We bought an electric golf cart.

May 23rd, 2008, 10:16 am Josh Houghtelin Home

Zippy and I have been looking for the right deal on a golf cart since we moved into the sticks. We finally found the deal we were looking for. We purchased a used 2000 Yamaha G16 Electric Golf Cart w/charger.

We have a ton of landscaping, trail blazing, planting & tending to do over a good amount of space. We figured an electric golf cart would be the perfect tool for moving people, tools, and supplies around the property. The two straps on the back of the golf cart normally used for holding two golf club bags work great for carting around all our garden & landscaping tools.

We have been working on a few nice walking / cart trails that go pretty much everywhere. We even borrowed the neighbors bobcat loader to get a lot of the hard earth moving done. Cutting nice wide walking trails through steep hills of rock and clay is a a bit difficult to say the least. But the feeling of accomplishment and knowing we made what we have makes it well worth it. Now we have nice trails leading around the pond, horse pasture, and a good start on a trail going back through the hills down to the water. It’s definitely time consuming and seems like we’ve barely started but it will be well worth it when we are done.

How we are building trials:

1. Build Culverts - Since we have lots of hills and tend to get crazy amounts of rain when it falls I have a relatively labor intensive method of creating inexpensive culverts so water doesn’t destroy the paths
   1. Dig out & flatten the existing ravine a little bit
   2. Bolt two (or three) used/waste car tires together and place them on one hill/edge of the ravine & do the same on the other side
   3. Place one or two pieces of field tile, PVC drainage pipe, or metal culvert at the lowest point in the ravine. There will be a set of tires bolted together on both sides of the field tile.
   4. Pack the tires with earth to create a rammed earth brick just as they use in Earthship home construction. [video] This is the hardest part because the tires have to be rammed completely full of dirt so they retain their shape. This protects the field tile from being crushed if you drive a vehicle over it and also acts as a dam since the tires are nearly void of any weakness to erosion.
   5. Cover the tires and culvert with as much dirt as necessary to build the makeshift bridge as level as possible to the ground surrounding it using dirt cut from the side walls of the ravine if nothing else. We generally take dirt from another hill.
2. Make the Trail - Level off the ground through the whole trail as much as possible with the loader/Bobcat. It can take a while to break up and/or move all the big rocks we’ve run into but this is where the trails really start to come together. All the big hills, bumps, and ravines have been leveled off. In some spots, such as the edge of a hill that goes down to the lake, we can’t (or don’t want to) drive the bobcat in fear of getting it stuck, rolling it, or otherwise damaging it so I have a pickaxe, shovels, hoes, rakes & a bunch of other tools for manually tearing into the side of a hill and leveling off a flat surface for a trail.
3. Smooth it out - The bobcat does a great job of tearing through hills, flattening bumps and building culverts but doesn’t quite leave a perfectly smooth finish on the hard clay ground we have here. For this step I use a hoe & a rake to rough up the ground a little bit and smooth everything out as best I can.
4. Grass! - Zippy and I want the trails to blend back in with the rest of the yard and landscape so we are re-seeding it with grass. This should also help prevent erosion when our torrential rain comes. To get started I Just bought a 50lb bag of tall fescue, spread it around with a walk behind spreader & covered it with loose hay. Since our ground is mostly clay I try and loosen it up a little if I can with a rake before throwing the seed on it. In less than a couple months we should see some good results.

I will try & remember to get some pictures & video of the trail building progress thus far this weekend. We have a lot of work left to do as we want trails down the ridge of the hills in our back yard, between the hills down to the boat dock & a connecting path that goes around the far side of the horse pasture along their fence.