Day 34: Trees, Trees, Trees

Saturday

We got quite a bit done today. We camped out the night before, so we were already up a the land, ready to work. Steve started us off by using the snow plow truck to smooth out the driveway ruts. It was a big help, as the cement trucks had made the ruts deep enough that the minivan was scrapping. I did a bit more smoothing of ruts and washboard with a rake later in the day.

We had a bit of a break in the morning, with Abby joining me for a quick trip to the farm store to pick up some hardware for the posthole digger. She talked her way into two more ducks for Grandma's farm. Cheese and Quackers. The other kids were a bit jealous.

We let the new ducks play with the other ducks and goats and kids for a bit. They all got along great. The ducklings were much more at home in the grass than in the box. The chummed right up to everyone, and followed the kids (human, not goat) like they were a mother duck. The fun of country life.

In the afternoon, I was a task master, putting the kids to work for hours on end. Two hours, to be exact. We planted three rows of nut trees in the back of the meadow near the camp site. All four kids helped, plus Steve and Kim. Once again, we had  a system going, or so we thought. Maybe it was just a good plan. We set up the mule with the post-hole digger, water, tape measure, and buckets of trees. We planned to stop, drill a hole, plant a tree, fill it in, water it, and move on.

Turns out we couldn't get the post hole digger to dig. Not sure if the auger blades were dull or if the ground was too hard. So we dug by hand. The rest of the plan went, well, as planned. The kids were great help. Will and Abby helped me measure. Reed and Emmy planted and watered. I think they all helped each other with everything. They were great help and hardly complained at all.


We did trees every 30 feet in a line, staggered the next row and set it 20 feet way. We did two rows of walnut and one row of pecan. Probably around 20 trees (twigs) total. In five years maybe they'll be as tall as Reed.

We were blessed with excellent working weather, and then were blessed with rain late in the afternoon. It rained just enough to give everything, including our new trees and grass seedlings, a good soaking. Then the rain turned to hail on our drive home. Don't worry, the kids weren't out during the hail storm, just after.

Daily Stats		Hours Worked			Cost
	Day	Trevor	Family/Friends	Contractors
Today	34	4	8	0
All Time	34	28	32	194.5	$13,496.75
Summary of 5/10/2014		Work Done Today
		Smoothed driveway, planted trees
		Materials Used Today
		Walnut and pecan trees
		Who Helped Today
		Steve, Kim, Reed, Emmy, Abby, Will
		Contractors On Site
		none