May 15, 2016 Bonus Tractor Day #4 Day 3

I almost got through all of this without one picture of
the excavator putting stuff into a dumpster.
Manly - Yes?

We were supposed to have Sunday off, but still had four hours left on the rental so  . . . Bonus! A rainy day, but not too wet to make a big difference.

Starting off a little later than before, we took a side trip to look at some old aluminum lamp posts I had found laying in a guy's truck that were reclaimed from an old farmhouse built in the post war period of the last century (maybe my longest run-on sentence ever (six verbs)). They were fantastic. One has one light and a mailbox, the other has four lights. So I bought them. More to follow on this later when we figure out what to do with them

We arrived at the Farm to find our new neighbor, Lance, already at work cutting up the Motor home, the mobile homes were already carted off. Ann's fires were still burning even though it was raining. She got things going again and I finished loading the dumpsters. We spent the rest of the day cleaning up, leveling the ground, and burning the last of the wood.

Tractor Day #4 was over at four, only taking three long days and one short one.

May 14, 2016 Tractor Day #4 day two

This is the pile when we started.
The shipping container is on the left,
the pile started about four feet past the doors.
Click on this for a bigger view.

By the time we got back to the Farm our fires had burned down, but one of them was still hot enough to jump right back into flames. Ann Started a new fire nearby the trash pile out of scrap wood from the trash. She is getting pretty good at starting fires. She had a huge fire going in a few minutes.

As I piled trash into the dumpsters using the excavator she picked out wooden debris to stoke the fire. Eventually she had a huge bonfire going while I went back and forth stoking the other fires with the tractor.

This is a view of the pile from the front.
The blue tarp in the foreground was the pile that the previous
owners had piled up when trying to prepare the place for sale.
The rock pile in the foreground is Polscher's Pile,
a donation to our project.

As it tuned out there was about a ton of metal in the trash. The roof from the mobile home, the body of the motor home, and one camper, plus the metal from the shed Jack knocked down on Tractor Day #2 all had to be pulled out of the trash and put into a pile of it's own.


At lunch time a couple of guys walked onto the Farm and ask whether we had plans for all of the steel framing left over from the mobile and motor homes. Needless to say we had none, so they began cutting them up with a welding torch and hauling it all away. Lance was the guy's name. He lives nearby and across the highway where he building trailers out of scrap steel. So the steel being carted off was a good for the both of us.

By the end of the day we had most of the dumpsters filled, most of the wood burned, and most of the steel removed, but the place was still quite a mess.

May 13, 2016 Tractor day #4 begins

Throwing in the first ball.
There were about eighty teddy bears too.

Things got off to a rocky start. The weather was headed into the high eighties so we got out there early in hopes of avoiding some of the heat.

The excavator was supposed to be on the Farm at nine but, at ten, we called only to find that they had us down for four in the afternoon. Disappointment! But what the heck. We started cutting wood and lighting fires.

The dumpsters arrived on time, just before lunch. At one the excavator showed up and the fun began.

We were going to jump right into trash removal, but the fires were already started so I began loading the fires with the huge amounts of wood that the excavator allowed. Pretty soon we had two extraordinarily large fires burning twenty feet high and the gigantic piles started shrinking up noticeably. I grabbed the tree stumps that had been laying around and threw them into the fire with the other wood.

By the end of the day we had burned about ninety percent of the three large piles of wood slash. Maybe two hundred yards of trees, berry vines, and other assorted debris went up in about seven hours. Between pushing the fires together we spent a little time loading the dumpsters.

This was taken from inside of the mostly empty Shipping Container.

After searching through the container's contents, we found that they had simply loaded every bit of rubbish into the container, prior to bringing it out to the Farm.

Since there was an amazing  amount of trash to load up, picking a place to start was tough. We chose to begin with the remains of what had once been useless trash stuffing the shipping container. I got this into the dumpster and began chipping away at the main pile as Ann lit the barbecue to cook our first meal on the Farm. Hot dogs aren't much of a meal, but Jack showed up and a good time was had by all.

At about eight we had to call it a day. We were filthy head to toe and were in bed at nine, asleep at nine - ten.

May 12, 2016 Tractor Day #4 Before pictures

This is the before view from the back gate.
The back gate is near the creek on the east side.
The shipping container is about three quarters to the left.
The trash pile extends from about five feet to the east of the container
and ends about an inch from the right edge of the picture.

This is a panoramic view from the front gate before the dumpsters were delivered.
The view extends from the front fence to the front fence on either side.
Click on it to see a bigger picture.
The shipping container near the center is the only constant landmark.

This is the East Meadow Fire Pile.
About sixty feet across and forty deep.
Seven feet high.

We have been burning this one for weeks.
This is the remains of the West Meadow Fire Pile.
About half the size of the East Meadow Pile.

This is taken from the Back Gate and looks along the Eastern Fence.
The wood debris pile contains four large fruit trees we had to cut down.
The wood had to be hauled to the East Meadow Debris pile for burning.

This might give you some idea about the scope of the project.

This was the stuff we scraped out of the container.

The pile of trash was about nine feet high and fifty feet long.

May 11, 2016

Tomorrow we start an epic trash cleanup. Two thirty yard dumpsters, one medium sized excavator with a three foot bucket and a thumb, three days off, a hundred yards of wood to burn. This is going to be great!

I'll post the heck out of the weekend.

Updating our strawberry experiment:

This is where we began last year.
Three barrels made into huge strawberry pots.
We planted three hundred plants in four varieties.
Using organically approved sterile soils.

This is where we are this week.
Maybe four hundred berries growing.
Three have ripened and were red all of the way through.
If this continues we should have a good harvest.