December Update on the Work on our Land

We've been very fortunate that our fall has been relatively warm. Jeff and Ed have been working almost non-stop on clearing our field. I got a hold of my husband's camera and downloaded the photos that he took.

This is amazing! Way back when, my husband began digging around this boulder only to discover that it was like the proverbial iceberg, showing 1/10th above the ground and having 9/10th below the ground. In 2011, we had someone come to drill the rock to put in a few stress fractures and this is what Jeff used to break the boulder apart. The rock weighed approximately 40,000 pounds! We have a video of Jeff meticulously working on breaking the rock apart and burying it in the trench that he dug beside the rock.
What Jeff has been doing is turning the soil over with his bucket and sifting out boulders that are larger than 20 pounds. Then, my husband comes with his tractor and moves those rocks away. The entire field has been thus gently turned with the top soil put right back where it came from. That's what we have to do to prepare our soil because we do live in Stonington!

The end result of all this work has been a field that now looks like this, which is a view of the field looking north:

Ed has been working on clearing the underbrush and trees from the east side of the field in order to move back the tree line so that the morning sun won't cast too much of a shadow on the vineyard.

What we find that is just terrific is that both Jeff and Ed have made suggestions about how to enhance the vineyard. We had a rock wall on the east side of the field where Ed was working and Jeff said that he could bury the rocks so that we could have a smooth transition from the vineyard to the edge of the tree line.

Ed saw a beautiful maple on the east side where he was working and instead of taking it down, mentioned that that tree would be one to keep to provide shade in the summer. We love that Jeff and Ed are thinking about the aesthetics of the vineyard while they are concentrating on running their attention demanding equipment.
When we first walked the property in March of 2005, we were aware of bees coming in and out of a hickory tree located at the north end of the field. Our neighbor also mentioned to us that we had a bees. But in subsequent years, we never saw the bees come back. During his excavations, Ed came across the tree and found a vacant hive. Instead of just demolishing the tree, Ed showed my husband the insides of the tree, complete with the remnants of an old hive. Totally cool!