kubota tractor

Sunchokes for the win

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On Sunday Mr Rainman came out again. We are now starting at 0900 so it is a little warmer when we are working. It was quite pleasant, I was able to work with just a long sleeve shirt and a wool cap on my head. There were still a few get ready for winter items to clear up before we could work on the garden and lavender. The plan on Saturday afternoon was to work on the lavender. It needs trimmed up again. But the longer I worked on the berm the more time I had time to think and prioritize. So we went out to the barn first thing and finished setting up all of the chutes and feeders. They were still outside and in the hay rooms from when it was dug out. There are no sheep on the property but we will have to bring them back in three weeks and then they will need to be sorted so I can take some to the livestock auction. We also tossed out food into all of the feeders and then tossed out bedding. The barn is all ready for the sheep. There are a couple of overhead lights that do not work, the ones in the hay rooms being the most needed. The damn raccoons have torn some of the wires out by crawling up and down the walls. I need to put in more zip ties and anchors that I screw into the walls so the wires cannot be pulled. I am not running conduit for those 12v wires. I will add that to my list but honestly it will not happen until I get the raspberries, blackberries and trees all trimmed up. I need about another month for all the leaves to finish falling off of everything before I can do the trimming.

We then filled the feeders for the pregnant cows and the two feeders for the feeder cows down below. We used all of the round bales from the second cutting at the neighbor’s. There were still a couple of moist ones but there was no mold and none of the bales were warm/hot. We managed to get the truly wet ones fed out immediately and the cows just ate them. So in a couple of weeks I will have to actually feed out some of the large bales of hay we purchased. I am super happy that we are not having to touch the purchased hay until mid December. That bodes well for maybe not having to purchase any hay next year for winter.

We now Winter is near when the quail start moving down towards the houses. We feed them during the winter and there are more buildings/shelter down near the houses for them to wait out the bad storms. So there is a large covey hanging around that we see every day. They are super noisy! You can always hear them usually before you can see them.

Once we had all of that done we had to see how our Sunchokes did. I planted them for the first time this summer. I planted about 30 small tubers. The plants got almost twelve feet tall and the sunflower bloomed very late. It was the very last flower we had available for the bees. I am not sure if it was due to the time I planted the tubers or if they are naturally late bloomers. I am unsure but we will know next year. Mr Rainman and I started to dig up the tubers after cutting off the dead stalks. I had read that you needed to be careful with sunchokes as they can turn into a weed and can be very invasive. Wow! We dug up almost 80# of tubers from a single 15 feet row of tubers. I planted one tuber about every six inches initially. It was crazy! We just kept pulling them out of the ground. There was no way we got all of them when we were digging despite going over the area several times. All of the wield small or shovel cut tubers ended up being the ones we replanted into the same row. I sent a three gallon bucket home with Mr Rainman and we put the rest in the root cellar. I did plant a row in the yard near the newly installed side fence. I want to plant a six by six foot patch on the other side of the fence gate but I was running out of steam. I will do that in the spring. I will need to put in a couple of posts and some wire to hold up the tall stalks so they don’t fall onto the house. Annmarie and I have not eaten any of the Sunchokes yet. The plan is this next week to peel and boil a batch and see how they taste. If we like them then we will probably plant some more. I have read online where people mix them in with potatoes to add texture and a nutty flavor to their mashed potatoes.

Once Mr Rainman left I took the Kubota tractor out to work on the culvert crossing in field #4b. The spring ditch is so deep now that you can no longer drive a tractor across it. The back half of the culvert was torn out in the last flood. The reason it got torn out was I did not install a rock wall face on that side. It was one of those things I was going to come back and finish later. The side that had the rock face survived the flood but the other side did not. It took a lot more dirt than I thought it would to get the back half built up. I did bring in two loads of very large rocks to place near the culvert. I need about eight more loads to complete that entire side but my chest was not going to allow it. The nice thing about the weekend was it was the first one in ages where I was able to work the entire weekend without stopping early to rest. Things are improving.

New sprayer boom

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I keep working on getting the star thistle sprayed in the CRP. It had not been controlled for a decade so it made some inroads. The wind and heat has been dictating when I can spray so it has been hit and miss to get it done but I managed to get in a solid three days last week. I can usually get 3-4 tanks done before the wind or the heat picks up enough that I can no longer spray. There are a lot of old coyote dens out in the CRP! It makes driving around on the tractor surprising. You can get lulled into a back and forth rhythm then WHAM, you hit a huge hole and the front tire has fallen in. It takes four wheel drive and going backwards to get out.

The miniature bunnies are all along the fence line. They are living in every single rock crib. This little furry creature thought that if it just held still I would not see it. I guess in its mind it worked as I just snapped a picture and kept on driving. Nothing harassed it so it was successful. We have one down along the driveway also. Annmarie and I were just commenting that we never see babies and we only ever see one at a time yet they keep multiplying.

