Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Hill Side Leveling



Walter Jeffries from Sugar Mountain Farm recently had a post about level and hill sides. We are in the same boat. The only level spot we have on the farm is where we stop going up one side of the hill and start going down the other. As a matter of fact we can roll about a mile to the east, a mile to the west, and about a quarter mile to the south.

When we began building the farm store I lost most of my machinery storage area, so I decided to put a shed roof off the back of the big old chicken house the store is going to be in. The trouble was that the hill away from the back of this building is pretty steep, which would make backing machinery under this roof and keeping it from rolling away a little tricky. After I decided on building this shed I started looking out for free/cheap fill. The state brought me about 10 loads this summer, then last week a neighbor at the bottom of the hill began work on the opposite problem. He wants to build a garage but there is a hill in his way. So he has to dig out a tremendous amount of rock and dirt to make a level spot. I hired another neighbor to haul this material up to make level spot at the top of the same hill. Ironically some of this dirt probably started out up here.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Store Update- Tile Hooligans


Don Lee owns a third of the businesses in downtown Springville, which means that he owns one. Unless you count Lee and Son Flooring and Americana Roads Antiques as two separate entities, in which case he owns half. Anyway, Don has always been helping us out, at first by finding good horse drawn farm machinery for us and giving me some blacksmithing work to do. Later when we began raising and butchering poultry he started helping us with the processing. Not a lot of people out there who want to volunteer to spend a day killing, scalding, and plucking chickens.

When we started planning the farm store and new and improved processing room he said that he and his son Justin would tile it for us using the left over tile from years of tiling jobs. The end result is the picture above. And the added bonus is that there are still enough tile left over for me to do the walls of the "Evisceration Station" in tile which will make wash downs very easy.