Morning all.
Quite the past few days. I was talking to a friend on Sunday, and he said he was going to a fellow's house to clean out a garden. He said it was probably 20 hours worth of work, mostly pulling weeds and tilling and that he was getting $500 for the job. I told him it was going to be over 100 degrees, and he offered me $200 to help for two days. I was thinking, how bad could it be?
We pull in at 6AM on Monday and find that it is a half acre garden, most of it head high with grassweeds. So the first three hours were spent using a lawnmower and a broken weedeater to clear the walkways to dirt. Then we laid 200 feet of weedcloth, and just as the thermometer broke 100, we were given shovels, a wheelbarrow and 6 tons of gravel. We shoveled and scooped almost 4.5 tons of the stuff. The way it worked was, he took an ATV with a 1000lb trailer, loaded it up at the gravel pile and drove it the 100 yards to where I was and dumped it. I then loaded it into a wheelbarrow and dumped it in the garden.
We called it quits at 1:30 because it was almost 110 and we were both starting to show signs of heat exhaustion. Yesterday, we finished the gravel by 8, then pulled weeds with a rototiller and a rake for the rest of the morning, until 1. We barely got a quarter of the way through the garden.
$500 may not have been enough... Any other time of the year, it would be. But June, not so much.
On the bright side, I brought home my new Winchester on Sunday.
--TK