haying

The tractor is broken again

Steve HardinLeave a comment

This morning the plan was to get Mr I Need a Belt Bad to finish the lawn and kill some more weeds in the garden. While he was doing that I was going to get some more field work done. I got him started in on the lawn and took the side by side up to spray East side of field #2. I have what I believe to be a type of hairy vetch that is proving hard to kill. Mostly because it does respond to the spray but it grows so fast that it keeps snapping back from getting sprayed! I sprayed out another 50 gallons. The grass is pretty tall in places but has not headed out yet so I think I can wait another 1-2 weeks before I cut it. Once the spray was done, I opted to grab the tractor and cut the West side of #2 for hay. I had about two acres cut and was almost done when the tractor refused to steer. I jumped down and looked at the steering mechanism. The picture shows that a cast iron piece is broken! This is a new broken piece and on the left side this time. They just fixed the right side wheel bearing last week. So the plan to turn the hay I cut yesterday is on hold. I need the tractor to work! After a brief consult with the wife where she tells me its okay to buy a new tractor. I wanted to hold out for two more years, tomorrow I will be getting quotes on a new tractor and get the broken piece overnighted so we can continue to put up hay. The real question will be can they get me a new tractor in under two weeks?

Mr I Need a Belt Bad dug thistles out of the garden then Mr Professional got him hooked up with the five gallon back sprayer and he walked along the driveway and sprayed the stray grass stalks. He did this a couple of times. Annmarie had him help her plant some new flower ground cover under the old metal harrow rake. Next week he will get to finish weeding the garden, spraying the grass in the planter garden and start weeding the flower rock garden. He is going to whip our yard into shape this summer. We got some more clover seed for him to plant on the front hillside also.

It always seems like something breaks and stops us from haying! Here is to hoping we can get it fixed quickly and not lose any hay.

Haying season has begun!

Steve Hardin1 Comment

I brought the tractor home this week from its repairs. It has the back hydraulic takeoff connectors repaired, a hydraulic leak under the tractor and the front wheel bearing seal all fixed. It is no longer pouring out oil from multiple locations on the tractor! They even power washed all the grease off of it. I wanted to drive the tractor home via the back roads and not use the trailer, it would have taken about 90 minutes to get home. Annmarie told me to just take the trailer! I would have needed a ride to drop me off and had to make a special trip to town instead of just driving the pickup to work. I used the trailer.

One of our cows had another calf so 4/6 have now had calves. Unfortunately they are taking their time. So next weekend we are going to herd them all up to the barn and sort them so the four babies can be tagged and banded. We will have to get the other two later. I don’t want to have to tag and band a 8 week old calf. Mr I Need a Belt Bad was excited to hear that we would be working cows next week, we will see how excited he is after he has to help catch and hold them down.

Mr Professional came out yesterday and got the sickle bar mower attached to the tractor. I had to work all week so no weeds got sprayed. I am on a new drug regimen for my post covid pericarditis. It is back to tearing up my gut and the constant chest pressure is starting to wear me down again. I have been instructed by multiple parties that I am to take it easy. So I have added napping to my schedule and only get to do a few light things in the morning on the days I am not working. I hate it. But I am tired and I want to get better and limiting my activities will help.

Today Mr I Need a Belt Bad came out and we set him on the yard first thing. Our front hillside has sprouted with cheat grass and it needed to be mowed. We have some clover coming in and have vowed to not use any herbicide on it in an effort to get it established. So we had him mow and bag all the cheat grass with the mower on the low setting. It did not disturb the clover and it decimated the cheat grass. He had one instruction when I set him up with the mower, do not hit the black hose connecting the sprinklers! That is actually two directives as he was instructed to mow the hillside and not hit the black pipe. I had to use a wire wheel to clean off the sickle bar mower goop so the grass slid over it and was using the grinder when he came over to tell me that he had hit the black pipe!! He had one job! I grumbled and told him to finish mowing and we would fix the pipe later. He was back five minutes later showing me a four foot chunk of pipe he hit that was not connected to anything. I had removed it a couple of weeks ago as it was not needed and had just tossed it to the side. So even though he violated the rule, no hitting of the black pipe he maintained the intent which was to not interrupt our watering capability.

