John Deere tractor

Last of purchased hay

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Saturday was a good day. I had Bubba helping me and we went and picked up the last load of purchased hay first thing. I was a about 30 minutes late picking him up and just told his mother I was on farmer time! This is a real thing! Serious! There are times you just need to get a job done and are sure it will only take another 15 minutes to complete so you tell the wife you are headed in. 90 minutes later, two phone calls and you only give up to come inside because it is getting dark. I would like to say this doesn’t happen very often but that would be a lie. I can easily get sucked into something and just want to get it done! It is immaterial that the project will take three weeks to complete. I have set a goal for work to be completed at this time and must finish.

So Bubba and I hand loaded the last 2.5 tons onto the trailer and came home and unloaded it into the barn. It was a lot easier to put onto the trailer than it was to stack it up on top of the hay pile. The easy portion of unloading is the bottom three levels of bales, after that it is all work. Hay elevator next year! As I was explaining to Bubba how next year we would be storing round bales it occurred to me that I need to put some rails on the inside of the barn so the bales don’t push on the siding and I may even need to put a cable tightener at the top of the barn to keep it from spreading out from the pressure of all that hay. One more thing to do in the Spring of next year. This came to me as an epiphany while waving my hands in the air and talking. This is good, I can plan ahead and have things ready.

After we stacked it all Bubba took a lunch. I drank water and thought about the next task we were going to do. In all reality, I was resting in the shade, but saying you are planning sounds better. You cannot let them sense weakness, teenagers will exploit it.

Before I could show Bubba how to pick up rocks we needed to empty out the rest of the tractor bucket. We set two more posts for the Bull enclosure and then I had him drive the mistress. I walked alongside giving him pointers. Most of the rocks are going to come from the back hillside. I only have about three buckets worth laying around the barn lot. So Bubba needs to know how to safely pick rocks from the hillside. There is a technique to this as the tractor is small and can easily get over balanced. He is to go straight up and back down the hillside once loaded. This allows you to keep the bucket low to the ground and drop it on the ground if tractor tires start lifting off the ground. He must always wear the seatbelt. He is good at this already. It is a must and something that I harp on everyone about. I wear it faithfully. He can loosen the rocks out of the ground with the front bucket but he has to hand load each and every rock. I don’t think he expected it. I suspect he thought he could scoop them up like gravel from the pile. So he hopped off the mistress and we started to load the bucket. Next thing I know he is screaming “snake!” He landed five feet away with a panicked expression on his face. I asked where and started to dig around in the grass to see it. I pointed out that he was getting rocks from a rocky hot hillside and he was going to find lots of snakes. If he doesn’t bother them, they won’t bother him. We got back to work. He managed to back down and got stuck in the dry creek bed. He had popped the mistress out of four wheel drive. When you have that much weight in the bucket you need four wheel drive and positrack to get over slippery surfaces. He was able to drop the rock load into the first rock crib and then I turned him loose. There are five rock cribs to fill currently and each one will take a minimum of two hours each.

After getting cleaned up Annmarie and I headed into town to get me new work boots. One of the local stores has a one day sale and clothing and shoes are 20% off so I try and buy foot wear on this day. I had spotted an add for an estate sale on facebook during Bubba’s lunch time and it was on the way to town so I asked the wife if she was interested in stopping. She was game, we like to do these but most of them are not true estate sales, just glorified yard sales. We like to yard sale but usually on days where we can visit 10+ sales in a single day. I had seen the signs for this sale on Friday while doing the supply run but had not stopped. Big mistake! It was a true liquidation of everything from a man over 90 years old. There was still a lot of stuff left and we went on day three. We found a few odds and ends but the real find was a DOG TAG MACHINE from World War 2! The thing is a beast and weighs around 250#. I just kept coming back to it and finally made the best offer of the day for it. A couple of people were holding out and hoping that no one would want it. I spotted one of these years ago and coveted it then but it was really expensive. They go for $500-1000 depending on how old they are. Most of the ones I have seen are not this old. Once I get it into the house and onto the breeze porch I will start cleaning it up. The thing is sold metal and just has surface rust. Its a light coating from being stored outside in a shed. I will get that cleaned off and lube the machine up with some WD-40 and I will be set! Annmarie asked me what I was going to do with it. I am gonna make tags! I have no idea what for but I am gonna make some. I hunted around and finally found blank tags for 18 cents a piece if I buy 1000. It seems like a nice round number. I figure it will take me 50-100 tags just to get it right and see how many lines I can put on the dog tag. I need to create a postcard with information on the machine and process so I can include it with any tags made. I am pretty stoked about this find! Now I just need two more hardy souls to help me unload it and carry it upstairs and onto the breezeporch. I have it wrapped in a tarp in the the back of our pickup now. I also need to print up the instruction manual.

