Our Saturday work party was the most successful work party we’ve ever hosted! We accomplished every goal we set ourselves for the day–the major as well as minor ones!
- We cleared the area we’ll be gardening (which
has calculated to be 1/5 acres.) of sticks and trash. Debbie,
, , and Lynn moved our old cut wood pile, our old scrap wood pile, and apparently our old pile of gas cans from our garden area to more appropriate locations. After that it was careful work of raking leaves to find any remaining material that might gunk up a tractor. even found an old, intact growler buried under all that stuff! - Debbie,
, , and Zona leveled the ground and moved our greenhouse out of the driveway and into its permanent home. - The ritual area has been cleared of all major tripping hazards. We removed about a dozen stumps. Andy, a friend of
, came to his first work party and worked the *entire day* swinging a pick ax, digging, and sawing. I still have no idea where he got all that energy. Stephen, our May King, got us off to a fast start in the morning, while Glenn also applied his considerable strength to the project in the afternoon–he could move 5 times the dirt Andy or I could in the same amount of time.
snuck back there at least once and demonstrated why flexibility and hatchets go hand-in-hand. Lynn, a new member of our community, did her time carefully removing clay from the stubborn stumps with a garden spade. and Zona snuck back there while I was making lunch to get a start on a really disheartening stump–the tree was as thick around as my neck. We got it out! and finished building and painting our rabbit hutch. It’s twice the size of anything we could buy commercially, built mostly from scrap lumber and a couple pieces of particle board. , , , , , and put in lots of time building the rabbit run–basically, creating a cage wrapped in chicken wire on the ground and sides with burlap on top. It’s basically the same design as our chicken run adapted to burrowing animals. , , and Zona weeded our future turkey pen. You can see the ground! - Finally,
and Briony completely cleared our goats pens of weeds and trash. As has happened so much, clearing weeds let us discover land! There is this whole triangle of land between the goat pens and irrigation ditch that we’ll be using for goats, but the previous owner was using for weeds.
For lunch, I made my normal “big group” sized meal–in this case great northern beans and quinoa with broccoli, carrots, and red peppers. We were feeding 13 *hungry* people–All the food was eaten. I had made cookies as well, which went faster than the food. Next time, 2-3 times the number of cookies and at least half again as much food. Which really means it’s time to bring out the larger pressure cooker!
A huge thank you to everyone that came down and put in time! We’re now completely ready to raise rabbits, pending delivery. We’re also ready to till our garden *and* host Ostara. Both of which have deadlines associated with them.