He then got set up with the weed eater, a new experience for him, and yes he had goggles and hearing protection. He did not like the weed eater as much, it is heavy, you have to use a chest harness and it does wear on your arms. He ended up mowing about half the front yard and will finish the rest tomorrow. He should even have some time to work on the garden also. Mr Professional came out and pulled the hay rake out, sickle cut the orchard and worked on weeds. He is also working on getting the chain saw put back together. We need to do some creative repair to the plastic handle. I am picking up a couple of packages of JB weld to create a fix.

I mowed the hay today with the sickle mower. I got about four acres cut. I have maybe another two in one field but it can wait a week and the #1 field can wait at least another two weeks. We are going to try and spread out the cutting so we can get it baled in between and it won’t get too dry like it did last year. I suspect we will be cutting the neighbor’s field mid to late week and starting in on it also. The goal is to get 35-40 ton in the barn, shed, buildings. I still have about 12-14 large bales left over from last year. I use two per week when it is bare and no feed available. We will have to hook up the trailer to the tractor to feed out the small bales. I love the way the grass lays down when you cut it and the smell. It is very relaxing.

Back at it!

Steve HardinLeave a comment

The part came from Italy for the sickle bar mower.  Mr Professional spent most of the day on Thursday tearing it apart and I had to order more tools.  I did not have a spanner wrench.  I also did not have a large metric open end wrench over 18mm.  Since I was already ordering tools I ordered another water fire extinguisher and a new pickup tube for the water extinguisher we have and two metal tank holders.  I will mount one on the tractor and one on the side by side so we have water in case of a fire.

Friday we spent the morning pressing in new bearings and reassembling the sickle bar.  Once on, we readied the tractor for mowing.  I will mow the upper field on Saturday.  I think I can get a couple of ton out of it even after all of the flooding.

Annmarie made a Dutch baby for breakfast!  I like lemon, powdered sugar and real maple syrup on mine.  After breakfast, I grabbed my full coffee cup, full thermos and quart of water and headed out to the tractor.  I started to mow as soon as I got up in the field but I had forgotten how long it takes.  The field is seven acres and the tractor will only mow 1 acre/hr, that is a lot of circles.  I started to fall asleep while going down the rows, I am sure the neighbors thought I was drunk.  My lines were all off.  I started to subdivide the field into smaller pieces so it would feel  like I was making progress.  The hawks were amazing.  I tried to get a picture of them but I am not sure I succeeded.

After seven hours I was wishing I had two more thermos of coffee.  The doe and her twin fawns kept running around the fields.  I drove back by the blackberries to see if they were ready.  Turns out the first batch of berries are ready to pick.  I have a friend who offered to trade huckleberries for blackberries, not a 1:1.

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I will turn the hay in a few days and bale it in the morning.  It makes nicer bales when you do it first thing in the morning.  These will go in the barn.  I have 6 ton of small bales to pickup and I have 40 ton of large bales still to pickup.  I need to do that this month.

 

 

Mechanic I am not

Steve Hardin2 Comments

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Since I was stuck home due to the quarantine and felt great finally, I decided to get some more farm work done.  The upper three fields need to be cut so they can be turned into hay.  The Upper Prime Squared field is going on its third year as a grass field and it looks great!  It is the best field we have and one I am aspiring to get the others to duplicate.   So I opted to start on it.  The real problem is it is still covered in some flood damage and I was unable to get it all cleaned up.  When I was using the sickle bar to cut the hay I kept running into the dirt/grass piles and it did not like this.  I had broken all three of my spare bolts when I realized I had only managed to cut 2/3 of the first field.  I spent an hour on the phone with the micro hay equipment company.  They did not have any of the needed bolts or parts.  The arm that had some cracked bearing casings had to come from Italy.  He did not know of anyone else that had broken theirs in the past so it was not on hand in the parts warehouse.  He is supposed to be getting me a quote from the Italian company.  I am starting to get desperate enough to look on Italian websites for the company and purchase my own spare parts cabinet.  I am just trying to figure out how to do it.  This may come as a necessary evil.  If anyone knows someone who can read Italian and knows about micro hay equipment, give me a holler.

