More groundwork for the greenhouse

Today we got up at the unpleasant hour of 5:00 so that we could work before the heat of the day today (predicted high 104).  We were around with breakfast, supplies and lunch and at the farm at 7:00AM.  Once there, we were joined by friends from church - Julie and her daughters Jessie and Ellie.  Their help was very much appreciated!

Catherine and Ellie helping remove rocks

First, Jeremy and Jacob measured how far out of level our existing pad was.  It turns out it was a bit more than we really wanted, so Jeremy started the tractor up and we did some more leveling.  We learned some key things during the process of taking the back, North edge down another foot or so.  Namely, sooner or later when you cut into a hill, you're going to hit rocks.  Big ones.  Rocks that don't really want to go anywhere.

Getting to be experts at switching implements on the tractor....

This rock took the tractor to dig it out and all 3 adults to lift it out of the greenhouse

Thankfully, between Julie and I working with the shovel and the tractor, we were able to remove the offending rocks. Someday perhaps they'll make their way into a foundation somewhere...

Julie and I surveying the newly staked corners

We also did a little bit of mowing with the scythe while the tractor was doing its work.  Julie got pretty proficient with the tool and we managed to clear out some more next to our drive.  I also got to peen the scythe for the first time!  It turned out to be pretty painless and it definitely improved the performance of the blade.  I suspect that I will need to get even better at it to effectively cut grass someday, but it was a good start.

After the pad was re-leveled, we had lunch together before moving on to the next thing on the list - staking out the true corners for the greenhouse.  This required much measuring and adjusting of stakes, but eventually we got it done.  Then we lined up the hoops for the greenhouse to get them ready to bolt together.  At this point it was 1:30 and getting HOT!  We decided to pack up and head home for some A/C.  Not a bad 5 or so hours work for the day.

Daisy decided that under the picnic table was the place to be

The newly re-leveled pad

Setting the stage

There's not a lot of visible progress right now, but much happening behind the scenes.  We have finished sorting out the hardware for the 2 greenhouses and we think we know which pieces go to which one.  Its not a small amount of hardware...

We've also ordered the poles for the first greenhouse.  We're extending the sidewalls to make the greenhouse taller, so we couldn't re-use the original ground poles.  Next up is checking how much of the existing pressure treated bottom railes are re-useable.  Then we'll know how much wood we're going to need to build the endwalls, run the bottom rail and install the new rail at the top of the longer side poles.  With a smidge of luck, that will all get done by the end of the weekend.

Bit by bit, we're setting the stage for the build to start next week!  You're welcome to join us!

Greenhouse Raising Party

So, you ask, if the pad is leveled is there a greenhouse raising party this Saturday?  In short, no, there’s not.  We have discovered that the parts we need to be able to put the greenhouse up will not be here until next Tuesday.  At this point, we will be raising the greenhouse next Thursday and Friday (July 5 and 6) with the hope of having it finished by end of day on Friday.  We’ll be starting as early as we can to get as much done while it’s not blistering hot and we’ll likely work late for the same reason.  If you would like to come out and get some hands on experience raising a hoop house, please let us know!  Any amount of time would be appreciated.  We will happily feed anyone who wants to come out either day to help.  We will also have tools (although you're welcome to bring your own if you prefer).

The reason we are targeting EOD Friday is so that we can attend an earthen plaster workshop north of Topeka that weekend.  Since we want to use earthen plaster on the bale walls of our future home, we’d really like to have some hands on experience before we do it ourselves.  If anyone else is interested in going to that workshop (its free), let us know and we’ll forward on the contact information.  We might even be able to carpool!

In other news, we moved the poles we do have out to the farm yesterday.  We still have to finish sorting out the smaller hardware (screws, nuts and washers) to see what we are missing.  That process is ongoing.

Bit by bit, it’s coming together!

Leveling for the greenhouse

The pad is level!!!!  Now that I've answered your first question, here's how it happened...

Friday evening, we hitched the plow up to the tractor for the first time to besure we had all the right hardware to make it work (we did).  The plan was to use the plow to break up the soil so that we could use the box blade to level teh site for the first greenhouse.  We were planning on this taking all day on Saturday and likely some time on Sunday.

Once the plow was attached, we couldn't resist trying it out, so Jeremy drove over to the staked out site of the greenhouse and started plowing.  We quickly discovered that we had the plow set too dep when the tractor started bucking like a bronco - funny to those watching, not so funny to the guy riding the tractor.  Once that was fixed the plow worked like a dream.  The earth turned over in 2 neat rows behind the tractor; loose, dark and rich.

