So far this week has been delightfully productive and full of exciting experiential learning :)

The hoop house is actually getting vertical, which is admittedly a total surprise. We have bypassed things like leveling and uh, well, measuring for the most part. It's just a fifteen foot high 24'x48' structure, so I'm pretty sure planning and measuring would be overkill, right Dad? We don't have a transit or a skid steer or (until today) a tape measure longer than 25', but we do have a very wealthy board member with zero building experience on site daily and demanding progress. In fact, when he gets frustrated with all our measuring and planning, he just starts digging holes (abiet slowly and crookedly from behind that financier spare tire). So we have the ground posts in, and although they're not plumb or lined up, today they stuck two of the ridgelines up. They weren't bolted on straight, so one of them shoved out the ground post to a frightening angle. Frightening mostly because the ground posts are so easily pushed around! They were supposed to be set in concrete, but instead it was decided that we would dig a 2' hole (the top foot of which is freshly added compost and sand) with a post hole digger, plop the ground posts in, and pack a little dirt/compost in around the edges. Oh my god. As much as I like to bitch about Agriburbia, I was completely convinced our hoop houses weren't going to flop over, or look like hell for that matter. So, I guess the hoop house part wasn't delightfully productive, but on the other hand, it is nice to have the damn thing out of the box finally.

This week I've also learned how to set curtains for flood irrigation, mostly through trial and error. It was extremely wet, somewhat frustrating, but all in all pretty darn fun! It's pretty great to mess around in a ditch with a shovel and some tarps and then watch the pasture getting watered or drained just like that. Part of the west pasture has been under 4-8" of water since I moved here (> a month!), so I blockaded a box dam, unblocked a culvert, added a tarp curtain, and thirty minutes later that poor oxygen-starved (and increasingly stinky) patch of pasture was emerging from the depths! I drained another section simply with a few chunks of mud - yipee! Turns out rudimentary ditch/flood irrigation is not rocket science, so a shovel, some tarps, and a basic grasp of the theory of gravity got me pretty far out there! It's still far from perfect of course, and I need to get the tractor out there to redo some ditches. Grading would be great too, but I don't want to go down the plowing/sowing road when we've got a pretty healthy population of perennial grasses. 50 cows come tomorrow for a 1-2 week vaca in our lovely back 50. They should do wonders on that neglected land, and will give us a rough idea of the property's hay potential as well.

Other exciting news - today I cooked one of our chickens for dinner, which was a satisfying first! They're 16 days from slaughter still, but this one broke a leg (and dislocated a hip?) and needed an early retirement. We haven't yet set up any proper facilities, but there's a cone or two in the shed and the 350's tailgate made a great processing table - with a clean cutting board of course. Finding a sharp knife proved tricky (mine's been cutting electric fencing and twine for too many weeks), so I ended up using a box cutter blade for the important part. Plucking really was easier with this mutant half-naked breed, and I nailed the evisceration for once (Shannon, you'd be so proud!). Anyway, the chicken turned out pretty good, but not as tender as I was hoping. Cecil certainly didn't complain about his giblets though!