Big Doin’s In Little Homestead

At long last Mrs. Barn has agreed that the time has come for me to build her a year-round playground.  This required a new terrace to be cut into the hillside just above the garden plot, which in turn required a bulldozer to accomplish same.   Since I do not own a bulldozer, rendering me as less of a man I know, I asked around and three friends independently gave me the name SteveB as the guy to do the job.

After several weeks of back-and-forth phoning he finally showed up a few weeks ago to do the deed.  There is nothing quite so much fun as watching a good ol’ boy and his bulldozer at work.

I literally set up a lawn chair in the bed of my pickup and sat watching him all day.

It took him about six hours, back and forth in the space, to finish the job.

Working just by eye he created a long, wide, flat platform and when he surveyed the project afterward, he confirmed that it was not perfectly flat; it was a couple inches higher at one end than the other.  For a 150-foot-long run that struck me as pretty good.

So, what will go there?  For starters I will be copying my friend F’s greenhouse, hoping to get that built over the next few weeks, weather and family commitments allowing.  Once that is up and running I expect Mrs. Barn to spend almost every day there through the winter since she loves puttering in the dirt and hates the gloom of short days and cold weather.

Once he was done with the new terrace SteveB he moved across the creek to smooth out the gnarly terrain in the space where we had felled a number of trees eighteen months ago to give better sunshine to the garden plot on that side of the creek.

That outcome was every bit as successful as the terrace, and we now have a wide range of options for using this plot of land.  I’ll probably start with a parking spot and a small bed of gravel.

I seeded both patches of dirt and there are now flourishing stands of pasture grass there.