Much of the repairs at the farm have been done the hard, traditional way. By hand, with shovels and saws and axes and clippers and so on. And we’ve done it by ourselves, because we want to really put our hands on the work, and because we’re cheapskates. But occassionally, just occassionally, we’ve needed to call in outside expertise, like the tree surgeon who we consulted on cutting back the mulberry and taller trees, or the specialists who rebuilt the storage building and outhouse roofs.

And sometimes we need big machinery, like this excavator a friend trundled over from his nearby property for a morning’s work. Having been such virtuous smarties to pull down all the fencing in the front grove by ourselves, we were stuck with the huge concrete blocks under the gate posts. That was too big a job, so we called for help getting them out because we weren’t prepared to cover it with dirt and pretend it wasn’t there.