Six hundred as a number does not sound that bad. It could be a reasonable enough mortgage or car payment, a nice windfall if it is dollar bills but not so great an amount if you are talking about pennies. Picking up and moving six hundred of anything can be work, but add to that moving, drilling, then moving again, inoculating and moving again, waxing and moving again. Two last moves into the wagon and then into their waiting stacks. All of this makes 600 almost an insermountable number. Especially when the big event is over and you are back to being just three working together to get the rest done.
Saturday, May 4 was really a nice day. We got a break in the rain and the sun was actually going to shine a bit. Ron and Jo were out on Tiny House Farm early getting final set up completed. I was doing the usual last minute coffee and donut run before I headed out. Learning from last year and having our sheds on site, we were able to haul some of our supplies out the day before. And I was not going to repeat the charcoaled sausage biscuits. This time each piece was heated up separately and it worked a treat. We pre-grilled the hotdogs and hamburgers too. I stuffed them all into a cooler lined with towels and then used Sterno fuel to keep them piping hot until lunch time. That really worked too. Made it much easier to bring the food out and have everyone eat and then jump right back into work.
Our crew this year was again a combination of seasoned and newbie workers. We had Josi, Lynne, Jenn, Don and John back again as the backbone of our day. Lynne did us a solid by bringing two others with her; Pam and her son, Tom. Lynne’s son Karl and his friend Max came too and spent their time taking pictures and video of the process.
Ron was in his glory as he truly loves sharing knowledge with others. But he was even happier to find out that one of our new workers, Terri has been growing microgreens and was more than happy to talk with him about it. If it wasn’t for the work we had to get done, he would have spent the entire time talking with her about his new favorite subject. He soaks up knowledge every chance he can from any source he can find. People with experience are his favorite source.
Once the safety briefing was over and everyone had themselves a sausage biscuit, we jumped into the work process. There were a lot of logs to get done. I know I have said that before, but it was so true. Rich and Mike Davis took to the drilling right away and that freed Ron up to do the log runs across the steam and down to our south end. Jo, Don Josi and I showed the newbies how the other jobs needed to be done and we got started. We made sure that everyone took a turn at each job and the logs worked their way through the work tent and into the trailer.
We broke for a quick lunch of hotdogs or burgers and got back to work. Over the course of the day, we slowly lost our workers. By 5 pm it was just Ron, Jo and me and we were totally beat. A serious dent had been made in our log stacks, but we still had more than half of them left to get done. The three of us slowly made our way up to the road for the trip home. Me, I was walking very slowly. I had made a huge mistake by wearing my rubber boots for the entire day. They have no support in them and I paid the price.
Ron and I headed back to THF on Sunday. Jo, lucky girl was at work so she missed out on this second day. I made sure to bring my old sneakers with us. No more wearing those boots all day for me. We were just going to get done what we could between the two of us. Ron thought it would be a great idea to show me how to do the drilling. Turns out I am not good at that job. It was easier on my nerves to have Ron do that part of the job. Once he had a stack done, we both inoculated and then waxed logs. We stayed again until about 5 pm and then dragged ourselves back to the road and drove home. Thank goodness we still had hotdogs in the frig that we just needed to reheat.
With more logs still to get done, we made the decision try and get some done after work during the week. Those shifts were really hard. I was the last one home from work at 4 pm and we didn’t get out to the farm until 4:30. We could only work until 7:30 or so and we had to get home and get some sleep. The weather got in our way too. As did other farm projects. We still had our lavender to get planted. That is another story.
The weather was warming up and it probably was a good thing that it was usually only the three of us working in the tent. As the day went along, it got warmer and warmer. We were lucky with the breeze that blew through every so often. The heat made the work harder and we seemed to move slowly through the work. But we kept at it, slogging our way through the stacks of logs.
We learned a few new tricks to get the logs inoculated. Getting the blasted things to stop rolling around was always the hardest part of this process. Ron was good enough at the drilling to hold each log with one hand and drill with the other. While waxing you could also hold the log still and dab the wax with the other. But inoculating; you needed both hands on the plunger. Most of us don’t have a third hand to hold the log still. Jo started bracing one end actually against the wheels and that work pretty well for the most difficult logs.
It was long, tiring job but finally, finally on May 25th we were done with the last log.
An lovely empty space is all that remains now that all the logs safely across the stream and busy getting ready to give us shiitakes next year.
We have learned more this year. No more batches of 600 logs for sure. That really is too much. Especially if we have only one day for our shiitake event. Next year we are either going to plan for two days of volunteers, all in one weekend or over two weekends. Or we will have do some serious prep work before hand. It might end up being a combination of the two. We cannot really have a lot more workers on site at the same time. Our tent isn’t that big and we don’t want to have them off doing something just for the sake of keeping busy. They are coming to learn how this process works, not pick up rocks or to do some weeding in our three acre field. Those might make other really fun work events though. Something to keep in mind I think.