We plowed the first layer to be moved before proceeding to the RV to make camp for the night.  When we got to the RV, we had an unfortunate surprise.  Either we forgot to unhook the battery before we left or someone hooked it up while we were gone resulting in the battery being completely drained.  This meant that not only was the battery ruined, but we couldn't open the slide out on the RV.  Big frowny face here.

Nevertheless, we made camp, had some dinner and passed out for the evening.  It was a great night - gentle cool breeze and the sounds of the country.

First thing Saturday morning (and I mean first thing - we were up and around at 6:00), we were back at it.  We were hurried along by some very ominous looking storm clouds complete with thunder and lightning.  We would celebrate the rain, but we also wanted to get this job done!

The combination of plow and box blade worked fantastically well.  It took about 5-6 hours on the tractor to get the stie leveled with several rounds fo swapping between the 2 implements.  We learned several key things during this effort including:

- How not to kill the tractor when it bogs down
-That our soil is AWESOME for the top 4-6 inches
- That we need a stronger block to hold up the box blade (see picture)

We had a lot of fun Saturday too.  Friends of ours, Jessi Asmussen and Kevin Prather, and their little boy Elliot visited in teh morning and we all took a walk around the farm.  It was wonderful to spend time together!

The kids and I got to be weights on the box blade to help it dig in a little deeper which was fun.  The kids particularly enjoyed this job.

While Jeremy ran the tractor, I set up a new, larger pen for the goats.  We're upgrading them to a 16'x32' pen so that we won't have to move them as often and so that they'll have mor eroom to run around.  Setting T posts is a really good shoulder workout, in case you're wondering!

We finished up about 6:00 PM, broke camp and we were home about 7:00.  We were all hot, sweaty and glad to have the job done!

Sunday, we went to the pool (in case you're thinking we really do just work all the time).  Ahhhhhh.

Becoming a Master of the Tool

Have you ever seen a master work?  A master at work makes the task seem almost effortless.  The tool(s) become an extension of their thoughts and motions.  Jeremy has achieved this with his painting, but otherwise we are not masters of anything – only beginners.  It is something that we aspire to, however. 

There is an art and a craft to doing physical labor that is akin to the art of any sport or dance.  The body learns to move in a certain way to manage the tools and materials; each muscle learns to act in unison with the others; the mind learns what to focus on and how to compensate at every instance.  The result is beautiful and awe inspiring.  When that work is done with others who are equally skilled, the symmetry and rhythm, the coordination and balance are even more astounding – it makes you realize the true power of people working together toward a common purpose.

This grace doesn’t come quickly or easily – it takes hours of repetition and practice.  Everything we do with our bodies goes through this cycle of learning and improving.  Each time we pick up a tool, we must learn how to make it an extension of ourselves – a projection and instrument of our minds intent for the task.  At first, the projection is rough and clumsy - the shovel glances off of hard earth instead of digging into it, the splitting maul bounces off the log instead of dividing it cleanly.  If we keep going, we learn the right angle for the shovel, the right swing with the maul that starts to do the work, but we are not yet masters of the tool or the task.  We are merely able to get the job done. 

Next we enter the mastery phase.  Each time we pick up the tool, we notice something new about its balance, its angle.  We try slight variations on what has worked in the past – we learn to lean on the shovel a little differently, hold it with a different hand, move it side to side in a certain way.  We learn to swing the maul with a different angle or motion.  Each of these changes feels different to our bodies and makes different imprints in our brains.  Through our senses, we evaluate every shift to see if we should continue with that or find something else. 

This is not usually a conscious or rational process.  We don’t think “Now I will try angling the shovel at 25 degrees and see what happens.”  No, this is an intuitive learning process.  After the motion, we sense whether the work was done better or not.  Did the job get done more quickly?  With less effort?  Was the result of higher quality?  Without thinking we begin repeating the new motion and then continue experimenting. 

If we are very lucky, we will have a master of the tool available to jump start our learning.  This is the person who when using the chosen tool makes every motion seem effortless; the person who has truly integrated this task into their subconscious to a level that it is as natural a motion as breathing.  Often, asking how they do it is completely useless – they don’t know, they just do it.  Occasionally, someone has taught enough other people that they can express how to do the job very well.  In either case, by observing  we can sometimes find the secrets.  We can watch how the arms are raised with the maul, the angle of the down swing, where the blade is aimed, what muscles flex when.  Then we can try to use our rational mind to jump start the intuitive learning process.  “He lifted it kinda like this and then brought it down like this” and through many fine refinements the right angle and swing are found that begin to replicate the master’s ability. 