When I got down to the house I tried to back into the machine shed. Unfortunately, the boom on the left had flopped down and I ran it right into the upright wooden pillar. This caused a bend on the back rigid bar. It was bent too much, when I let the boom down it was pointed forward at a 45 degree angle, no good. In typical farmer fashion I figured I could just straighten it out by hooking it on the same post but pulling with the tractor to straighten it out. Surprisingly, this took quite a bit of effort on the tractor’s part and all it did was break the hokey fix I had done a couple of years ago in the middle. So now I had two issues.

The answer at this point is to just take it apart and rebuild it. But this means relying on my welding skills. They are improving, but that first weld two years ago was so bad I had to screw two holes into the patch and put screws in them. I am getting much better and that was one of my very first repairs. It also held for two years! I went to Irish Iron (Packy’s) and got some square tubing, a small piece of square tubing to go inside both pieces to hold them in alignment when I welded them. I also picked up some channel iron for the gun rack on the Kubota tractor. I was there so I figured I would just get it all.

I had to take it all apart, busted one of the bolts in the process and then had to cut the swing safety ends off. They need to be welded onto the new piece. Since I was having to rebuild the thing anyways I decided to do some improvements to its design. I have a boom and a wand attached but the valve to switch is under the tank currently and it is a standard yard hose Y splitter. So I purchased two valves to weld onto the top of the bar to switch between the wand and boom. I also moved the boom left/right valves to an upright direction so I now have four valves mounted on the spray bar. It was surprisingly not bad once I got the wire feed speed adjusted. I had to slow it down from the Gingerman’s settings. I cannot weld at 200, I did fine at 175 speed. I have no clue what the value for the setting is, I just know the bigger the number the faster the wire comes out.

I go it all welded together and broke the ancient handle off of one of the old valves. I tried to weld it on, it took two attempts before I realized the valve stem is bronze. I will have to eventually replace that valve but for now it will work fine. I have learned to just grab some color of spray paint and cover up the bare metal when I am done. It helps control the rust. I was putting all of the tubing on with hose clamps and of course on the very last clamp the standard screwdriver slipped and dug a gouge out of my thumb. It would not stop bleeding so I whipped out the little first aid kit I have on the tractor. The requisite blood sacrifice for a farm project was given.

The fires have already started to burn all around us. It is a little early for fire season but our lack of rain is starting to show. It does make for a fantastic sunset!

Predators 2/Farm 5

Steve Hardin1 Comment

Well it has been a long two weeks and we are starting to make some progress on the predators. I continue to take time 2-4 times a week to drive around the entire property looking for coyotes. I had to take Snoop up to the boneyard. He up and died on us last week. He spent the last couple of days just lounging around. It was hot so he decided to just sit under the sprinkler to stay cool. He was by far the alpaca with the most personality. We are not really sad, he lived two years longer than we thought he would and he was ancient.

I was driving Snoop up to his eternal resting spot, the boneyard, when I spotted a couple of coyotes. I stopped, kept the tractor RPMs up high and proceeded to dispatch two coyotes with two shots. The not being able to hit them at a dead run thing is rough on your confidence level. I only have 12 rounds of 243 left out of the ones my father loaded by hand almost 20 years ago. I will need to get some more loaded as I am going to run out of them before the summer is out. I was out spraying the CRP for star thistle and spotted a coyote on my way back to the house to get another load of spray. The coyote never slowed down and once it ran for the fence it just kept running. I was going to give it time to settle down and stop but it did not do that. So I just started throwing lead at it, I managed to get off four shots before it got out of range.

It is painful to just hold onto a rifle for hours on end while bouncing around on a tractor. I need some form of rifle holder on the tractor. I am going to put it on the Kubota. We mow and spray with that tractor so it has more time on it throughout the year. I am going to weld a holder onto the lift arms, an upside down U and then bolt a set of rifle holders with bungee straps to hold the rifle in place. I just need to make the U tall enough that when I lower the bucket the U doesn’t hit the hood on the tractor. I have a bent support that I replaced I am thinking about just cutting it in half to use as the uprights. It is already painted bright orange so I would just need to grind the paint off near the weld. I am becoming a lot more comfortable with the wire feed welder. I had to slow down the feed speed from 200 to 175 so that I could make a molten pool and push it along. Once the rifle holder is in place I will then need to work on a new varmint rifle. I need one with a synthetic stock so it can take the bouncing around and beating it is going to be subjected to every time we hop on the tractor. I am thinking about the sights as it will take a beating.

Milo, the wonder dog, helped me cap a couple of raccoons in the last week, so the farm is currently ahead of the predators this year. Our cows are calving but so far we only have three calves out of six cows. We don’t think one of them is pregnant. The cows do not seem to have any issues with the coyotes. I think the momma cows are just too mean and protective when a dog shaped animal is near the calves.

