Ready for Blocks

Thursday morning we went out to remove form work and put down gravel. After I pulled the cleats and Phil had dealt with gravel and the plastic underneath for an hour, we gave up. Jadon, though, continued on until he had removed all the boards from the first day's pour. What a faithful, diligent fellow he is!

Phil was having a miserable time of it. The plastic under the sand remains fairly intact. The plastic under the gravel was chewed up horribly. And it smells awful, like a vat of cat urine (or something equally foul). So he was trying to scoop up the gravel, while sliding on plastic that tore, under a hot sun, wearing sunglasses that made his ear protection fit badly. He was done.

He had some time with friends scheduled in the afternoon, though, so his day ended better than it began.

It was interesting to hear why you don't take forms down too early. It's not because the concrete will run all over, or mush down. It's because if it dries too quickly, the chemical process needed to set the concrete doesn't finish, leaving the finished product weak.

This morning, we had a delivery first thing: our mortar arrived, and the first of our batches of concrete block. Each pallet of block weighs about 3500 pounds!

Phil has more or less organized the shipments by when we'll use them. Staging this project is a bit like a full-farm sudoku puzzle.

While Jadon and I took down the rest of the formwork, Phil used the rest of the gravel to cover the ground where we'll be working.

I wasn't expecting the site to need that much gravel (I had been thinking maybe we could use some for the driveway, for example), but I am thankful we had enough to cover the site, and I'm thankful we were able to get rid of all the stinky plastic!

While Jadon and I picked up all the scrap wood around the site, Phil headed up to another delivery truck, bringing us some scaffolding. We won't need it for a little while most likely, but it was good thinking on Phil's part to order it. The boys happily helped Phil snap it together, and they happily climbed all over it.

Except Joe. He maintained a careful distance.

We headed out then for our two hour drive to Costco. We coincided it, as usual, to pick up cow minerals and 30 gallons of apple cider vinegar (mercifully broken into two 15 gallon containers). Our friends at Lancaster Ag deliver once a month, so to save on shipping we head up to the drop point. Today while we were loading, the owner of farm happened to stop by, and he gave us an hour long tour. He has a beautiful farm in the Shenandoah Valley, all green rolling hills, looking out on green rolling hills. He showed us his movable chicken houses, and took us over to see the turkeys, now about three weeks out from processing. I haven't really seen a group of turkeys up close: the toms really do fluff up their back feathers, just like in elementary school art projects. And their funny necks and heads, and all the gobbling. It was fun!

Phil is enthusiastic: tomorrow we hope to start laying blocks.