Through still more refinements, our bodies learn the secrets of the tool and we notice that the job is easier.  Our muscles become conditioned and ready for the work.  The act of lifting the tool changes our stance in preparation for its use.  The feel of the tool in our hands stops being awkward and clumsy and becomes calm and purposeful.  The tool takes on a personality and the status of a trusted co-worker in the task worthy of respect and appreciation.  Gradually we come to understand the before hidden interactions between our finest motions and the tool’s performance.  We become the masters. 

One day we notice that our relationship to this task has changed.  It is now a source of pride in a job done right and done well.  We smile to ourselves every time we see the tool and secretly look forward to the next time we get to use it.  This feeling, this deep satisfaction and pride in mastering a difficult task, is what makes life on the land so wonderful. 

I will leave you with a story from our family illustrating the difference being a master of the tool makes.

When my brother was 13 or 14, our family was splitting wood for our wood furnace.  My grandfather, then in his 70’s, was there observing the proceedings.  I should say here that my grandfather had cut and split several cords of wood every year since he was old enough to pick up a maul.  This was my brother’s first attempt.  Being new to the task and the tool, he was having mixed results.  The first logs split for him after several sturdy strikes of the maul, then he found one that wouldn’t.  It was a largish oak log and every stroke of the maul just bounced off.  Again, being new to the task, he tried to hit the log harder to get it to split resulting in nothing much happening at all.  Eventually, my grandfather stood up from his seat and asked if he could show Scott something.  My brother handed the 70 year old, thin, slightly stooped 6’3” man the maul and stepped back.  After weighing the maul in his hands, my grandfather proceeded to look at the grain on the end of the log and choose his spot before stepping back.  He slowly raised the maul and let it fall on the log end directly on the place he chose.  The log split cleanly in two.  What had been as stubborn and hard as iron was transformed by the skill of the master.  It was art.  With 4 more strokes he had taken the stubborn oak down to 6 pieces of normal firewood.  He handed the maul back to the very impressed 13 year old and sat back down.  Then he took the time to explain how to read the grain on the end of a log and talk about what he has learned about splitting wood after doing it for 60+ years.  My brother is now very proficient with a maul and enjoys the task.  We should all be so lucky to have that kind of teacher for every tool we pick up.

One day, we will master the tools we use.  Until then, we keep learning.  I hope you too can one day become the master of the tools of your trade, whatever they may be!

Goats, plows and RAIN!!!!!

Yesterday was not a big step forward day in the move process due to many scheduling issues.  However, we thought you might appreciate seeing some pictures of our adorable little goats and the bolt that needs to be replaced on the plow for this weekend.

Hercules the "big" guy

Rollins enjoying the play station...err...doghouse...err...goathouse

field before goats

field after goats

This is the plow.  The toothy part on the bottom of the front blade should be covered up by the part pictured below.

The bolt in the center of this plowshare is rusted and half broken.  Hopefully it will get replaced without undue difficulty.  Yeah, right.  ;-)

Also, for those of you not living in Lawrence, water actually fell from the sky here last night!  This means that our work to level the site for the first greenhouse will be much easier and it means that we don’t have to water today.  Both are extremely welcome.  We will be packing tonight for another weekend at the farm.  Wish us luck on getting the site leveled so that we can start building the first greenhouse next week!

Tractor - oil and hydraulics update

We’re moving along.  Yesterday, Jeremy successfully finished changing and flushing the oil and hydraulic fluid resulting in much better hydraulic pressure on the tractor.  Along the way he replaced several gaskets and filters.  We continue to find that parts for this wonderful old tractor of ours are cheap and easy to replace!  Woo hoo! 

We also discovered in doing our research that not only do we have a short in the tractor's electrical system that is cooking batteries, but we need to stop jumping it with a 12 volt battery (i.e. the truck) because that messes up the charge regulator.  The tractor uses a 6V battery, you see.  Not quite sure how we'll do that - it will probably involve buying some piece of equipment to charge batteries that can do 6V.  Until then, we'll continue with what we're doing and know that when we find the short and fix it, we will be replacing both the battery and charge regulator.  Luckily, we can keep going like we are so this isn't a fix we have to do before we can continue with the work. 

Our next task is getting the plow put back together.  Hopefully this will just entail replacing the bolt that is broken.  Given that the bolt in question looks impressively rusted, we'll see if that turns out to be as simple as we hope.

Once the plow is in operable order, we get to sit back and hope to goodness it actually rains!  That would make leveling the site SOOOOOO much easier.  It would also be a welcome relief from the unseasonably dry hot weather.  Everybody cross your fingers for water falling from the sky!

At home, there is a fair bit of grass coming up around the place.  We are having to water sometimes twice a day to keep the fledgling grass growing.  It is amazing how something as useless as grass can take several times over the water that our garden did.  *sigh* 

I promise that pictures will be forthcoming - the camera has been left at home for the last 2 trips out to the farm unfortunately.  One day we'll remember.

