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Potato Patch & Container Shuffle: Rainy Day Desert Moves!

In this episode of Occupy the Land, we seize a rare cloudy, cool day (and a surprise sprinkle of rain) to push two big projects forward. Ernie digs a rodent-proof potato patch in a natural low spot that catches runoff, lining it with hardware cloth against burrowing critters and hungry bunnies whose tracks are suddenly everywhere. Meanwhile, we haul and spread gravel to firm up the “moon dust” so a professional can safely move our huge storage trailer, clearing the way to place a second shipping container and create a 30-ft covered workspace between them. With rain in the air and bunny pressure rising, we’re racing to expand both food production and workshop space on our greening Arizona desert homestead!

Transcript:

We’re going to be planting potatoes and possibly carrots. So he’s digging out a small place on the property that gets a bit of water from when it does rain here, and the soil is kind of damp, but we have to kind of dig down a bit and, put some hardware cloth over it and things like that to keep the rodents down.

So this is going to be sort of a test thing because rodents out here can vary into the soil and, and, burrow in the soil and get down in there and eat the crops and everything, and then the bunnies from the top. So we’re going to try this and see how it works. I’m also going to be doing it in a raised, I have a raised bed type of situation.

One of the washes that we have terminates about here. And then we have the road that goes to the Sam pond there. But there’s one area right here that fills up with water when it rains, because it comes down the, the road here. And this is one of the things that it fills up is right here. So this is perfect for doing potatoes.

Now you need to go down, you know, a foot or two and put a hardware cloth down and then a lot of mulch and soil and the potatoes. And we’re going to cover it with cardboard with wood chips on top of it. And this is going to be productive, I think. And we just have this one little area that always retains a lot of water.

And, you know, these, you know, plants grow. So I think this is a perfect area for doing potatoes. So that’s what we’re going to do.

What we’re doing is building up a pad over here for this moving van container, because we’re going to be moving it up and in place to put a another shipping container in place with it. So we have to build up the road here. And the pad with gravel, which has gone down the road to get today. And this is just the guy that’s coming to move this trailer is just going to get stuck.

So we’re building this up today.

So this is the moon dust you’re talking about. It’s so fine. It’s very soft and everything, but it’s terrible to drive on you. Definitely. It’s like. It’s like quicksand when you’re driving on it. So how are you gonna dump this little gravel?

And he’s going to be doing that all day today and tomorrow. We have some rain expected in the forecast, but it seems like we never get anything anyway. So today is a good day. It’s cloudy, it’s cool. It’s good to being outside.

And then once he gets all this filter out.

Yesterday, Ernie cleared this pad in preparation for moving the moving van container over here and flattened it out. Still, a lot of moon dust out here, but we came out this morning to check, and we have just looks like these bunny tracks all over the place. So we probably have a lot more bunnies and.

We thought, but I don’t see them out here. I just see the tracks all the time.

So no sooner did I get done saying we hardly ever get rain out here. And looking at the bunny tracks, we had it starting to rain a little bit. We’ll see what we get. It’s kind of nice to get a little bit of weather out here. We really need to see what this water is going to do. We pretty much already know how it’s going to flow.

We just really need a big gully washer. So.

We can really see the pattern and see how we’ve created a few more ways for it to run on the property. We want to see how that works.

Okay, we’re moving the storage trailer so that we can have 30ft between two shipping containers, and the other one will go right there. So we’re going to take this trailer and move it over to here.

So that’s what we’re doing.

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