!!!! SEPP to Boot: Stephen's Experience (BEL)

Mike Haasl wrote:Just to check another potential cause...  Might there be a leaking plumbing line somewhere near the top of that landslide?

I'm not sure about that. To my knowledge there's no plumbing in that berm, and I suspect Paul would have mentioned something about it after seeing this, if there were.

I think the bottom line is that we watered too much, and there was only grass up there on sandy, silty built-up dirt. This next go-round, we're working on stuff that will keep the soil-to-be rooted in place. I also hope the scaffold will add support from underneath.

BEL #676

The weather's turned seasonally-hot again. I was grateful to be zipping around town on my bicycle.

On the south-west side of town, there's a pedestrian-bicycle bridge that crosses a main thoroughfare: Reserve Street. Missoula has non-automobile trails that travel both above and below this wide, busy road.



Closer to the center section of town, south of the river, a deer munches on someone's lawn. I remember seeing likely this same one last weekend, though I was unable to snap a photo of it. I suspect the neighbourhood sees it as their novelty mascot or something.



Over at the Pie Hole today, a bee joined me while I sipped on my kombucha. Sorry, Miss: my pizza was all gone.



After returning to Basecamp earlier this evening, I saw Black Spark on a stakeout in the hayfield across the street. Good luck to you...!



That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!

BEL #677

I spent a lot of today up at the Lab: watering the Allerton Abbey hugels, and then hiking around on the acre I'm stewarding. I'll have a video of my first attempts at marking out the boundaries of the acre so I can start work up there. That will have to be posted another time. But the first steps were (finally) made up there, and I'm pleased with that.

Here are some trains I kept pace with on the highway outside Missoula:



Chris and I tackled another rickety junk pole fence not too long ago. One typically has to disassemble these sorts of things before they can be repaired, and here's what it looked like after we began dismantling it.



Once repaired, we were both confident that it'll stick around a while longer.



When starting a new, more-involved project - particularly one where the team has little or no experience - I will come up with a diagram to explain the end goal and steps along the way. For the hydrant project that Chris and I completed a couple weeks ago, here's what I started with. Some of the details changed, but in general we're sticking with more gravel near the base connections of the hydrant, then sand most of the way up. There's a big rock in the "splashdown" site underneath the hydrant spigot to divert water.



At the end of a long day's Booting, sometimes you just have to gobble some Power Pellets and munch some ghosts, amirite...?!?!?!



That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!

BEL #678

We're at the point where more mulch on the garden beds is a very good idea. We want to retain heat and moisture so the soil we're building stays healthy throughout the winter and an early start never really hurts.

Ben, Chris, and I started off our morning down at Dances With Pigs Meadow, each of us cutting mulch by hand and bundling it for later use in the back of the truck.



I found a cicada shell, and it reminded me of being back in Maryland all those summers when the cicada were swarming the 'burbs. This guy seemed really small in comparison.



The afternoon was dominated with addressing the aftermath of last week's mudslide, and how to restore as much soil as possible to the berm. Here's how things looked at the start of our time over there:



Discussions during our Boot time ranged from questions like, "Is Han is full first name, or is it short for something?" and trivia about Ronald Reagan's final acting role in "The Killers," where he plays a mob boss trying to strongarm John Cassavetes, and Lee Marvin also co-stars (kicking a tremendous amount of ass while he does so). I'd love to see that one again sometime soon.

After 90 minutes or so of raking, shoveling and hauling, we added soil and mulch to the lattice-scaffold we'd built last week. It's coming along as planned.



Chris and I also visited the plums, and harvested the freshest-looking ones before the wind knocked them out of the trees. He's processed and added a number of them to the dehydrator, and we'll pick up on this tomorrow to do the rest.



That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!