Laying Ground Work

After a restful weekend visiting family in Oklahoma and Arkansas, we’re back at it.  We have to get the first hoop house up as soon as possible so that we can get the straw out of the farmer’s barn.  To that end, we met with an excavating company last week and discovered that having the pad leveled for the greenhouse would cost us $1500.  Ouch.  So we’re going to take a run at it ourselves again. 

Our plan is to use the plow that came with the tractor to break up the soil a layer at a time on the high side of the site.  Then we’ll use the box blade to move the loosened soil over to the low side.  It will take several passes to get the site leveled, but we think it’s do-able. 

In order to make that happen, we have to get the plow in good working order and finish the tune-up of the tractor.  This means changing out some very rusted hardware on the plow (and maybe the tractor), changing the oil in the tractor (a 2 day process) and figuring out how to use the plow.  With a little luck and some work, that will all get finished before the weekend.  Then we’ll camp out at the farm this weekend again and get the site leveled.  If that miraculously goes well (fat chance, but good to dream), then we’ll start laying out where the poles go early next week.

The first step in this process happened yesterday.  Unfortunately, Jeremy didn’t have the camera with him, so no pictures.  Sorry.  The oil that drained out of the tractor was a lovely shade of pitch black and had the stuff in it you would expect from oil and hydraulic fluid that had been in an engine for at least 25 years.  We flushed the hydraulic system out and it is now draining overnight to be sure we get all the fluid out before putting the new oil in.  Interestingly enough, hydraulic fluid used on this tractor is not standard hydraulic fluid.  It is actually 90 weight mineral oil!  We were surprised to learn that.  Sometime today, Jeremy will re-fill the fluid and the engine oil and we’ll see if the tractor will start back up again.

As a bonus, we discovered that there is some kind of short in the electrical system which has already fried the battery we purchased last week.  *sad*  We’ll be trouble shooting that this week also.  Until we find the short, we’re back to jumping the tractor every time we want to use it. 

Assuming we get all the maintenance done and the pad leveled this weekend, there will be a hoop-house raising party on Saturday June 30^th.  If we don’t get the pad leveled this weekend, then the hoop house raising will be delayed for some period of time while we figure out plan B.  So, if you are someone or know someone who would be interested in helping to erect a hoop house, please check back or email us (jajlehrman *at* yahoo.com) to find out if it’s a go or not.  We should know by Monday one way or the other.    Until then, we’ll be spending quality time with the tractor…

We have straw!

Each of our lives is made up of many stories.  There are times in life when you go out and find a story like when you go on a great vacation somewhere exotic, go see a great show or something similar.  Other times, a story happens to you like when you see an amazing rainbow, win a prize, or stumble into a new friendship.  This story is a bit of both.  Its also long, so get comfortable!

First, a touch of background.  Where we turn off of Hwy 24 to go up to our farm, there is a good sized established farm.  It’s currently planted to a mix of wheat and corn.  On Saturday when we drove to our farm, the wheat had been harvested and the straw was still in the field.  Fast forward to Saturday afternoon, Jacob and I are going to see a friend of mine about 5 miles away.  On the way, we passed this farm and saw an older farmer working on a baler in his driveway by the road.  There was a bale of straw in the chute.  Could it really be possible for us to get the straw for our house from less than a mile away?  I had to stop and find out, so I pulled over by the driveway and the farmer walks over.  Our conversation goes something like this:

 

 

Me: “Looks like you’re baling straw.”

Him: “Yes I am.”

Me: “What are you going to do with the straw?”

Him: “Oh, I’ll probably sell it.”

Me (starting to get excited): “Where are you going to sell it?”

Him: “I don’t know.”

Me: “Would you consider selling it to me?”

Him: “Well, how much do you need?”

Me: “About 8000 lbs and we’re happy to move it for you.”

Him (getting excited): “Sounds good.”

Me: “How much were you thinking of charging?”

Him: “Well, if you’re going to move it, probably $1.75-$2/bale.”

Me: “Can you hold on to it while we get this hoop house built so that we have a place to store it?”

Him: “How long?”

Me: “Hopefully just until the end of the month.”

Him: “Sure.”

Sold – that’s the cheapest and the most local straw we’re going to find for insulating our cottage.  I proceed to give him my phone number, tell him where we’re staying this weekend and take down his number.  We proceed on to my friends and then back to the farm.

