The work behind the work - new picnic area

Its been a heck of a week. Apart from a sudden event that I got roped into helping organize by way of being on a local committee, we had planned since last week, before the original event was cancelled, to build a new picnic area. This was the space we had set aside for it, and it has already been 'cleaned' by me and my machete here:

I had hired a local contractor, and he came up to take a look around, measure our first picnic table area construction, draw lines in his notebook, make calculations, ask us about any changes or upgrades we wanted, and generally try to figure out how to charge me for the job.

For those of you that don't remember, we built this in 2020, and since I was blogging on HIVE at that time you can see Part 1 and Part 2 on chain. This project went so good, but it only really fits about 16 people without getting uncomfortable, and sometimes we get groups of 22 or 24 people, which is really the maximum size our farm can handle anyway.

So please build us another picnic table area, my wife asked me very nicely.

I always forget how much work something like this is, but unfortunately if I don't pull the trigger and get things started, nothing ever gets done.

The big issue is that its a gentle sloping hill, and of course we have to level it off. So I started working with a hoe and filling wheelbarrows with dirt. This would have been a pretty easy job just pushing some dirt from one side to another, but read on to find out more.

As you can see, I had some pretty nice rocks sitting around from a few years ago, and started working on a cool rock wall inspired by Grandpa's potato berm I spotted again while up in Wisconsin. I thought, I could do something like that, and I bet it would look good too!

But back to doing three times as much work or more, someone noticed that all this dirt was really nice and black, healthy organic soil, which would go really good in her garden. So she inspired me to haul out a bunch of that black dirt somewhere else, leaving some gaping holes behind to fill with some lesser quality dirt I had laying around elsewhere.

At some point I got called away to go to LATAM blockchain summit, but we had time, slowly working and transforming the site.

This was going really well, and boy does she look happy! Filling up three raised beds with the best dirt - I can already taste the future carrots she will grow for us.

Wait, when were those contractors coming again?

Yes that's right, in the middle of trying to help organize a once-cancelled festival in just 8 days, the contractors called back - Don Alex, pick us up tomorrow at 8am - we have all the material and are ready to build the picnic contraption up on your farm!

Well, what could I do? I dug out a whole bunch more black dirt until my wife seemed happy, then got up early to pick up the dudes.

Hey dudes, by the way, I don't quite have the space prepared yet. Don't worry Don Alex, let's get this material up there and then we can take a look and see what must be done.

Oh there is a lot to be done yet.

Starting with the driving. You may remember that I was bagging up some material, for several reasons but now one of them being that part of the road was washed out by a storm last weekend. In the meantime the community has worked a bit on the road, but this section is still tricky. And just 5 days earlier I had the car up at the farm, but now with the material, we didn't have any luck, although we tried just for the fun of it.

We got this far.

Luckily I had suspected as much, and brought two extra guys to help carry up the material the rest of the way. Which they did. Its not far but it is uphill, but we made it up with everything, including air compressor, metal tubes, plastic roofing material, welding kits and angle grinder, among other things.

They did some prelimary work with the material, but mostly they just ate lunch and opined about what they would do tomorrow. When you are hauling cargo uphill often you aren't very much motivated to keep working.

I did get them motivated to help me move about 30 wheelbarrow loads of the not-so-good dirt over, this was a big help. Then they went home.

I, on the other hand, spend the rest of the day working the site, including, as they mentioned to me, pruning this avacado tree. After much measurements, we decided that we didn't have to either lose the tree or move my stone wall further down, but could just prune the main trunk and leave a mainish side branch. I thought this was a good compromise, and I worked until dark moving stones and branches and stomping dirt into place.

Its really starting to come together now, and I snapped this next picture this morning, although I felt totally crappy this morning after staying up until 1am finishing up several things on the computer related to paperwork, presidency and other such tasks.

It still needs more dirt though, and not just a little, especially on the side nearest to the camera.

The guys showed up early this morning, luckily I did have my pants on though. They managed to put together the basic structure and, in leveling it off confirmed what my eyes were telling me that, yes, it needed more dirt.

But tomorrow is the festival, and the guys said they could do some other work on Saturday so maybe I will invent some time between now and Monday to move this most important dirt.

They even started to paint the superstructure - this is progress! Now I just somehow need to find time this weekend to get electrical wires, prepare the wood and move some big piles of dirt, all while supposedly managing a two day event in the central park.

We will see how it all turns out, and you can be sure to read about it all here - on my blog.

Freedom and Friendship