So I am still on the hunt for 3-4 metal cabinets, one for herbicides, one for oil products, two for spare parts for the haying equipment.  I need to get organized.  I could not cut any more hay so I developed a plan for Annmarie to pick me up some bolts and nuts that I can weld a slant onto then grind them to some semblance of a cone.  Mind you I only have access to a wire fed welder and I never got to practice with a wire fed in my welding class, that was the next class.   Of course that night it rained 3/100 of an inch, me cutting hay so far this year has 100% rain predictability.

 

On Friday, I spent two hours welding and I use that term very loosely an approximation of a cone.  On half of them I welded directly next to bolt head and on the other half I sandwiched two bolt heads together and welded a small bead around the second nut.  I then ground all eight down to form a cone.  To get it to fit inside the hole I had to take some of the protective pieces off of the sickle bar.  I then had to figure out how to use an easy out to remove the broken bolt.  This  went on and on and on for a total of seven hours before I finally got it all back together.  It got greased very well, two zerks are missing and need to be replaced, I ordered them the day before from parts warehouse.  I started it up but there was still this weird clanging.  I went out and finished the last 1/3 of the field and made it one time around the second field before it broke again, 2 hours of run time only.  The arm part now has a deformed head and bearing which means I need a new part.  I am not a gracious mechanic.  There were lots of explicatives used throughout the day and some blood letting.  No more hay gets cut until I get a new part.

It was getting dark anyways.

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Scaring away rock chucks

Steve HardinLeave a comment

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Mr Professional came out to the house and picked up bales of hay from the orchard and drove the trailer over to the barn.  He has been working on another project in town that Annmarie asked him to do so his time on the farm has been limited.

On Thursday, Annmarie spotted TWO rock chucks down in the ram pasture and went out the front door with the 22 rifle.  She flung lead at them and they got away.  I saw this all from the living room window.  Without a carcass she gets no kill credit.  She even admitted she missed.

Friday morning, Annmarie’s spotted another two rock chucks and went outside and started flinging lead again.  Again, they both got away.  I was not home at the time but she told me about it.

I had gone out to barn to move the hay inside off of the trailer.  It was a mere 98 degrees F and I did bring some water.  There were 60 bales to go in from the orchard haying (1.25 ton) and someone had to do it.  I got them all in the barn and stacked.  I needed the trailer cleared off so I could go and see if the metal scrapyard had any panels or culvert for me.  I found some amazing panels but the owner was taking them home and I did find a piece of 4’ culvert hidden in the back corner inside a piece of 6’ culvert. I will come back in a few weeks after I gets some more haying done and have them pull it out and cut it down to 16’ long.  I decided to go with a longer culvert.  The gate is 16’ wide and that would allow any size truck to cross.  I am going to use Rasta blocks and install a concrete wall on both sides of the culvert so it can withstand the water cresting it if needed.  On a plus side, I did not pickup any scrap metal and they gave me a sold recommendation for a portable welder.  I will be buying a Miller Multimatic 200 and using flux core wire.  I have been shopping around looking at prices but it looks like $2200 is the price I am going to have to pay. This is less than the allotted $3k I had set aside for this needed purchase.  It will even work off of my generator and will do 110/220v power supply.  This was a major tip and I am grateful for it.  I will be converting my old small pickup bed trailer to a welding trailer and mounting the cutting torch and welder and generator on it all so I can just hook up and go!

I was dragging after unloading the hay in the heat, tired, did not feel good, so after my shower I am upstairs dressing and Annmarie started shooting again at rock chucks!  At her opportunity rate I am going to have to increase my accuracy to offset it.  She shot at two more rock chucks.  I am thinking its the same two she always shoots at.  She now has to sneak out the back door as they will run away if you use the front door.  Friday morning I had removed the screen from our bedroom closet window so I could get a shot off if needed.  It doesn’t show the whole ram pasture but I can see  the hillside.  I spotted a rock chuck running up the hill and got off two shots.  We both missed.  My plan is to now just use the upstairs window when I want to shoot at the rock-chucks.

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This is my view from the upstairs bedroom closet!  I have a decent field of fire if they run for the upper rock pile.
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