail. I mean, one just doesn’t go about tossing seeds hither and thither and expect everything to pop up in nice groups, does one? No, any respectable farmer must map every section out, according to group, and allow for walkways, space for compost piles, and a place to park the truck.

This we did on a huge piece of graph paper on the floor (plan the garden, that is – not park the truck. That would have been impossible). We had already received all of our seed packets in the mail (from three separate seed companies), so we picked a morning, laid everything on the dining room floor, and got to work.

This took some doing, but after a couple of hours (and a lot of erasing) we had a pretty good garden mapped out. The seeds were bunched by group, or family: brassicas (broccoli, kale, etc.), solanaceae (tomatoes and potatoes), legumes, roots, and some miscellaneous.  That actually left us with room to spare, which will come in handy next season as we’ll be rotating all of the crops.

And what were we planting? I guess just about everything. Here’s the list, in alphabetical order: artichokes, asparagus, beans (fresh and drying), beets, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, chard, collards, corn, cucumbers, fennel, garlic, kale, leeks, lettuce, okra, onions, parsnips, peas, peppers, potatoes, pumpkins, spinach, and squash (some yellow summer and a variety of winter, including pumpkins for Halloween).

Add to the list an herb garden with all the goodies and a tiny garden for Sarah to grow her own cherry tomatoes, watermelon, carrots, sunflowers, cukes, sweet peas, and cotton.

(Yes, cotton. I have no idea why, other than that we may teach her the value of hard work by making her knit her own clothing. I don’t know – I’ll have to check with Lizzy on that one.)

Now that the planning phase was over, it was time for sowing. The tomatoes and peppers were starts, and the potatoes were, well, potatoes – but otherwise everything else was in seed form, so we’d have to trench or cultivate each row before planting.

Unfortunately we had gotten a good bit of rain since the last time we tilled (before putting in the drip line), and what had been beautiful, dark, loose soil had turned, over the course of a couple of weeks, from a sticky mud pit to a hardened, unworkable crust. There was no way we could amend the entire site before planting, so we had to just go for it, forcing shallow gashes into the ground along the drip line and covering the seeds with the gravel-like lumps of dry clay. We were able cover some of our rows with a nice compost/manure mix, but most of the garden looked like the surface of Mars (you can see what I mean in the pictures below).

Which was damned discouraging, really, as the idea behind a garden this big was to have food – to eat, dry, can, store or sell – for the whole year, thus saving us valuable time we would otherwise have spent looking at US Magazine in line at the supermarket while the aromatherapist up ahead pays for her Kombucha with a check. The notion that nothing would actually grow in our garden hadn’t occurred to us.

Tomatoes & potatoes (which I now learn aren’t supposed to be planted next to each other. Oops.)

But somehow everything seems to be coming up! The last of these pictures were taken a couple of weeks ago, so it’s actually in better shape than it looks here. Lizzy figured out how to program the automatic drip timer, and we’ve even had to start weeding.

The entrance to Sarah’s garden
Corn!
Beans & cucumbers!

Potatoes!

It isn’t perfect, not by anyone’s definition: some sections seem extra dry while others flood a bit even with moderate watering. I still wince every time I look at the soil, and some vegetables, like the broccoli, cauliflower and kale, seem to be struggling. But others, like the corn, beans, potatoes, and – surprisingly – lettuce are thriving, and the tomatoes look great.

It remains to be seen, of course, if any of these grow to fruition. Until then we’ll tend to them as best we can.

Now we just have to worry about the gophers….

-Jason

Not Your Garden Variety Garden – Part 1

Hello everyone! It’s been over a month since we last posted, but I hope you’ll forgive us as May turned out to be pretty busy. Not only did we have a garden to put in, chickens to process, acreage to mow and bridges to build, but we also took a brief trip to Yosemite (where we found ourselves in the middle of a blizzard), and were lucky enough to enjoy extended visits from both sides of the family. Now that the dust has settled, the mower has replaced the tiller (which had replaced the auger) on the Kubota, and the guest room is again fulfilling its natural role as the place where I watch YouTube clips all night while pretending to write, let’s pick up where we left off.

