Trip to North Carolina NATGA

Just sent off our payment for the NATGA meeting for January 16th and booked our hotel at the Hawthorne Inn in Winston-Salem NC. It is a little over 1000 miles from Des Moines IA and should take us between 14-16 hours to drive. Gas for the trip there and back should cost us about $350. (Map provided by Microsoft Bing)

We had considered flying commercial but the tickets would have cost anywhere from $800-$1000 for the two of to fly out. I also looked into flying our plane down but gas for the trip would have been between $600-$800. Not to mention the weather is not normally all that good for flying VFR this time of the year. Thought the flight time in our little Cessna 172 would have been about 7 hours, the cost and weather sealed the deal for us. We are road tripping!

Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

http://www.trufflegrowers.com/

Clearing the land

My wife and I spent our Thanksgiving weekend clearing brush and trees around the perimeter of our plantation. It was a lot of work but it was quite rewarding to see how much more room we now have. We are planning on clearing even more junk trees giving us more plantable area. Check back for some updated pictures of the area.

This afternoon I will be collecting soil samples to have sent off for testing by our friends in North Carolina. I can hardly wait to see what the results will be. The cold weather will start setting in this week so we are running out of time to do much more this year. We have also started to work on a design for the land to give it better drainage and hope to get started in the spring 2010.

I have been in touch with some local providers of lime and waiting on quotes for application costs. Our soil has a natural high pH 7.3 - 7.6 so we are hoping we will not need to add too much lime.

I have also prices out some irrigation supplies and it looks like we should be able to get everything we need for under $1000 if we bought a supply tank. If I am able to get to some water unground to pump up, we might be able to setup our irrigation for as little as $300!