Hello from the farm,
I thought I'd share a picture of my latest masterpiece. This is what happens when you give me Google Earth Pro, thousands of Christmas trees and far too much enthusiasm. I didn't even need Darryl this time - my computer can accurately scale the plantation plan and overlay it directly onto Google Earth for me.
You may reasonably ask what qualifies us to become Christmas tree farmers. Well, Mark and I are both viticulturists (horticulturists who specialise in grapevines), which I believe makes us perfectly qualified to plant Christmas trees and drink wine while we wait for them to grow.
So, back to my plan. At one point I thought, I'll just move those 200 trees over there. Ive only changed the row spacing approximately one million times. But it's considerably more fun than designing vineyard irrigation systems and calculating flow rates and pipe pressures. Remember all that calculus at school and wondering when on earth we'd ever use it? Turns out the answer was: when we became vignerons.
Anyway, back to the Christmas trees. We now have a very neat, colour-coded plan. The little gap in the middle will become our nursery area for the potted trees. One day, all those tiny green icons on my computer will be actual Christmas trees. Families will come to the farm, wander through the rows and agree on the perfect tree and take it home for Christmas.
But first, we have to turn all those little icons into actual holes and wait for our Pottiputki to turn up.
