State of the Farm, May 2026: Behold, The Terracing

You may recall that we were planning to terrace the garden.

 

It took a lot of planning and a week and some fairly hard work but the project is (or will be shortly) done. Here’s the blow by blow.

 

What we had to start with was the garden first pictured above. The soil was fairly tired out to begin with. This garden space has been in use for about thirty years. We’ve added soil and manure over the years but there is ledge under that there ground and we never were able to get much more than about six inches of topsoil.

 

We were... unsatisfied with the result.

 

Meanwhile, we recently had constructed a solar carport to increase our solar power. (More on that another day.) When they built it, they excavated these rocks. These are not small. 

 

In addition, we purchased an enormous amount of compost to act as soil. 

 

We thought long and hard about this. For one thing, we needed significant quantity. In terms of nutrients, the biggest bang for the buck is compost. However, compost is not dirt—though it will become soil in time. It’s fairly coarse. We also considered a soil/compost mix. We decided to use the compost as it was, hoping over time it will degrade sufficiently to become proper dirt. We might have to add sand or clay at point. We’re hoping not.

The tool we used was a Bobcat mini skid-steer, MT 100 which we rented for one week. Win, lose, or draw, we needed to be done one week after delivery.

 

We received the MT 100 on Friday. The plan was to take the weekend and do the rocks together. Then, during the week, I would take over and move the dirt. Our friend William (He Whose Name Must Be Praised) would come over to help on Saturday. Sunday, Wendy and I would finish the job and put mortar between any gaps where the compost might leak after a rain.

 

Before we started on Saturday, I experimented with rocks.

 

I picked what I thought was the biggest rock (a bit wider than the bucket) and moved it successfully to the corner without mishap.

 

 

Now, I was fairly confident this would work. I spent the rest of Friday moving compost into the various raised beds around the garden. I learned two things: 1) the MT 100 tore up the grass something fierce and 2) be very, very careful with the raising, lowering, and emptying of the bucket. It moves faster than you think.

 

I only slightly crunched one of the raised beds.

 

Come Saturday, we moved rocks around the main garden area to create a terraced rock wall. On Sunday, we used small rocks and mortar to complete the job.

 

 

 

All through this, I was gaining facility using the MT 100. The controls are fairly simple. The lever on the left controls the treads. Pushing directly forward has both treads going forward in unison. Pushing directly backwards has both treads going backward in unison. Moving the lever to the left or right cause a partial difference. For example, moving it to the 11 o’clock position going forward causes the left tread to retard slightly from the right causing a leftward turn. You get the idea.

 

The right lever controls the lifting arm and the motion of the bucket. Moving the lever forward causes the arm to lower. Move it backwards causes the arm to raise. Moving the lever to the left rotates the bucket up and moving the lever to the right rotates the bucket down. 

 

This is all straightforward until, of course, you get tired and a little dyslexic and rotate the bucket when you want to turn the machine or the other way. I got extremely careful moving rocks with William and Wendy in the area.

 

On Sunday, Wendy and I did most of the remaining work by hand. We didn’t use the machine much. It was all place the rocks and mortar the holes. But it was successful by the end of the weekend.

 

Now, it was up to me.

 

The MT 100 was good a moving rocks but would never equal the facility of a backhoe. Rocks sometimes had to be tilted into the bucket. Once they were dumped, they had to be situated correctly by hand. Often, the MT 100 was useful in pushing heaving things into place once they were properly oriented. But it was a clumsy process.

In the moving of dirt, the MT 100 shone. It was clearly what the unit was designed to do: pick up a scoop of something, carry it to the location, dump it in place, and (maybe) trim the location a bit. 

It took a good long while (two person-days) but that was just the time it took. In point of fact, we ran through one delivery and had to wait for a second and a third. The actual time of loading was less than the wait time. 

 

In the above pictures, you might notice two bare sections. One runs down the center of the hoop house and the other is between the far end. This was intentional The hoop house has peas growing on both sides and we decided not to put any compost in there lest we interfere with their growth. Instead, we put four buckets at the end of the hoop house to move inside by hand after the peas have finished. 

 

The other is just to define two disparate areas. There’s another hoop house to go in one section and the other will be corn, squash, and beans. 

 

The main garden was finished by Thursday afternoon. We got one more delivery on Friday morning. Four buckets ended up holding down the dirt on one end of hoop house as described before. 

 

What’s left to do is to put up the hoop house that we needed to take down for the work and restore the fencing around the whole garden. I’m writing this on Friday and we’ll do that this weekend.

 

And, here’s the finished product.

 

 

 

 

This was astonishingly straightforward and without much drama. I managed the MT 100 pretty easily despite having stitches in my left hand—another story for another day. Let’s just say be careful with your glass shower doors. They can explode. 

 

I rented the MT 100 from Koopman Lumber in North Grafton, MA. I can’t recommend them enough.

 

In point of fact, I more or less accidentally rented the MT 100 from them. I looked around several different places and most would only rent dingos to people like me. The better units (and, interestingly, better pricing) was to contractors. When I talked to Koopman I misheard the price. Better machine for the same price? Sold!

 

But TANSTAAFL. The rental price was significantly higher. That said, the MT 100 was more than twice the machine as the dingo. I don’t think the dingo could have handled those rocks. Not all who wander are lost. They may think they’re someplace they aren’t and are better for it.

 

We’re going to let the compost rest for a couple of weeks and then plant around memorial day. Then, we have to care for it. We don’t really know how water works with this stuff. When we water is it just going to go right to the bottom? Will it stay around the plant? We don’t know. Will there be enough strength in the compost to support a growing plant? We don’t know. How will the compost fare over the winter? Will it compress? Will we have to add some kind of soil to make it work better? We don’t know.

 

We’ll just have to find out.

 

However, we do know that the climate catastrophe is coming. We know it increases our allergies. We know it is causing fjord tsunamis. And we know Orange Voldemort is against any possible fix to the problem, including wind.