 

 

Jump forward to Sunday.  We’ve just finished spending the morning mowing and building a giant compost pile (see previous post).  We’re hot and tired and looking forward to a relaxing afternoon.  After lunch, we were all chilling and mostly asleep when a truck pulls up our drive by the RV and out pops the old farmer (Lewis).  He says he’s ready for us to come get the straw out of the field because it looks like weather will be moving in that night.  Ok then – guess we’re going to go move some straw. 

We unloaded everything from the back of the truck figuring we would drive the truck and trailer through the filed to pick up bales.  We were thinking they would be stored in the large barn next to the field, so this shouldn’t take long.  Off we go to the farm where the adventure really began.

 

 

First, we discovered that truck exhaust can ignite the straw, so the trailer would have to be pulled by a tractor through the field.  Ok, no worries.  We unhitch the trailer and park the truck there.  The farmer pulls up in his tractor then asks if we can use the ball off of our trailer hitch because he doesn’t have one.  Sure – that’s no problem, right?  Well, after locating 2 pipe wrenches to get the ball off the receiver hitch, we had it all hooked up and ready to go out in the field.  This is when we find out that the bales will be stored at a different barn that is about 5 miles up the road from where we are and we realize this is going to take longer than we thought.  Then the farmer proceeds to tell Jeremy how to work his tractor and he turned us loose in the field.

First trailer stacked

Now it’s up to us with a tractor we’ve never driven hooked to a trailer and a field of straw with bales scattered all over.  We’re game, so off we go.  We load up the trailer with 47 bales stacked 5 bales high.  There was something really deeply awesome about walking around the field and picking up the straw that will go into our house less than a mile away.  Part of me couldn’t believe that this was really happening.  We were also feeling the pressure because there were rain clouds building to the west and we knew that the straw can’t get wet if we want to build with it. 

 

 

We get back to the farmhouse with the first trailer load and the farmer pulls up with another longer trailer.  Cool – this will go faster if we can do 2 trailers at a time.  We switch it over and off we go into the field again.  This one held 88 bales.  About a third of the way through this trailer, I look at Jeremy and say, “You can add this to the list of things we couldn’t do 5 years ago!” and it is all too true.  It has taken that long for us to be in good enough shape to even consider moving 200+ bales of straw, twice, in an afternoon.

Second trailer stacked

While we loaded the second trailer, the farmer and his wife went to a 50^th anniversary party.  They weren’t back by the time we finished loading the trailer so I took the truck and got Jacob.  We had left him at the RV thinking that we’d only be gone a couple of hours.  Clearly that was not to be the case, so Jacob became our photographer again.

 

 

Now for the next bend in the story.  We have 2 trailers and only 1 ball.  The big trailer is attached to the tractor and the farmer proceeds to tell us that we can follow him up to his other barn while he pulls the trailer on the tractor.  Five miles isn’t a long way, but when the vehicle you’re following can only get up to about 12 miles an hour, it takes a really long time!  It was now about 5:00.

 

 

It took about 20 minutes to go the 5 miles to the other barn.  Along the way while shifting around and admiring the wonderful purple color on my forearms, I kicked something hard in the floorboard.  Yes, there are enough things currently in the floorboard of the truck that I didn’t immediately know what it was.  It was the receiver hitch and ball to my brother’s truck that we had borrowed before we got our own.  We have a second ball!  That meant that we could leave one on the tractor while someone else pulled a trailer to unload with the truck.  Eureka!  We might get finished by midnight…

 

 

The farmer left the trailer with us since we could now pull it back and he headed back to his farm.  We unloaded the big trailer and stacked the bales as high as we could reach from the ground (6 layers) making a solid wall of straw about 6 feet tall.  Then it was back to the farm to get the rest of the bales while watching the clouds to the west.  Could we get it all done in time?

 

 

We picked up Catherine from her sleep over on the way back so the whole family was there for the finale.  We loaded up the big trailer again – this time with about 100 bales stacked 6 high.  Getting them that high involved a lot of climbing up on the load and moving bales from a lower layer up to the 6^th layer – any taller and it wouldn’t have fit under the rafters in the storage barn.  Jacob got to ride through the field on the bales while Jeremy and I loaded them - every farm kid's dream, right?  Meanwhile, we were getting really tired and continuously eyeing the clouds and listening for thunder.  It was getting dark and we still had to unload this trailer and our trailer.

Last trailer

Our official photographer finally makes it into a picture with the last trailer load

The farmer kindly offered to let us store the 47 bales from our trailer in his barn by the field, so we quickly unloaded that.  He even helped with his son!  That was actually kinda fun – the kids shifted bales over to the adults who hauled and stacked them in the barn.  It didn’t take long to empty our trailer.  Then we were off to the other barn towing the very fully loaded big trailer.

