Hey guys! Brian and Terry here with another installment in our Forest to Farm series here on Survival Dispatch. Today we are going to be working on the topsoil where our houses are going. We’ve both been in construction most of our lives and there is a recurring theme when it comes to construction sites…the topsoil gets destroyed. As soon as you bring in heavy equipment or lot of deliveries, your topsoil will disappear.
A mini excavator isn’t the ideal tool for this job, but it worked out pretty well. I lowered the blade on it to the level I wanted to scrape. I would push as far as I could and create a pile. Terry would be running around in the skid steer scraping and moving soil as well. Once I got a nice pile going, he would come over, scoop up what I had piled up, and then add it to our growing pile off to the side. It turned out to be a very efficient process and we really accomplished a lot in the time we had left on the machines.
By doing this, we are conserving out fertile soil that has been forest for as long as anyone knows (we know for at least 300 years). Once we get our houses finished, we will bring the topsoil back in and grade it as we need to finish out the area nicely. This will save us a ton of money in the long run.
We hope you enjoyed today’s post and found it helpful if you are going to be attempting something like this. Be sure to check back often as we move forward with our homestead project. Next time we will be looking at removing some giant stumps from our property. Thanks for stopping by!