Rise of the Machines
The bigger the digger, the faster and deeper it digs
We’d been mildly bothering Carlos the building supplies guy for a few weeks about bringing one of his big diggers in to help rearrange a few things.
We’ve had a couple of rearrangements in the valley already and it usually involves setting a site visit, walking, talking, pointing and head scratching, and then waiting weeks for the agreed machine to rock up.
Our most recent bothering was on our umpteenth trip to the tiles and taps place to sort out a still unresolved confusion with the builder over shower and sink hardware.
.Usually-very-calm-Carlos was a little stressed so we light-heartedly nudged him before moonwalking out as he mumbled something about talvez amanhã de manhã (maybe tomorrow morning).
So when a car trundled down the drive at 8.30am the next day, the dogs were almost as surprised as we were (too be fair they’re a bit slow until they’ve had breakfast).
Carlos had sent his digger guy, and after some walking, talking and pointing (and virtually no scratching of heads) he asked if we wanted to start straight away.
We nodded enthusiastically and naively and headed off to the shops.
Half an hour later we met the big digger delivery truck coming the other way on our dirt road and Mr Digger and his 21-tonne truck were already 3m deep in trenches.
The bigger the digger the harder it is to undo mistakes – once things are done, they stay done – but our new trench seemed to be heading in roughly the right direction.
The extreme gardening was to deal with the large piles of eucalyptus roots which have been languishing on the property’s perimeter since the whole adventure began.
Our first job had been to cut down the eucalyptus forest occupying our flattest land with our bestest view and then dig out the deep roots and either burn them, bury them or truck them out.
We’d opted for burial over climatic impact or cost with the intention of creating a mound of amazing water-retaining soil to feed growth over the next 30 years, but had to wait until they had dried out and reduced by about half the size before digging them in.
That time had come and with a deadline for opening and an ugly fence to bury, there was an urgency requiring a certain level of bothering.
Bothering doesn’t always work here; in fact, it sometimes has the opposite effect.
But not bothering also has the opposite effect, so we are constantly striving for the correct level of balanced bothering.
We are clearly not getting that balance right in a couple of key areas, but it seems the town hall now has the paperwork it needed three months ago and hopefully we will imminently receive our plan for the water infrastructure.
But while I digress, do check out the movie…
Landscaping is an important part of our project and a little vineyard will look great and maybe even make us something suitable for human consumption at some point in the future.
It’s taken me a while, but I have finally accepted the fact there is no way we can plant wine grapes next Spring, as Ana has been saying for months, for a whole number of reasons not least that there are far too many other things to do.
But there are some things we can do , and so the focus for that patch of land is to prep it as well as we can for a Spring 2025 planting.
This involves taking soil samples to see if the area is even appropriate for grapes – even though quite a few people we have spoken to have shrugged as if to say “why not?”
The 3m trenches have revealed our soil profile and it appears to be about half a metre of soil on top of thick clay...hmm.
With that in mind, and a lot of soil improvement to be done, we also need to work out which other machines need to be arranged.
Mr Digger said we’d need a smaller bulldozer to mix and break down some of the clay and rocks, but the options also include disking, harrowing, raking or maybe ploughing with a tractor before planting some nitrogen-fixing greenery...and then perhaps bringing in some sheep?
We were thinking about maybe three sheep to begin with when Alan scoffed and said “you’ll need at least a dozen.”
The Gledsons – Alan and Margery – are back in the valley for a couple of weeks to give us a hand with some heavy lifting.
Alan was a sheep farmer when he was my rugby coach many years ago at Northern and Northumberland, and so presumably “a dozen” might well be a walk in the park for him.
Our sheep experience is limited to Ana’s parents’ farm in Sweden, and apart from a bit of shepherding and fence building we honestly spend less time feeding them than they do feeding us.
We haven’t even decided between sheep, goats or donkeys as yet.
Some people advise us to start small with one breed of grazers and go from there, whereas others are encouraging us to start a small zoo.
We’re asking the Gledsons for some land preparing advice, but we’re also getting our hands dirty for the first time in a while – and there’s nothing like the unstoppable force of the Alan Gledson machine to get things done.
The project for the next couple of weeks is a refurbishment of the guesthouse bathrooms: switching the old baths for modern walk-in showers, swapping in new water-saving toilets and retiling all the walls.
How hard can it be to remove a bath? Really hard when it’s been concreted in.
Yes, for some absurd reason the bath installation by the German folk who built this place involved building a small wall in the bathroom corner, filling it with broken bricks and concrete and then lowering in a metal bath as it was setting...certainly solid and better safe than sorry I suppose?
My jackhammer wasn’t going to cut it and even after borrowing something far more substantial from the builder, it took the best part of a morning and about six wheelbarrow loads of brick and cement waste before we could consider the next step.
That could be either a ready-made shower tray or non-slip tiles. We’ll need a new shower unit for sure...and while we’re smashing up the walls we may as well move the taps to the side rather than under the shower head.
We’re analysing what the guys are doing in new buildings to make a plan, and while it all seems a little ambitious, what could possibly go wrong?
I might run a book on how long it is before I chisel a water pipe and we get caught up in a vicious cycle of “mission creep” as the military call it.
The one good thing about being rubbish at DIY is it always makes for a better story.
Euctee debris can be shredded for top quality and very useful mulch for both moisture retention and soil improvement.
"the correct level of balanced bothering" got me there