Swales and seeds

What a wonderful day at the farm!  The only down side was that we forgot the camera and the battery on my phone was dead, so no pictures right now.  Next time we go to the farm, I'll try to catch up with pics of some of what we did today.

We started out by moving a stack of large pallets out to the farm.  We gave one to the kids to disassemble for the long boards in it, turned 4 of them into a compost bin and stacked up the other 4 to use under the next load of milled lumber.  Once the kids had disassembled the pallet, we turned the 3 long boards into a landscape compass.  If you have never seen one of those, it looks like a 6' tall letter A with a 5' spread at the bottom.  The cross piece of the A is exactly level.  This allows us to find a level contour line on the hillsides by putting a 4' level on the cross piece and then moving the compass until the 3 feet are level with each other.

Once the compass was built, we used it to make 3 level contour lines on the hillside behind the hoop house.  Next, I worked on digging out the first swale following the contour lines while Jeremy seeded grass onto the other bare ground around the hoop house and garden.  When he finished seeding, he helped me finish out the other 2 swales.

The 3 swales are about 120 ft. long.  The plan is to construct grape trellises along the swales then move our grapes, raspberries and blackberries to the farm.  Ideally, they should move before they break their winter sleep.  That gives us somewhere between 2 weeks and a month.  In reality, as long as they get moved before the hot and dry part of summer hits, we should be ok.  Here's hoping!

Our last project at the farm today was putting dirt on the edges of the plastic on the hoop house.  We have tried an assortment of things to keep the plastic from pulling up in places and none have quite worked like we wanted.  This one looks promising though. 

When we got back home, I spent an hour or so getting the grape clippings dipped in rooting powder and put in dirt.  With a bit of luck, we'll get enough of them to take to fill up the swales we just built!

What a wonderful day!  If only I didn't have to go back to work tomorrow...