 

 

We had a limited footprint to use in the barn, so we stacked the bales up to the rafters.  That required me being up on the bale wall while Jeremy threw bales over from the trailer (remember that the trailer is also stacked 6 bales tall).  We managed to fit all the bales into the space we were allotted, just. 

The wall of bales - if you look closely, you'll see the rafters at the top of the picture!

Jeremy dropped the kids and I off at our farm to fix some dinner and pack while he took the big trailer back and picked up ours.  We finally made it home about 10:30 and in bed about midnight.  What a day!

Looking back on it now that my hands will grip again and the sunburn has turned into a tan, it was a great experience.  I can’t believe that we stumbled into straw that close to home from a farmer kind enough to store it for us and for a price that was less than we budgeted.  Deals don’t get much better than that.  The afternoon of work was hard and exhausting, but also rewarding and fun.  We took the first concrete step toward building our cottage, met our very nice neighbors and spent a gorgeous afternoon outside.  I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Sometimes a story stumbles into you and sometimes you stumble into a story.  This time, we took the first step and the rest of the story just kinda happened.  Thanks for reading it all! 

Goats and Scythes part 2

We camped at the farm this past weekend and had the opportunity to do lots of things.  We also, finally, got to bring our 2 goats home to the farm!  On Saturday afternoon, our neighbor brought the goats over and put them in the enclosure we had built for them out of cattle panels.  They immediately started eating all the weedy bits which made us very happy.  The plan is to have 2 enclosures set up at all times – the one they’re in and the one they’ll go to next.  When they move out of one, we’ll move it to a new place so that they always have their next spot set up.  This way they can help us clear out the weeds from a large area (hopefully) of the farm.  Based on this first few days, it takes them about 2 days to eat down the weeds in a 16x16 square.

Over the course of Saturday evening and Sunday, we started to get to know the boys.  Hercules (the white one) is very people friendly.  He was a bottle baby and loves to be scratched around the ears and shoulders.  He’s the buck and is a cross between a La Mancha and a Nigerian Dwarf which means he has the very little cute ears of a La Mancha but is the much more manageable size of a Nigerian Dwarf.  He also has the gentle disposition of a Nigerian.  Rollins (the black one) is much more reserved and is a full blood Nigerian dwarf.  He will come up to investigate you if you’re still enough, but he doesn’t really seem to like lots of attention.  He may warm up over time or he may not.  For now, he’s eating weeds and that’s what we need!  Hercules is also the dominant goat – he pushes Rollins around a bit.  They’re very entertaining to watch.  We put a dog house and a large dog carrier in the pen for them to use as shelter and shade.  It only took about 5 minutes before one of them was on top of the dog carrier!  They jumped up and down and all around playing king of the hill.  Rollins is nimble enough to jump onto either structure, but Hercules can really only get on the dog carrier with the flat roof.  When we came out Sunday morning, they were each in a little house so apparently it worked out.

The other thing we did lots of this weekend (other than watching the goats play) was work with our scythes.  I have a favorite tool now!  On Saturday, we staked out where the first greenhouse is going to go and then mowed that area with the scythes.  It didn’t take very long and gave us a very good visual picture of how big the greenhouse really is.  I also mowed a path through our top field over to our neighbor’s so that we could stop walking through the tall grass to get there.  On Sunday, we staked out the second greenhouse and used the scythes again to clear out that area and the fence line on the south side.  It took about 2 hours to mow that quarter acre of dense weeds and small saplings.  I’m pretty positive that it would be much faster to mow just grass or even just grass and smaller weeds.  Even so, they say that the original acre was the area that one man could mow in a day and it looks like we could keep that pace up.  Not bad for nearly complete newbies.

Jeremy using the brush blade on the fenceline

Jeremy honing his blade while I mow

Mowing with the scythe is very meditative.  There is a rhythm to the work that you just don’t get with a string trimmer or a power mower.  The blade cuts through the grass/weeds in a swath about 3 inches deep and 4 feet wide and lays most of the cut material in a pile on your left.  The rhythm goes swing, step, return, swing, step, return.  The steps are tiny but steady.  The physical effort required for each swing is minute and spread over the whole body so that no one body part is overly worked.  At the end of using the blade for 2 hours straight, I felt completely….fine.  I wasn’t really tired and no parts of me were more tired than any others.  It was great!

First greenhouse site mown Saturday afternoon

The area we cut Sunday morning as I finish the last swath

There is a definite difference between the ditch blade and the brush blade though.  The extra weight and depth of the brush blade make it very difficult to use for open field mowing.  It really doesn’t cut grass well at all.  It excelled at clearing the fence line of years of accumulated saplings though.  The ditch blade, by comparison, cut the grass quite well and would go through very small saplings and woody weeds easily.  It won’t do year old saplings though.  The difference in the 2 tells me that if we’re going to use scythes to do our own hay or to keep larger areas weed free, we’ll be investing in either a longer ditch blade or a grass blade.  That will enable both of us to cut a larger area efficiently.

