The Pit
How it started. November 2018, soon after buying a tractor, Joel looked at this hill and said “that… is in the wrong place”
This is looking west into the future studio building. Note the outhouse behind Joel.
fall 2019, same perspective if you back up, a year later. Note the outhouse.
That green T-post marks the North East corner of my future studio. You can faintly discern the yellow string running to the right: the north wall. This is a fair view of half of “the Pit”. Not the pit of despair, as I have quipped, but the pit of abundance. Despite the fact that it was once a hill created by a previous owner asking a bulldozer to fold earth over lot of trash, it is now a divot in the land as Joel has un-earthed this dump and disposed of it properly. But Joel needed to keep excavating and found a vein of river rocks. Or the alluvial deposit of a glacier, it’s hard to tell.. Either way, it is very valuable as the base of road-beds. So he picks out every rock. By hand, tossing it into the tractor bucket. Gradually accumulates them into piles, the clay around them softening down in the rains outside the trailer until he is ready to use them. He in turn quips about building the Appian Way.
It’s not just a pebble mine, believe me. Essentially he is juggling the simultaneous tasks of excavating/ grading, to the proper heights, my studio/ our temporary residence, a large utility shed, a car-port and my kiln shed while laying out how roadways will flow into each other and serve these structures. I have tasked him to anticipate larger gatherings (need for parking, adequate septic, room to breathe), and he is also looking forward to creating our dream home and a sauna further up the hill (…more roadwork and thoughts about water). I have never thought about sub-surface water as much as I am now, the next applied step beyond academic reading about permaculture swales and keylining. The way poor drainage makes wet spots, and then rot in the house. I have taken good American roads for granted my whole life. And electricity. Actually, that’s not true, I lived in a rather beat-down place in MN for years whose driveway was a kind of creek bed and heat was not reliable. We fell in love in that time period, so maybe that’s how he knows I can actually weather this ongoing destruction/ construction chaos for years.
The land is truly one of abundance. It was an old mill site. The kinds of timbers that made old Portland were milled on our land. That means literally hundreds of tons of sawdust, and old bulldozers pushing it off into the forest to decompose. Ok sure, they littered into it their awkward snake-like 500 lb. cables too, but we’ll take them and recycle them in an effort to harvest the now-compost. Joel looks at me and says jovially, “madness!”…as he tries to estimate its current market value. I say “good soil is good food!”… He grew up on an old-world dairy farm eating everything home-grown, and knows I speak the truth.
COMPOST! In front of him, behind him, of unknown quantities. The tractor pushes undigested tree parts to the side, we pull out the roots of invasive blackberry, move it to the orchard, clean it further (the white tarp below), repeat. It is important to create a gentle transition in the orchard between the growing areas and the access road, so we are mindful of volume to create those edges well.
It is now mid-May, 2020, the time of Covid -19 lockdowns. Restaurants, my main customers, are shut, so I am out of a job. I should stock up on my hand-made porcelain crocks which have been a best-seller for years, and I will, but right in the beginning of lockdown, Joel was working on this area of the orchard and asked my intentions with it. I had a plan but given its proximity to ad-hoc irrigation, we decided to make a temporary vegetable garden that would transition into plan A over time. So, compost, 2 feet thick over 3000 sq’. The edges aren’t done but the planting area is, mostly. The next photos show those soils. They’re so crumbly, cleaning them is like swimming… of course weed seeds are sprouting now, and a forest mint has been imported, but I can manage all that. I am on-time for the growing season, and I’m afraid of deer, but I like learning, and I’m excited to know what I can do here in these uncertain times. Beans are looking great, lettuces are going, winter squashes are popping, kale and beet seeds are in the ground, and my farmer friend gave me 20 tomato starts…. !
