In the spring, I will be growing food behind Scottish Bakehouse in Vineyard Haven, one woman on the little farm-ette. This week we finally broke ground of the deer fencing, and as the posts line up like wooden soldiers along the drive it’s hitting me – this whole thing is real, real, real.

I’ve been so lucky to have the support of other local farmers in starting this project. One farmer I used to work for allowed me to make a trip with his dump truck up to Wellscroft Fencing in New Hampshire to pick up the order, saving us hundreds of dollars in freight charges. Another allowed us to use his tractor for two days to pull brush and till the field. A tractor is no trivial loan – on most farms, it’s the backbone of cultivation, and to risk sending it down the road to benefit a friend is a big deal.

Finally, I’m working on the project with a good friend who’s put up high-tensile fencing before. He’s also knowledgeable and patient enough to let me do some of the tractor work. My feelings toward the mechanical beast are evolving. While they may be expensive gas-guzzling breakage prone prima donnas, it was so incredibly fast and satisfying to clip around the field pulling out large shrubs with the front bucket. Zip, zip, zip.

We were finally able to get our hands on a mechanized auger this afternoon and will hopefully have all the posts in the ground and most of them tamped by the end of the day tomorrow. After fixating for so long on having a place to grow things my way, it is awesome but also vaguely terrifying to watch the infrastructure go up and realize it’s happening. It’s actually really happening.