Construction continues at 63P. Or should I say deconstruction. It was time to start hauling out the loads and loads (and loads) of stored pallet wood from the plot. For this I needed help. Morgan decided to lend her efforts towards the ordeal, as well as her mom, Rosalie. We had quite a tall task ahead of us to take advantage of this oh-so-sweet pleasant weather window. Rosalie brought us sandwiches to power-up our muscles. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of our lunch break so Rosalie only gets a textual shout-out, but below is Morgan scanning the plot and all it’s wood, probably ruminating on what the hell she signed up for.
The goal was to remove all of the extra wood from the plot. I’d venture to say there were hundreds of pounds of pallet wood, mostly all of it in decay and unusable after who knows how long it had been sitting there in storage. The ‘Mansion’ bed was made out of this wood, so whoever the previous 63P owner was had oodles of access to this kind of wood and took advantage of it to build the Mansion. Up close, the Mansion is quite impressive with how much pallet wood was used in it’s construction, irregardless of it’s current condition (a.k.a. mehh condition).
Now is a good time to point out where exactly plot 63P is in relation to the rest of the garden…
The plan was to haul all the extra decaying wood out of plot and dump it at the edge of the parking lot, where I had a u-haul truck reservation scheduled the following morning to haul it to the dump. On a day like this, I severely envied plots 13P-16P, where fantasies ran rampant of chucking wood over a gate and being done with it. However, we had to make looooooooong trips, sometimes one heavy board at a time to drop in the parking lot’s “dump zone”. Oh, I should mention that the garden is sloped, so every piece of wood had to be carried away uphill to the parking lot. Aside from throwing in a description of blizzard-like conditions, I’m starting to sound like my grandparents describing their commute to school.
Enter: Scott.
Throughout the day, there was another gentleman roaming about the garden busy pruning all of the grapevines (see grapes in the above map). He is one of the garden’s grapevine masters, responsible for maintaining their condition. He couldn’t help but notice what we were doing so we got to talking. Now Scott, being such a swell guy who doesn’t like to see material go to waste, decided to inspect what we were hauling away in hopes of finding a use for some of it.
One thing he found that he apparently didn’t want, although I’m not sure why, was a good ol’-fashioned abandoned rat’s nest.
Holy smokes! While not at all something I wanted to see, at least this rotting pallet wood was useful for SOMEthing. I’m trying to be glass-half-full here, ok? I was informed that rats have historically roamed these here parts of the garden. My eyes narrowed into slits when I heard this. I sense a war coming. However not today.
After inspection, Scott told me that since most of this wood was not pressure treated, it could potentially be useful to other gardeners, including himself. He started redirecting our parking lot dump travel plans towards other areas of the garden.
“Take a few of these 2x12s over to the grape vine trellis. We could use those for supports”.
“Take anything that breaks apart over to the raspberry canes. They love rotting wood”.
This was music to my ears, as the more wood we dropped elsewhere, the less wood I’d have to haul to the dump the next morning. He even said he’d take a few pieces in his truck to take home. Scott the Savior!
In total, after about 4 hours of work, this is a general glimpse of what we were able to haul out of 63P.
Now here’s the tricky part. After corresponding with the garden manager, she said that we could not dump wood outside of the plot (like we did above). The official reason is that they do not want to encourage behaviors or give ideas that this is a dumping ground. This is why I rented a u-haul truck for the following morning to finish the task of hauling it away.
Savior Scott struck again.
“Eh, just leave it”, he said. “I’ll put the word out to others that there’s free wood”.
“What about the garden manager?” I replied.
“I’ll talk to her.”
What a swell guy. I helped him load up a few boards into his already jammed-packed-with-garden-supplies pickup truck as he was gearing up to leave.
“Did you hear about that fin whale that washed up on the Oregon shore recently?” he said.
I told him I did hear about it.
“Apparently Native American tribes were granted rights to harvest parts of the whale for their use.”
He pointed out at plot 63P. “That’s our fin whale.”
He hopped into his truck and vanished, like a gard-en/ian angel into the sun-kissed sky. I almost shed a tear in that moment, but then I remembered I lack emotions and snapped back to reality.
In total, it was a great day out on the plot. With the help of many parties, we managed to haul all the existing decaying wood out of the plot. This unlocked my ability to continue mulching the ground and carry on with more raised bed repairs. As for what happens to the dumped wood, it could either disappear and be drama-free, or the garden manager could lock me in the shed to serve in garden jail for the sins I have committed. Only time will tell. What I do know however is that the facelifting journey of 63P is now officially in full force.
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