Hog Fuel & the Dingo

A few weeks ago we had 20+ cubic yards of "hog fuel" delivered in the form of a gigantic pile in our front yard. Hog fuel, for those of you who don't know (I didn't) consists of shredded trees, shrubs, stumps, yard waste, and the like. It's MUCH cheaper than wood chips, and also much dirtier & irregularly sized and shaped. It's commonly used by farmers to fill in a wet corner of a pasture or as bedding material for dairy cows. This is what the pile looked like this morning:
That machine parked in front of the pile is a Toro "Dingo", which I rented for the weekend from Hardware Sales. It was a pretty impressive little machine, really fun to operate once I got the hang of it. Here Tombi and Moira watch as I back away from the pile with a full bucket...
Gabe & Cynthia really helped a lot too, pushing wheelbarrow loads (the dingo fills the wheelbarrow fast!) in addition to the Dingo-loads out to the various dumping sites and raking out the hog fuel once it had been dumped. We got a nice early start in the morning, and worked until about 10 am while Cary & his brother Eric fixed us all a delicious pancake breakfast! :)

It took a lot of trips with the machine & the wheelbarrrows to move all that material and spread it around where we wanted it. The finished product looks pretty spectacular, as Kess models below:
That's the path through the bushes from the parking pasture above. Below is the new & improved rope swing landing area, complete with a path leading up to it.
It finally decided to start to rain, so we called it a day at about 4:30 pm with the pile reduced to a mere sliver of it's former self. Tomorrow, assuming we're not all too hungover after the bachelor & bachelorette parties tonight, we'll quicky finish it off.
All in all, a good day's work! I'm pretty impressed with the Dingo. It's a really odd machine, not like any other I have operated, but it really made this job go a LOT faster than it would have with shovels & wheelbarrows alone. All the extra labor by people who thought they were just coming up for a party weekend didn't hurt either! :)