Oh what fun it is to demolish and tear up things with a big tractor. I was going to rent a much smaller backhoe, but it was broken and they convinced me to rent a large John Deere 310. They said it was an $80,000 tractor. The rental place is about 3 miles from the house, so I drove it home during rush hour through town one night and returned it the next night. During the 24 hours we rented it we took out 20 fence posts with concrete (see above) with ease and 12 tree stumps and leveled the land before we till the land in August. Oh……I forgot to mention that I also hit a yellow jacket’s nest. They live in the ground in case you didn’t know. I ended up with about 10 bee stings. Funny thing was I took a benadryl right after it happened……should not have operated heavy equipment after, but it all worked out in the end.

As you can see from the pictures below, the landscape has changed a lot from when we moved in outside the family room. We had grass, trees, bushes and a fence. Now it is empty, but will soon be filled with a vineyard.

We have a vision that the vineyard should be an integral part of the house. The previous owners wanted privacy so they put up fences, bushes and trees. This was all very pretty but we wanted to open up the land so all 3 acres felt part of the house. The pictures here show the side yard. We started in May by taking down trees in the front of the house, on the side and back. Next we trimmed all the oaks in the field up to about 15-20 feet off the ground. When this was done, I spent about 40 hours chipping all the wood. If you have every operated a small chipper (11 hp) you know this is a big job…..I can only do it about 2 hours per day. Out in the side field is the septic system. We had to find this before we rip the land, so we rented a metal detector and found the leach field…..I still have to dig down to find it but at least I know where it is. Lastly we rented a tractor to take out the fence and stumps and smooth the land. Good pictures of that in another post.