16 October 2019

About 9:30, while I was busy picking another two full bucket-loads of rocks out of the area between the new stone wall and Lake Dunmore Road, Tammy and Geryll stopped by.  After discussing next steps, the two ladies left again, returning an hour later with 12 bales of hay.  They then left again, purportedly to go into Middlebury to acquire a hydro seeder (a device that sprays water, grass seed, and hay onto an area to be planted).  That trip, I thought, should have taken them an hour or so.  At 1:30 Nate showed up to take away Tammy’s Kubota, saying that he had just talked to his boss, who was in Middlebury, and should be back here “any minute now”.  At 2:00 Jake arrived, bringing with him a small broadcast seeder.  Finally, at 2:30 Tammy and Geryll returned, bearing a 25 pound bag of grass seed, a hay mulcher / sprayer (not a hydro seeder) from Taylor Rental, a half yard of topsoil, and a tale of woe involving two flat tires on Tammy’s dump trailer.  In the next hour we spread the topsoil (could have used a full yard, easily), spread the grass seed, and mulched Tammy and the seeded area with hay.

15 October 2019

Tammy and her guys got here at 9; Geryll Robinson (just back from a two-week vacation in Europe) arrived an hour later.  Tammy brought me a copy of the Rutland Herald from Wednesday, 2 October, the front page of which had a nice picture of the stone wall being built, plus a short blurb about who was doing the work (Tammy, Nate, and Jake) from Goshen Mountain Landscaping.  Nate continued building the wall front and back faces; Jake dumped stone rubble into the wall void as needed, then he and Geryll began the arduous task of cleaning the work area of all the “extra” stone; Tammy and I continued putting caps on the wall top.  By early afternoon the wall was complete, including a short extension of the Lapidus’ existing wall (built by Tammy years ago) so that the Lapidus’ and Perkins’ walls meet at the property corner stake.  Then the fun began in earnest!  Tammy used our Kubotas (one at time; she’s good but…) to aggressively grade and groom the area between the stone wall and road in preparation for topsoil and grass seed.  Let’s just say that us grunts (Geryll, Nate, Jake, and I… and grunt we did do) removed many, many tons of stone stirred up in the aftermath of Tammy’s efforts.  Back breaking work!  All that “extra” stone was dumped into a once-hollow just off the driveway.  Tammy, Jake, and I finished the final topsoil spreading at 6:15.  Don’t know about the others, but I’m PDK (translation: pretty darn knackered) tonight.

 

14 October 2019

Tammy, Nate, and Jake arrived about 8:30 to continue wall building.  While the two guys concentrated on building the outer wall faces and filling the inner void with stone rubble, Tammy and I scavenged and placed the top caps.  By the end of the day, all but 20 feet of the wall was complete… and looking PDG (translation: pretty darn good).

11 October 2019

Returned to Fern Lake with all fingers, toes, other body parts, Delores, and the Kubota intact after two weeks of working in the woods.  Got out 7 cords of saw logs and 6 cords of firewood, the sale of which should at least partially assuage the trials and tribulations endured.  On a very positive note: there were only a few occasions when the Kubota was balanced just on three wheels.  Unfortunately, those occasions caused more than a few strands of Chree’s hair to turn gray.  Oh, well!  Expected to find the stone wall complete, or the Goshen Mountain Landscaping crew hard at work.  While the wall was much further along than when we left, there was still about 40 feet left to go… and Tammy’s crew was among the missing.  A good sign: there was a dump truck load of beautiful topsoil deposited by the wall at the top of the driveway.  Tammy did call later that afternoon to explain her absence… and promised to be here Monday morning to continue work.