Skylar and I finished a path in the BRC orchard that I had begun two years ago by laying down a “corduroy” of rotting beech logs. You could call it a version of a hugel-mound (aka Hügelkultur). The side-by-side logs provided the base of the path. Today we covered the logs with a layer of old hay and then covered the hay with about four inches of fresh chips from our recent chipping effort. The new path will serve a number of functions. It gives us access to several apple trees that weren’t easy to get to. It will provide those trees with soil nutrients for the next thirty or forty years. It also creates an edge at the east end of the central pond in the orchard. It’s a job I’d been scheming about doing for years and it was great to have the opportunity to do it.

The weather has been prefect for working outdoors - not as hot and lots of sun. However, it is getting dry, and we do need rain. We could use a couple inches or more.