Just wait a couple more years for Poncirus plus to be bred with the cold hardiest kumquats, satsumas, and mandarins, it’s finally a trifoliate without the resin
Many of these crosses are likely to be Z7 hardy and tasty
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Looking for more steel 2 3/8" now to finish the fence
Located my steel and cleared what i needed to for fencing. I might add an acre or two of concords there. The first step is to finish the fence. Fencing has been a 2 year project. It was hard to find the materials and dig safe would not mark some of the lines. Nobody really knows where all the lines are. I told the guys working for me to spend extra and take the trees down with shears instead of a dozer to make sure we dont hit any lines.
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I can tell you that you’ve got fiber optics under there! 
I know how that goes, and it can be so frustrating. The county did come out and mark where they thought the water line was, but I had specifically asked that the technician give the rough depth below the soil line. After calling the county they said that they are not willing to do that since they don’t want to be held liable if it isn’t as deep at they indicated. I got to “pothole” (dig multiple depth locating holes all along the ~338 foot frontage) and determined that I had no cause for concern with the project at hand.
The “call before you dig” standard operating procedure in this area is generally something along the lines of “if the entity doesn’t mark anything in [X timeframe] then it means that they don’t have anything in that area for you to be concerned.”
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We know what is down there which is why i said shear the trees off ground level and dont dig them out. The guys had to find a shear but they did tell me they knew it was the right thing to do after i brought it up. The water company said straight out they have no idea where the water line is. We all know its down there and nobody knows exactly where. I do recognize the fiber but the company that put it there is out of business and bought out. Nobody knows much more than that. My bulldozer guy called them 3 times and they never marked any of it. Sometimes that is the best we can get.
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I’m adding another 5 acre track onto the 60 acres i already purchased in this project. More information to come about what i have planned.
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This is an extremely common scenario for buried utilities. I sometimes have to locate pipelines as an incidental part of my job and it’s amazing how often the pipeline companies don’t have any type of original design or documentation of where things were constructed. Add to that the fact that burial depth can and does change more often than you might think. The surface of the ground is always changing, especially where people and rivers are involved.
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My project continues to grow in size rather than nearing completion. Prices are dropping on building materials and that may work to my advantage.
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Im adding another 5 acre parcel on my project. In the spring i plan to plant 50 plants of concord grapes on the hillside i cleared. 300 pears in the bottom ground on the 5 acres im purchasing. Next year in 2026 or spring 2027 i hope to add autumn olives , persimmons, and pawpaws. We are still building fence. 55 acres is plenty of new land.
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just did some irrigation yesterday. my hose is on the wrong side of the house for my veggie garden so i made hose attchments on each side of my house. next year the plan is to put in drip irrigation to the beds, but i want to make sure i like their location first 
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The 5 acres is taking time to close. The fence project is still a work in progress.
Don’t let anybody convince you that a geothermal greenhouse is easy.
We made it this far this season (doing the work ourselves, which is probably clear by how crooked our block retaining wall is, haha).
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Looks great to me it doesn’t need to be any otheer way than how it is. Lookss like you made a greeat start on it.
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Thanks! It snowed today, but if the ground doesn’t freeze solid this week, we may be able to dig the posts for the frame before true winter.
Next year- work to be Iowa’s biggest source of bananas, haha.
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Closing on another 5 acres now which is around $4000-5000 an acre.
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Thankfully steel is inexpensive. The price may not look cheap , that is as good as it gets in recent years.
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Steel keeps dropping and there is tons of it coming out of KC Missouri
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Steel prices and gasoline prices continue to favor me thankfully . I missed these posts by minutes but got the wire for $199 a roll for 10 rolls + discount. That wire is strong stuff!
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Gorgeous!
But I’d have to vastly junk it up with fruit trees every few yards.
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Years ago, I gave away +/- 50 T posts. I had planted my orchard and didn’t want to bother with them. Same with fencing, gave it all away. Years passed and I needed to buy it all back plus more to replace the bad trees in the orchard. I gotta go out any buy more this season. I learned you are never done.
This was how I started with fencing in 2008, the deer just pushed it over.
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