Construction Monday!
It just so happened that two different outdoor jobs ended up being scheduled on the same day, so it was construction equipment mayhem at Red Hawk Farm all day today. We didn’t even do any of the work, and we are exhausted!
The first crew is our gravel guys who did all of our driveway work last year. They have all sorts of cool equipment (that arrives on a VERY big truck) that allows them to dig, scrape, fill, smooth, and compress pretty much anything! They had 3 areas to work on: First, they laid the foundation for our greenhouse adjacent to the garden, which we will be assembling in September-October.
This will make a great base for the new greenhouse, which will open into the garden.
Second, we wanted a little gravel area along the left side of the shop. The area was pretty unsightly (rocky, weedy), neglected once the shop construction finished. And we occasionally like to be able to park the trailer or one of our many other vehicles in that area. So this will help with that.
This may look like plain dirt, but I know from experience attempting to dig here that it is ALL ROCKS, large and small!
Third, the gravel crew scraped down the line of dirt along our former fenceline. When fences are that old, a running raised “lump” line of dirt forms on either side. Mowing over it just means plowing into a pile of fine dust, such a mess, and not at all good for the mower! So they scraped away the raised areas, smoothed everyting out. Not the easiest job, but their nimble equipment made the job much more manageable than if Steve had tried dragging a scraper behind his tractor.
While all of that was going on, the out-of-town construction crew that built our shop returned for a few add-on projects! First, we wanted the underside of the open end roof finished off. Too many nooks and crannies for the birds, plus the unfinished metal bothered us. So now it will be nice and clean!
The construction crew’s second job will be instaling snow guards on the roof. We really should have known that a roof of that size and pitch would create quite formidable snow dams, ultimately resulting in large piles of snow in front of the garage door that houses Big Red, the snow plow. Steve did some research, and it sounds like these horizontal guards will get the job done. It’s actually pretty fascinating how they work, with just a little 1” piece of metal changing the physics of the snow and the melt and the slide. They allow the snow to stay in place and then melt while on the roof, vs. “avalanching” down in giant sheets.
This crew will be back to finish the job tomorrow, and we will show the results when they finish!
