Rental City delivered the skid steer with 30” auger today. Phil drilled two holes in fairly short order, deep, topsoil mixed with subsoil. Therefore, not ideal. (The top six inches of soil have aerobic microorganisms, which need air to live; below about six inches are anaerobic microorganisms that need no air to live; if the layers get mixed, you get a lot of dead soil. Bummer.)
So Phil traded the auger for the bucket and scraped the topsoil off the location of the first two rows of trees. The rich topsoil is minimal in comparison with the massive quantities of subsoil the auger brings up, but I’m thankful to have it separated and available. (The photo below shows the visible difference between the topsoil and subsoil: the more orange soil in the background is subsoil.)
Next Phil ran to the hardware store to get spray paint (which really meant he also stopped at the bank and deposited checks, stopped at the gas station to get diesel fuel for the skid steer, stopped at the post office to mail a package and get our mail; he met Doug Bush at the gas station and had a nice chat, but that was an unplanned, added bonus). He marked the subsoil at 6’ spacing for these first two rows, and then settled down in the skid steer for the boring, repetitive, noisy task of drilling holes for trees.
At first, the holes look like this:
After a short while, as the perched water flows in, the holes look more like this:
All told, we think today produced 15 holes. Only 385 to go, plus backfilling and planting.
Okay, that’s really depressing. We’ll focus on the first number and forget the second.
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