Well, speaking of gardens, ours is finally planted! Of course last time we posted we were still in the fence-building phase, so let me back up, all the way back to April…

After installing all of the “invisible” polypropylene deer fencing, I eventually finished constructing the large, main gate…

…As well as a smaller, side gate. This in itself is remarkable as it involved the use of power tools and my somehow coming away from the experience with all of my limbs and digits intact.  Anyway the plan was to have two small gates to go along with the larger one, but circumstances have prevented me from finishing – or, rather, even starting – that final gate.  Consequently we’ve had to tear out the polypropylene at the posts where that gate should be in order to have access to the spigot near that end of the garden. Could an animal get in? Perhaps, but quick thinking on our part seems to have solved that problem: when we’re not using that entrance we just drape the section of cut fencing material back between the posts as a ruse intended to stymie any deer, skunks or, if necessary, neighbors bent on breaching the perimeter. Ha! Humans: 1; Deer: 0!

With that done it was time to move on to the drip tape. We had purchased one large, 4,100 foot roll, so we had to measure out each segment, cut them then roll them up, as tightly as possible, in order to carry them to the drip bars. This took longer than you might think; eight lengths of tape, at a hundred feet each, is nothing to sneeze at, and if you’re anything like me a strict adherence to method is required in order to avoid more work during the unrolling stage. I don’t know about you, but I can’t even roll up a garden hose without finding myself, only minutes later, struggling to untangle an impossible knotted convolution of rubber. Multiply that common experience by about a thousand and you’ll see what we were up against.

But we got it done, and soon (actually, a couple of days later) each segment was attached to the main bars, rolled back out to full length, capped off and stapled down.

Which brings us to the planning and planting stage! Stay tuned for all the excitement coming up in Part Two…

-Jason

First day of Spring!

What a great day we had today!  It was sunny and warm, and we got a lot done on the land – but I also totally scored at Goodwill.  Sometimes, the Goodwill gods shine down upon me, and today was one of those days.  I got: practically new snow pants for Sarah, snow boots for Sarah, foul weather boots for me, lots of shirts for me and for Sarah, sweaters for me and even a parka!  This is all in preparation for our trip to Yosemite next month, during Spring break.  But the best deal of all was a pair of Dansko clogs – the only shoes I will wear – which retail for $125 new.  Guess how much they were?  Five dollars and twenty-five cents.

After the shopping spree, we got to work.  First on the agenda: finally finish moving all the branches that were pruned from the 45 apple trees in January.  We loaded them into the truck and put them in the burn pile.  Here’s truck load number twelve or something (we lost count):

And here is the burn pile, currently.  Actually, it’s the burn staging area since that would be too much to burn at once.  Keep in mind there is also a giant oak tree we took down (not in photo) that is partially chainsawed apart and also needs to be burned.

That done, we worked some more on putting up our garden fence.  We have already put up the 58 ten-foot-tall posts and now it’s time to wrap them with fencing material.  We got maybe 1/4 of the way done today. The brown house on the right is our neighbor’s house.  Ours is the white one barely visible in the upper left.

Anyway, Jason stapled while we both pulled on the fencing, and then I hammered the staples in more tightly.  We had to watch out that we didn’t pull the fencing too taut, because it was bending the posts!

When we’d had enough of that, we took a break and let our almost-three-week-old chicks outside for the first time!  They were hesitant at first, but then came out and had a wonderful time.  And we had a great time watching them!  I did some research on how our breed of chicken -Barred Rock- “feathers out” and then looked at our chicks closely.  Looks like we’ve got exactly 20 females and 20 males!  Here’s a video Jason took of our cuties:

Well, that’s it for today.  Happy Spring, everyone!

– Lizzy

Fence Posting

It’s been pouring rain here the past couple of days, which gives me the perfect opportunity to tell you all about our latest project.

We’re building a fence!

I know – that doesn’t sound like much, but for us it marks a milestone. It’s the first major project that we’ve undertaken ourselves, as opposed to hiring a contractor. We came out here to “homestead,” after all, and if every book I’ve seen out there on the subject is to be believed, homesteaders rarely, if ever, hire professionals. In fact, hardly a week goes by without those people building a root cellar, digging a duck pond or putting up some kind of yurt. By themselves. The least we can do is build a fence, right?