Rock Wall

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Last week I was still waiting on the parts from Delta to fix the bathroom sink so I had a free weekend from the bathroom. The weather was gorgeous and I am ready to get the front yard fence up. We have a decorative metal fence, purchased years ago, that needs to be installed on the front rock wall. The plan is for it to keep the dogs on the hillside during the day and allow us to use the sheep to graze down the hillside. When the sheep get in the yard they eat some stuff I don’t want them to eat. We also want to start planting more flowers for the bees and the sheep will eat those also. Long story short, the rock wall needs to be completed before the fence can be installed. This entails a lot of tractor work and the moving of a lot of heavy rocks.

The ground is dry enough now that I can go up on the hillside and dislodge rocks. You do not want any slick surfaces when you are coming down the hillside and with a bucket full of rocks. As it was a bucket full would still put me onto three tires when I turned downhill. I had to drop the bucket several times and bounce it off the ground to level myself out. I moved rocks and dumped them into the yard for half a day then spent the next two and a half days building the rock wall. The left side was already done, I just had to raise it about a foot and add some more dirt. I am stealing dirt from the area behind the old chicken coop. I am trying to make that area flat so I keep stealing from there. I had been using it for the secondary dike I installed alongside that part of the creek.


The dike is in my field and it is only about 18 inches high. I would have only needed about eight inches during the last flood. By the time it gets that high it is really wide, it just needed a little help to stay in the correct channel. I doubt we will have any more floods as bad as the two we had but I think I have finally gotten all of the areas reinforced and added to so we don’t get widespread flooding.

I remembered why I did not want to do the project about two hours into the hand digging portion. I had to get a pick axe, shovel and breaker bar to move the old rocks out of the way. I ended up digging down to the original footing from the previous rock wall and building back up from there. I made it about half way on the new side. I still need to raise it about another ten inches but I figured I would get the wall up and then work on raising it and adding more dirt. I am only going to go over to the rose bush, end of the upper wooden fence.

As I was driving back and forth collecting rocks I got to study my favorite tree on the farm. I keep thinking I should go up and thin out the dead wood out of this tree but I love the way it looks and the birds use it as a primary stopping point. It is slowly dying and has been for the last 20 years.

Honey do list and bathroom prep

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It has been a long week as I continue to prep for the bathroom remodel. We made an executive decision and are going to put a tin ceiling in the bathroom. It will be white not two tone like the upstairs bathroom but it will tie in with the upstairs bathroom and our downstairs ceiling. Plus, I will not have to sheetrock and texture the ceiling. I hate sheet rocking. We ordered the bathroom lights and a recessed mirror cabinet for over the vanity. I called on our bathroom tile for the two short walls and it is on back order, it is supposed to be here by the 15th. I told her as long as it made it by February 3 I was fine with any delays. I am not going to buy any Schluter products until we tear down the bathroom to studs and then see if we need to fir out the studs to make the walls level. Not sure exactly what we are going to find, that is not super heartening but whatever it is we will fix it and make it work.

After that nasty wind storm blew down the little decorative windmill it has been working on destroying it. It no longer spins and the wind has literally been tearing the blades off. As of today it has no tail and no blades left, it is just a piece of metal sticking up on the pole. I need to do more research and get one with bearings and then need to somehow attach it better to the post. This will be one of my 2025 goals, I really like having a decorative one on the farm.

My Kubota tractor came home! I had them come pick it up for 1000 hour service and to make some needed repairs. It took three weeks but the thing hums now. It is running great! I was able to actually pick up the big bales and drive them around to feed the cows. Much easier than pushing them along on the ground in the mud. I was able to actually get both bales in the round feeders.

I did the wife’s new cutting table first thing this weekend. She wanted me to make something that was recessed and framed so her cutting mat could just drop in and it would not slide around. It had to be smooth so that it would not snag her fabric that was being worked on. I was able to cut grooves in some three 2x4s and then sand them all smooth. I then cut four pieces with angles and used my fancy tool to drill in recessed pilot holes in the corners so I was able to screw the corners together and then screw down the plywood. It is going nowhere. Once I had it all together I hit the corners again with a sander to smooth everything out. She was happy.

I was able to put the finish on the bathroom vanity. I love “Tried and True” as a finish, beeswax and linseed oil. I coated the entire vanity and it is now ready to go to the Tricities and get a granite top cut. I am planning on doing that this week.

I am hoping to have Mr Rainman come out this week and clean up the old chicken coop and start moving stuff out of the old house. I want to put all the tools out in the old chicken coop. I am keeping the theme plastic boxes, one box for each type of job. This helps keep the specialized tools together and makes finding them so much easier. I have one for tiling, painting, Sheetrock, finish nailers, electrical parts, and wiring. I have a cabinet with drawers for connectors and pvc fittings. Two cabinets for screws and nails of all kinds. None of that stuff needs a heated building.