 

 

After mowing the area, we raked up all the cut weeds and grass and created our first compost pile on the farm – it was a surprising amount of material!  One day all the weeds will become awesome garden soil.  I have to admit that raking up all the cut material and building the compost pile was a job.  Luckily, Jacob was there and was a huge help.  Aside from taking most of pictures in this post, he also manned the wheel barrow ferrying weeds from the field to the compost pile.  He’s really getting to be quite strong and is a very hard worker.

Note the compost pile in the center of the picture - about a 4 foot cube

We started mowing at 8:00AM and we finished raking at about 12:30 (2 hours mowing and 2 hours-ish raking).  We were all hot and tired at that point so we headed for the RV to have lunch and rest.  Our plan was to have nap time/family time after we ate and then go on a short hike to a large (4 acre) pond in the woods just north of our farm.  A quiet afternoon spent enjoying the quiet and exploring the woods sounded fabulous after the morning’s work.  Then we’d pick Catherine up from her sleep over next door and go home in time for everyone to have dinner, shower and be in bed on time.  Since I used the word “plan” in this paragraph, you can guess that this isn’t how the afternoon/evening played out.  That will be a topic for our next post!

Tractor Part 2

We are learning that everything takes at least twice as long as we think it will – especially if it involves a large piece of equipment.  After our 1945 Ford 2N tractor started and ran with really very little effort on Wednesday evening, we were excited to get it out to the farm (and off the driveway) so that we could take advantage of its mechanical advantage.  There were a few things that needed to happen first though.  The front right tire wasn’t holding air and was visibly very worn out and the battery was quite dead (it was stamped 1980). 

This was the plan:  Get up Friday morning, pick up the trailer from Sunflower Rental, load the tractor, go by the tire shop and then stop by Lawrence Battery for a new battery.  We had high hopes to be done with that by noon so that we could play around with the tractor a little before going to pick up the kids in Emporia at 3:30.  Needless to say, that isn’t quite what happened!  ;-)

We got around a little bit late on Friday morning after being up late several nights last week, so Jeremy got underway to pick up the trailer about 8:30 or so.  Our neighbor who helped us get it running on Wednesday recommended a tire place – K’s tires – and we called to see if they had a correctly sized tire in stock.  They did and since the trailer was at our house and the tractor already ran, I told them we’d be there in about half an hour.  Everything was moving along more or less as planned.

As I walked out of the house from talking to the tire shop, I saw our neighbor doing some general preventative maintenance on the tractor.  He and Jeremy were cleaning out the glass sediment bulb where stuff in the gas tank settles out instead of going through the engine.  It was completely full of rust and gunk – it was a wonder the thing started at all.  Then, just before putting it back on the tractor, Ralph dropped it on the driveway.  Being glass, it shattered into 100 pieces.  Great.  We had a new errand to run to Kaw Valley Industrial to purchase a new bulb, gasket and filter.  That took 20 minutes or so but only cost $8.50.  Upon my return with the parts, we got the tractor put back together and jumped it off the Honda.  It loaded up into the trailer with no real issues other than arranging the box blade on the back so that the ramps could fit around it.  Off to K’s Tires!

Loaded and ready to go....finally.

We pulled up to the shop with the tractor on the trailer and walked in to the office.  After identifying ourselves as the people who thought they’d be there about an hour ago, the shop owner (K) casually said – “No problem, just pull the tractor up to the 3^rd bay.”  We then had to explain that in order to move the tractor, we had to jump it.  Without missing a beat, he said – “No problem, I’ll pull my truck over.”  The second truck was pulled over to our trailer and we successfully jumped the tractor with a little fiddling (apparently fiddling is required in order to get a tractor to do anything, so we’re adjusting to this reality).  The gentleman who changed the tires for us was very friendly although less than enthused about changing rusty tractor tires (he had to angle grind on the rims a bit so that the new tire could make a seal).  He got them changed in about an hour including the jumping time.  Having never been to K’s Tires, I would have to recommend them to anyone.  They were very helpful in every way.  Then we were off to Lawrence Battery!

This was the only uneventful stop of the morning.  We pulled up, they pulled the old battery, put new terminals on the cables (they had corroded to the point that one broke off when it was removed from the other battery), and put in a new battery.  We test started the tractor and it cranked right over with the usually fiddling and no jumper cables!  The tractor was now cleared for field work.  Off to the farm!