As an added bonus I spotted this internal gear stacked over against some discarded stuff when we went back to pickup our Graphotype. I was gonna trade it with a couple of buddies. One does metal work and the other does woodwork custom tables. I figured that surely one could use this unique item. Well after talking to Annmarie on the way home we are going to use it! We have been talking about getting a custom metal sign for the farm and we can have someone cut us a pattern using their CNC machine and I could weld it after taking the class this fall. But today as I was staring at the picture it dawned on me that we could just have the CNC machine cut the shape to just barely under the circumference of the gear and I could just drill holes through it and bolt it to the ring! No welding necessary therefore no waiting needed. Annmarie just needs to design it and I need to get two metal posts from the scrap yard. Once I have those posts I can set them in concrete and we will be ready! I really like this idea. Annmarie can do all the design work and just have the CNC machine do its duty. I want to make it out of 1/4″ or 3/16″ plate steel, with the price of steel currently I will probably go for the 3/16″. If we use steel then I can create the rust patina on the new piece easily with a chemical spray.

I did get some new leather boots and some slip on leather shoes!

Bully for us

Steve HardinLeave a comment

This week I have been trying to work on the bull enclosure. The best part of this is after last weekend I went and got a load of hay and had Mr Consumer unload it while I was at work! This is the absolute best way to move hay, by not moving it at all and letting someone else do it.

I decided to change my name for Mr Consumer. Its a big deal for me as I don’t usually do this but I just cannot pass up the opportunity to use a better one. His mother calls him Bubba! I cannot make this up and it is way cooler than my name! So I am switching forever and ever, this one time.

My nephew has been coming out to the house in the late evenings to help me out. We are focusing on the bull enclosure. Its slow going but we have been able to sink 6-8 posts every night. We are setting each post with gravel instead of putting the dirt back. This means we are staying out till 2130on the nights we can work. This means I just come home, eat dinner and then head out to the barn lot to work. This only works 2-3 evenings a week but it is a little more done every day and ultimately it will be done if I just keep at it.

The only lousy part is we are having to manually dig the holes the rest of the way. My tractor just won’t do it. A 16 pound breaker bar will move a lot of rocks a little way then we manually dig them out of the holes. Most of the time you have to dig them out by hand as the post hole digger doesn’t grab the rocks. It is amazing how you can literally break a rock in half with a steel bar and enough effort. I can tell we have been at this for over three weeks, my T-shirts are starting to not be as loose on me from the upper body muscles compensating for the hard work. Now if only this would contribute to a six pack ab set without having to work at it!

We are reusing some old cedar posts in an effort to keep costs down. I am hoping they will hold but the only real way to test this theory out is to build it, put the bull in there and see how it works. So we are going to do a trial by fire after completion.

If only it were easy

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I really want to get the bull enclosure finished but it is turning out to not be an easy project. My choice of locations is making it difficult. There is a hidden solid rock bluff just under the dirt on this hillside. This is good as the soil never really grows anything but bad when you talk about actually trying to drill a hole in the ground. Sarah came out to help me and she proved valuable. Its funny, I am not sure if I will ever outgrow riding my child verbally to work faster and hit harder even though she is an adult. I did the same thing when she was a child. It went well and she kept calling dibs on moving the tractor so I was hoofing it around the barn lot. I am trying to reuse some of the old cedar posts that have been on the farm 50+ years. I don’t want to put a railroad tie into every hole as there are over 50 holes and a railroad tie is $20/each nowadays. We are not certain the bull wont push over the posts so it is a guessing game. I am going to create solid corners and then anchor the two posts next to the corner on either side together with an overhead wooden support. This should keep the bull from tearing up the corners. I have put in one rock crib on every stretch and may have to put in two to keep him from pushing the fence outwards. We will see how it goes as we actually start building the fence. We are still just drilling holes and have managed to get 9 posts set in gravel and 6 more dropped in holes. I set all my wooden posts in gravel now. They stiffen up much nicer and I am hoping that they last longer, time will tell.

This corner arrangement will have a triangle shaped rock crib between these posts. The posts are 8 feet apart and my lovely wife tells me that is 32 Sqft. It will be four feet high so I am betting it will take about four hours just to fill this single corner up with rocks. I have five cribs so far that will take at least 16 hours just to collect rocks off the hillside and fill them up. On the plus side it does help cut down on the rocks on the hillside but since we are pretty sure rocks grow there it is an ongoing battle.

I had better luck digging some of the holes by hand. I could manipulate the smaller hand tool to get through the clay faster. I may even need to take a metal file to the teeth of the auger on my tractor. I can knock off the burrs and sharpen the auger teeth, the problem is if I do this it will dig faster but every time I hit a rock I will cringe even more than I do now and I hit a lot of rocks when digging holes!

This week I was looking out the kitchen window and realized that it just looked weird. The light was very dull and the ground was a very unnatural color. I ran out the front door with my cell phone and took the above purple blue tinged picture from the front porch. I wanted one without the power lines so I walked across the bridge and stood on my trailer. This took maybe a minute, what a difference that minute made in the view. Five minutes later this was all gone. It was an amazingly beautiful sight and one of my favorite pictures from the farm.