Yeah, Oregon is Wet...

We knew the rain would make a mess of the area in front of the new shop. Look at this! The construction trucks had been driving on the old 'garden' area for almost the entire Summer... no problems with that, the soil is mostly clay and when it is dry is really solid. Like bricks, almost.

However, add water to clay... and you get SOUP! We really needed some gravel so the trucks could turn around and we could drive reasonably close to the house. Not to mention walking across the yard! I really don't like getting several inches taller (mud on the boots) every time I go out to the car to go to town. What a mess.

Henry leveled the area with the tractor after the first rains, but we really needed some gravel. Lots of it, and FAST! Henry called Steve, the gravel guy, and we got 7 truckloads of 3" rock... unfortunately there had been three more days of rain before Steve got to us (more than one person had the wet-weather-blues I guess!) It was raining pretty hard the day Steve came to deliver the rock. With all the mud, Steve couldn't dump-spread it... he had to put most of the rock into piles for Henry to move later.

Here is Henry moving some of the rock with the tractor... still a pretty heavy weight for the wet soil, but we needed some of the rock spread out or we risked getting stuck in the mud. We are supposed to get four days without rain now, and it should dry up enough that Henry can move more of the gravel around, and Jim can finish putting the siding on the tractor shed.