Thursday, Nov. 29, 2012, Boonville, Ca.
First day, trail making in the Boonville area.
I left my house on Tuesday, around ten thirty in the morning to head for Boonville to help a friend plant some fruit trees and work on a safer trail to the outhouse. It’s about a two hour drive up to the cabin. Marty was there when I arrived with a nice fire going in the wood stove and the sun was mostly out, but rain was on it’s way, hopefully not that day. We rested up a bit and shot the bull for awhile then went over to see what had to be done to make a safer trail to the outhouse. The one that was there wasn’t too bad, but in the dark or rain when things were wet, it could be real dangerous because of the steep little hill that needed to be gone down to get there and if for some reason you were in a hurry to get there, it might be a little on the dangerous side, especially for older geezer types.
The plan was to check it out and get it started at least. It was hard starting, because of rocks and all the redwood tree roots that are everywhere in the ground. But we got the first layer down and things went fairly well. Marty asked me if I thought we’d get it done by dark and I said I didn’t think so, he could use the old trail until we did, but an hour before dark, it looked like we might make it. We finished just before dark.
Below, is a picture of the trail, just before we put redwood leaves on it to get ready for possible mud from the coming rain and to make it look back to natural. Redwood mulch is real good stuff for lots of things and there was plenty of it there already, so was easy to get and use. It was getting dark, so the picture is on the dark side too. The trail goes from the yellow handled shovel on the ground, down to the outhouse.
We did the redwood mulch on the trail and we were both real beat and retired to his cabin to contemplate dinner. Steak and baked potatoes, which was good because neither of us had much energy to do much else. Some meds before dinner and before I went to bed helped me get by with all the induced pain. We worked hard to stay up until ten before going to bed.
Second day, fruit tree planting.
I woke to rain around four in the morning and so, tried to stay in bed longer but was up around eight. We sat around until about ten when Dave joined us to help out. We sat around and shot the bull until about noon when the rain was supposed to slack and it did, so we got to work planting prune trees and plum trees.
When the rain finally let up enough, I went out and got this better pic of the new trail all covered with the redwood mulch.Doesn’t even look like we built a trail there. A couple of big green ferns will be added to the left of it something in the future. Should look real nice.
We donned our rain gear and went outside to get started on the tree planting. It was still raining a bit. A big redwood stump just up the hill from the cabin got these trees, the ones with a few leaves still on them. They are going dormant. We also mulched the trees with redwood mulch and planted a couple varieties of grapes around the tree stump too. .
Just up from that stump, we planted this bunch of trees all in the same hole and put a couple loads of redwood mulch around them also, Pic below.
The road coming into the cabin looked like another good place to plant some too, so we put four in there and mulched them. Marty and Dave planted some more grapes around the redwood stump you see in the picture below too.
Of course, all the digging and mulching wore as all out, so we were beat again as we entered the cabin for the night. We sat around shooting the bull for an hour or so, then I made a chicken and noodle type dish that we all devoured and did the best we could to stay up until ten, when we all went to bed.
The hardest part about getting the trees going out here is the deer just love to eat the leaves on them. Most of these trees are six or seven feet tall, which, we hope will help keep the deer from eating them all the way to the top, so they might survive and get higher than the deer can reach. At least that’s the plan.
Third day, road work and home.
So, today, Thursday, we got up around eight thirty and took it easy before packing up and heading out around noon, with rain showers off and on. We had one more project that wasn’t planned. Coming in on the dirt road I noticed that it has some bad washings on it that if not drained properly was going to eventually wash the road out in a big storm, so this needed some attention too.
On the way out, we stopped and did some shovel work on the road that should take care of the problem. Of course the rain increased during this time just to try to get us all wet, but that didn’t’ slow us down much.
A nice time doing a little work in a beautiful forest, wasn’t too bad.
