Given that we've told you about hiking, kayaking, goose adoption and very little about our "work", you might have gotten the impression that we are secretly on vacation. Compared to Amazoonico and our normal lives we are definitely working at a much slower pace, however, there is always work to be done here.
One of our first jobs was to prepare some barrels to plant fig trees. The goal was to raise the temperature of their roots by potting them and putting them in a sunny and protected area. For us, this meant drilling drainage holes, making soil (compost, top soil, peat moss, lime and perlite), adding gravel and landscape fabric, raising and levelling the pots and transplanting the figs. We check the little trees every day and they seem to be doing fine in their new environment.
Another task was to plant about 400 nut trees in a nursery. Gayle helped Bryce with the digging and planting while I built cages to keep the birds and squirrels from digging up the nuts. Together, we secured the cages and closed up any possible access points. We now wait for the Walnuts, Monkey Puzzle, Burr Oak and Sweet Chestnut to start to grow. Bryce will find a place to plant them (probably as part of his partnership with local schools or as "graffiti" on some recently deforested land).
Our biggest job so far was to ready the "middle" garden for planting. It's about 40 m long and 15 m wide and has been covered with plastic for the winter. We removed the tarps and spread some smelly compost and lime to restore so nutrients. Bryce used the tiller on the tractor to grind up the the garden while we removed rocks. Then we began some hard shoveling to trench the garden to create paths. At the end of the day we covered the garden with plastic again (black side up) to cook any seeds that might want to grow. Hopefully we'll help plant it in a week or two.
Most recently, we've updated our rock picking certification after Bryce spent a few hours knocking down an old pile of dirt, roots and rocks. Some rocks were so big that it took only 4 of them to fill the tractor bucket! Don’t worry, Gayle is a tank and handled them on her own! The highlight was getting to operate the excavator! That was fun and sooo frustrating at the same time!
