Building the Hogan

With the boundaries of our house and garden set, we commenced with the task of  clearing the cordoned area of it’s sage brush and grasses.  Traditional house-building would say that this is the point where we hire a bulldozer or grader to come in and prepare the site.  In fact, one of our neighbors strongly suggested that we hire someone with a tractor to come in and clear the entire 20 acres.

We purchased a couple of common garden spades.

Why do it by hand?  First of all we are newcomers to the land.  This area is home to prairie dogs, hawks, coyote, elk, rabbits and a variety of other bird and mammal species.  We didn’t want to strip mine the parts of the land we had no intention of developing.  We certainly didn’t want to disturb it without understanding what was living in the habitat.  There’s plenty of room around us and if we need to nudge the animals a little further away we can do it as needed.

Secondly, we feel a strong connection to this place and we want to experience as much of the development process as we can through our own labor.  We don’t want to only be spectators in the creation process.  Our writing gives us flexible hours, so for now we’ve decided to work two days a week at the land.  It’s important to be involved, to see the plan grow, and to feel the tired muscles earned from a full day of shovel and wheelbarrow work.   

We first spaded the house area, clearing it of everything bigger than a clump of grass.  The process of clearing roughly 1500 square feet took us about eight hours of labor.  We piled up the sage brush for later re-use as mulch.  The second area we cleared was the tree garden.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, the trees were already on order and we wanted to be able to plant as soon as the trees arrived.  The tree garden is another 1200 square feet and took us another 8 hours to clear.

The soil in this area is a good mixture of clay, sand and humus and spades quite easily when it’s slightly moist.  When we started digging in April, the soil was still mostly wet from the winter snow melt.  As the month progressed, the soil became firmer as it baked in the sun.  Now that we’d removed the biggest sage and most of the stones, we needed to break up the topsoil.  Since we’d have a lot of shovel work ahead of us in other areas, we decided it would be best to pick up a small tiller to turn the garden.

We’re conservers, but we’re not Luddites.  Machines deployed in the right ways make sense.

My intention was to rent a tiller for the garden work, but when I discovered I could buy a decent unit for the price of a three day rental I ended up getting a 24 inch Bohlens at the local Lowe’s.  I think in most cases machine rental makes sense, but because we were going to need the tiller for a lot of other jobs, primarily the “big garden”  it was better to buy. 

My first attempts to drive the tiller over the tufts of hard grasses and compacted soil were comical.  The Bohlens is light and it bounced across the ground like a wild miniature horse.  After a couple rows it felt like my arms were going to come off.  As I mentioned earlier the altitude at our land is 7500 feet.  Physical work at this altitude can be exhausting and holding on to this little beast gave me quite a workout.  Once I learned some technique, and the ground was loosening, it was easier to control.  In roughly two hours of tiller work we had the tree garden ready.

Now all we needed were the trees.