It's not all about the house

Much interior work getting done.  The HVAC guy has done his thing.  The monster heat exchanger is not set yet but all the interior stuff is done including mounting the air-handler under the house in the crawl space.  Ducting is done as well.  Electricians have been in there for the last 10 or 12 days.  All the ceiling cans, fan mounts, vent fans (there are 5 in the house for some reason), outlets and switches, main panel, sub panel, all that stuff is in.  Exterior boxes to mount the door lights, floods, hot tub outlet, and probably 10 other things I can't think of right now are in.  But it is not all about the house.  Dee and I spent the weekend prepping the
orchard.  I tilled up about 6,000 sq feet of unfenced pasture and set some T-bar fence posts.  We strung fishing line (60 lb test for you fishing affecionados), which acts as a deer fence.  The deer cannot easily see the fishing line so when they are going for those tender young pear blossoms their noses hit the fishing line and they spook.

I had some geotextile fabric; just happened to be 12' wide by about 60 feet long which was just what we needed, left over from laying the new driveway to the house.  So we dug some holes, rolled out the geotex, cut holes in the goetex for the bare root trees, and filled the holes with compost and dirt.  Sounds easy but my Advil bottle is 3 tabs short and two beers down since I got home.  Medicinal purposes only of course.  Anyway the trees are in and well fertilized so Mother Nature does the work from now till harvest time.

This is 6,000 sq ft of newly tilled up earth.  It may not look it but I ran the tiller over this 4 times to break up the clods of sod.  The tiller only goes down about 3 - 4 inches.  Now if I had a plow......

These are the bare root trees that will be transplanted to the newly tilled area.  5 of these trees I planted last year but the rest are new this year and need to be transplanted.  We put them in temporary holes until I could get the field tilled and expand the deer fence.  You can see why I wanted to prepare the ground to eliminate the weeding that would result if we just dug holes and planed the trees.

It may look funny in the photo but this is the fishing line fencing we string to keep the deer out of the orchard.  You can also see the geotextile fabric laid.

Gabe, Skoshi, and Kukla are always happy to help.

New trees all tucked away and ready for more warm weather and lots of sun.  There is a future project to put in drip irrigation.  I need to run a line to the far side of the stables but I figure I have until July or August to get that done.  I have a big chipper that runs off my tractor.  Next step is to trim the alders that are next to the orchard and chip them up to cover the geotex.