The area we’re fencing is quite large (about a third-acre), and needs to be sturdy in order to keep out deer and any other large animals (this will be our vegetable garden). That means 4×4 pressure-treated uprights, cemented into the ground. Gates will have to be built, and deer-proof fencing material attached.

First Lizzy tilled the ground. Then we flagged off the area, spacing most of the uprights at eight feet apart and allowing for one wide gate and two small. We came up with fifty-eight holes to be augured.

I ordered the lumber and cement at the local builder’s store. The lumber was easy – fifty-six ten-foot 4x4s, two twelve foot 4x6s (for the main entrance), and a couple extra for good measure.  The concrete, though, was a different story. Having never mixed cement before I was thinking, what – one bag per hole?  Maybe two?  Doesn’t that seem like a lot? Should I order the eighty pound bags, or the sixty?

Grudgingly, I ordered a hundred and twenty bags of concrete mix. At eighty lbs. each, that’s a lot of cement. I figured we’d have some left over, but what the heck – we’re bound to use it some day.

It was time to start auguring. We drilled to a depth of about two feet, allowing for five inches or so of gravel at the bottom. The augur is 12-inch in diameter, more than enough space to secure a 4×4.

Before we could start setting the posts each hole had to be prepped. Prepping wasn’t easy, as it entailed cleaning out all the excess dirt from around the rim of the hole, as well as the stuff that never made it out with the initial auguring. Then, in went the gravel (the gravel, at least, was free – we removed it from the back yard as part of another landscaping project to be blogged about later). Once the gravel was in, there was eighteen or nineteen inches left for the concrete.

The smart thing would have been to complete each stage in its entirety before moving on to the next, but that wasn’t how things turned out. We prepped a handful of holes (which is a lot of physical labor in itself), and then started on the posts, which ensured that the job would be stretched out over several days. Unfortunately that left the bulk of the holes to be prepped later, which in our case was after it had happened to rain. And let me just say that if you’ve never had to scoop out several inches of dense, sticky, clay-like mud from over two-dozen holes in the rain then trust me – it’s nothing to write home about.

We were so very lucky to have our neighbors Andy and Dianne lend us both their cement mixer and, for much of the job, Andy himself.  He wound up being on board for close to half the posts, and without him I might very well be in a body cast.

I’m not lying when I say the amount of labor that went into this process was more than I had counted on.  First the cement mixer had to be physically rolled into place each day over bumpy ground (our truck has no ball-hitch). Then the cement, which was staged at one corner of area, had to be loaded into either the truck or the tractor and moved to where we were laying posts. Several hoses had to be connected and run from the nearest water source; extension cords, two or three loooong ones, had to be hooked up.  All of this took a lot of trudging and lugging – two things I’ve never been very good at. On the plus side, though, I did find that I excelled at sweating and grunting.

One the mixer was up and running I had to tear open the bags and somehow manage to get the contents poured into the spinning mixer without covering myself with, and inhaling, half of the bag.Then I’d give it a healthy dose of water from the hose, then another bag, then more water – you get the picture. Once the desired consistency was achieved I dumped the wet cement into a wheel barrel, which I then had to navigate over rough terrain several yards to the hole without losing my balance or hitting a divot in the ground and spilling half the stuff.

There awaited Lizzy, holding the post in place. She had to manage to keep the darned thing level while I shoveled the cement into the hole.

Anyway, I was exhausted, soaking wet, covered in cement, and bleeding – yes, bleeding  – by the time we were finished.

With the first post.

And yes – that single hole required three bags of cement. That’s around two hundred pounds of concrete and a couple gallons of water.

So I ordered more cement. All told, we went through about two hundred and twenty bags of the stuff, though I have to admit I opted for the sixty-pound bags, rather than eighty, for the subsequent orders.  Trust me – you’d have done the same.

We found that we could work only a couple of hours a day before our own physical limitations forced us to give up. That added up to about fifteen posts a day, if we were lucky.

But somehow we pulled it off, and just in time – the rain we’re getting now forced us to finish the final seventeen posts in an hour and a half, without our neighbor Andy’s help, this past Monday.

And if you don’t believe that this was hard work, just listen to Sarah:

I’m only half-way through building the large gate doors, and we haven’t even begun to attach the fencing material, so expect more later. Until then, I’ll be in bed recovering.

-Jason