Three Cheers for ERCA!

ERCA was here! ERCA was here!

They came Tuesday while Sherry was off work (Tuesdays are the new Saturdays for her). And they went to work and planted over 1000 trees. It was pretty cool to watch (although it was a lot more low-tech than I was led to believe).

The Kubota that had the planting platform on it was gorgeous and I had tractor-envy like you wouldn't believe (a year ago even *I* wouldn't have believed it!) and it was attached to a simple platform that had one disk that would open the ground and then seats for two people to sit behind the plow with trees stored in the baskets. They would plunk the little tree into the ground and a pair of wheels would close the dirt in behind them.

Rob drove the tractor and two young ladies sat in the seats to plant the trees – I didn't get their names, but you can see them in the photos.

After they had plowed around for a couple of hours they wrapped up and took their lovely tractor home with them (I asked twice, really nicely for them to just leave it here with the keys in the ignition, but they weren't as nice as they had seemed originally).

We walked through the fields and straightened some of the trees and I had to be careful where I walked – some of the trees really, honestly look like little sticks that someone broke off a branch of a tree and just jammed into the ground. Very little to look at right now. Hard to imagine that little stick will turn into a mighty hardwood tree. (You can see one of the trees in the foreground of the photo to the right – it's leaning a little to the right in the lower right of the photo – there's another one about 1/3 of the way down the photo – squint – that's what I have to do in real life to see them too…)

I guess we'll just need to wait a dozen years or so to see the tree that it should become. It's a good thing that I'm a patient kinda guy!

In other news I'm working with Google to come up with an adwords campaign where I pay for people to click on my ad. (Here's where I'm going to do a little teaching – just for a second – if you're reading this Blog on the internet and you use Google to find it each time – there are two types of listings for my site – paid and free. It would be really nice if you could use the free one instead of me having to pay Google $0.75 each time you click on my ad! Thanks!)

Whohoo!

With my hardwood forest (in 20 years) I know that a stroll to the campground is Bound To Please!