Sunday, September 21, 2008

Tractor day!

Today Roger, Adam's friend and coworker, came over with his tractor to grade the orchard area. The idea was to pull up the layer of what Roger told us was "bermuda grass" to make room for the field of poppies we envision there, and also to smooth out the ground in the area so that it's comfortable for everybody to walk on at the wedding.

Yesterday Adam did a LOT of work in the garden while I was working at a winery event, all to make it easier and more effective for Roger to do his tractoring. When I came home, I found all the fruit trees pruned into much smaller fruit trees (which I am given to understand is very good for the trees) and an enormous pile of branches stacked tidily against the greenhouse. Moreover, the old stump around which I had proudly dug my very first trench--we used the trench to flood the area around the stump, to facilitate its removal--had been pulled up. Poor Adam was a little sunburned and a lot tired, and I was so impressed by everything that he had accomplished while I had just been pouring wine.

Roger brought his tractor over in a big trailer behind his cargo van, and generously offered to use the trailer to help us haul all of our yard waste to the dump. (Roger was quite impressed by Adam's skills in tying the tarp over the trailer after we'd loaded it with all our branches and leaves and bermuda-grass bits; Adam told him that he'd learned how to tie down a truck load from his dad, when he used to deliver flatbed loads of honey to Philly.)

Because of Roger's cheerful and gracious help, we accomplished today what would have taken us months to accomplish on our own. Roger is aces.

Here are some "before" pics:










And some "after" pics:







PS: We are also very excited to have been relieved of the old tool shed, which you can't see in the photos in this post but you can see in the aerial photo from the previous post. We posted it on the "free" section of Craigslist, and the very next morning, after a flurry of phone calls, a very nice man came with two friends, a power screwdriver, and his truck, and they disassembled it and hauled it away. We love Craigslist. Besides the fact that it was the medium through which we met each other (and through which I found my cat, my last four apartments and the job that got me through graduate school), Craigslist made it possible for us to avoid adding the shed to the landfill and for someone else who wanted a shed to use it.

1 Comments:

Blogger Miriam Lee said...

THATS AWESOME! I didn't realize how much you had actually done to your yard! Well done! After we came to dig the pig pit we talked about your yard all the way home. it's sweeeet!

May 14, 2009 at 2:29 PM  

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