Lawrence Battery technician fixing the terminals

You can't tell in the picture, but the tractor is running here for the first time without being jumped!

We arrived at the farm around 2:00.  The tractor started up again with the usual fiddling and Jeremy drove it off the trailer with nothing interesting happening at all.  He then drove it to the greenhouse site and started testing out using the box blade to level the soil.  It was unfortunately not a very successful exercise.  The ground was so dry that the blade couldn’t really bite into at all.  The two foot tall woody vegetation didn’t help either.  We made a mental note that we needed to water the ground before working to level it on Saturday – no worries there since we’d been watering our whole lot for weeks.  What’s another hour or so with a sprinkler?  Next it was time to take the now empty trailer back to Sunflower. 

We parked the trailer in their lot where it had been and Jeremy went in to pay.  I didn’t want to sit in the truck, so I unhitched the trailer and put Sunflowers chain, boomer and ball that we had rented on the trailer before I went in to see what was keeping Jeremy.  For the first time in all the times we have rented from Sunflower, there was a line.  He had finally made it up to the next position when I came in.  Eventually, we settled up and were on our way home at 3:15

It was pretty obvious we were not going to be on time to pick up the kids in Emporia at 5:00 since we needed to shower before we went out in the general public.  A quick phone call to Jeremy’s folks and the time was changed to 5:15.  That trip was also blissfully uneventful and everyone was home safely by 8:00.  What a day!

Our weekend camping at the farm was also very successful in a bunch of completely unplanned ways, so check back to hear about that!

It lives!

Most of you will know that we have had an old ford tractor sitting on our driveway for about 3 years.  Last night we decided it was finally time to start the work of getting it running again so that we can use it on the farm but first a bit of background.

This style of tractor (the Ford N series – 2N, 8N and 9N) was the most popular tractor in America when it came out.  Shockingly, about 60% of the tractors sold back then (1940’s – 1960’s) are still running somewhere.  The reason is that these machines are so simple there’s just almost nothing that breaks on them!  They are also designed so that an average person can work on them.

Isn't she pretty? 

Ours came from Jeremy grandfather by way of Jeremy’s uncle and is a 1945 Ford 2N (the oldest version of these tractors) making it now 67 years old.  In 1984, Jeremy’s grandpa bought 2 of these tractors.  He took the attachments he wanted and the newer of the two out to Colorado with him when he retired and left the other tractor and unwanted attachments in Kansas on his son Rob’s farm.  Uncle Rob used the tractor once in a great while, so it mostly spent the next 15 years sitting exposed in a field.  When we bought land in Arkansas and were talking about wanting something that we could leave down there to brush hog with, Jeremy’s grandfather, Ott, said we could have this tractor.  We were told at the time that it has a crack in the block that “seals up once she gets warm”, that it needed a new battery and that it needed new front tires.  In the process of loading and unloading it, we also determined that it needed new brakes. 

The list of things to fix and the fact that Jeremy broke his foot on it bringing it home, meant that we felt this was a big job requiring some serious time commitment.  Sufficed to say, we didn’t find the time until now.  When we started working on it about 7:30 last night, we expected to get the tires aired up (to see how bad the leaks are) and maybe get it to turn over if we could successfully jump it from our truck (a simple car battery doesn’t have the juice to jump the tractor). 

Old farmer teaching us about our old tractor

We borrowed an air compressor from our neighbor and hit the gold mine.  It turns out that our neighbor, Ralph, spent a healthy portion of his younger life driving and working on ford tractors.  He came over to help us set up the air compressor and it was like watching an artist with their chosen media.  He leaned over and adjusted this knob, turned this under the hood, put this here, directed us in a few things to help and in about 5 minutes the old tractor was running on the driveway!  We couldn’t believe it.  It literally just took putting air in the tires and jumping the battery and she was ready to go.  Also, the thing with the brakes turned out to be that the right brakes were just locked up.  Apparently WD40 fixes that so no need to fix the brakes.

Tractor on life support

We drove it down the driveway to make it easier to load tomorrow and take out to the farm and sat back to marvel and this little tractor.  Our neighbor also kindly offered to come out to the farm with us on Friday and help us get comfortable with driving it and using the implements we have (blade and a 2 bottom plow).  We will need to get a new battery (this one can be jumped but doesn’t hold a charge) and add some hydraulic fluid before she’s running great, but we now have a working tractor!  If we’d known it was that easy, we would have used it to clear the roads of all the snow 2 winters ago. 

So now we can add “tractor” to the list of old tools we are ready to use on our farm.  With a little luck, this old guy will help us do a lot of work this weekend.