Saturday, July 9, 2011

Saturday, July 9, 2011

5:45pm

I got up this morning around 7:30 and was outside and working on the fence by 8am. Today, I worked on weaving branches of mountain laurel onto the fence framework. Basically, the fence is constructed thusly: eight-foot locust posts are buried about seven feet apart and four feet deep and eight-foot locust boards are vertically screwed into those posts. Two eight-foot cross boards (not locust, but sealed well with paint) connect the vertical boards at three feet and ten feet from the ground. Chicken wire is buried a foot deep in the ground and comes up to be stapled to the lower horizontal board. Then, the rectangles between the horizontal and vertical boards are filled in with mountain laurel.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, mountain laurel is a beautiful, shrub-like, flowering tree that grows prolifically all over the mountains here. Its branches are almost vine-like in a way, twisting, turning, and spiraling in a very aesthetically pleasing manner.

Anyway, the task is to look at the mountain laurel, then look at the fence, and then weave together pieces of the mountain laurel such that it creates a barrier impermeable to deer. In general, you start with an A frame (ideally, but usually it turns out more like a triangle) made of larger branches, and then fill in with smaller and smaller branches until all the gaps are too small for deer to fit through. It is actually quite fun, a lot like a jigsaw puzzle but with even more critical thinking involved.

The key is placing the first three pieces; if you get a solid basis with those first pieces, the rest tend to fall into place. My problem today was that someone had started a bunch of the rectangles but hadn’t filled them in, and they hadn’t done a particularly admirable job with the two large pieces that they had screwed into every rectangle. So my job was to fill in, and it took quite a bit more creativity than if I had started with a blank slate. And a bit of regression, er, deconstruction, in the service of transcendence.

I’m SO glad that we have plenty of work exchangers, because the fence is a LOT of work. We have to dig the postholes, strip all the bark off of the posts, tamp the posts into the ground, screw the locust boards to the posts, paint the non-locust posts three times, screw in the horizontal boards, bury the chicken wire, staple it to the lower board, hike up into the forest and harvest mountain laurel, and then weave the mountain laurel onto the fence. Each individual step is like an entire project in and of itself! BUT, I think it’ll be done by the time we are ready to be planting fall crops! Hooray!

I nipped myself with the handsaw while trimming one of the branches. The saw popped up and got my thumb right at the nail bed. I was more surprised than hurt, and it stopped bleeding fairly quickly, but it reminded me to be a little more careful with tools that are meant to cut through things.

When I ran out of mountain laurel and decided to call it quits for the day, I went down to jump in the creek with Chynna. Oh, that icy cold creek feels SO GOOD when you are hot and sweaty and dirty. And I mean dirty, like in the very literal sense of “covered in dirt.” The bark from the mountain laurel tends to flake off and coat you in dirt and bark-sprinkles, and I put in a solid five hours. There really is nothing quite as cleansing as scrubbing down with creek silt.