A local feed store and some alpaca farmers organized a shearing event for today, held in the parking lot of the feed store. It was a great deal- $16 per llama or alpaca, much less expensive than hiring a shearer to come out to the farm to do one animal. I had been wanting to shear Dolly Llama soon, and was dreading trying to do it myself, she was one shaggy monster. So I was thrilled to see a flyer for this event last week. Continue reading “The Llama’s New ‘Do”
We are starting to get some nice garden produce already. Our lettuce is bountiful, and tonight we enjoyed both English peas and sugar snap peas. Fresh off the vine, they were delicious Continue reading “Garden Produce”
We’ve lost, and bent, quite a few things that reside under our New Holland TC30 tractor. You see, this tractor has a lot of exposed stuff on its underbelly. And that’s not good, because when you have a farm, and an old farm no less, you run over things. To start with, there is 10 foot tall reed canary grass, and then there are even taller blackberry vines, and big things can hide in there. Things that have been found hiding in our weeds, from past farm denizens and flood deposits: logs and lumber, boulders, whole trees, a truck bed, broken or bent-over fence posts (with barbed wire still attached) a clawfoot bathtub, hundreds of feet of 6″ aluminum pipe and fittings, steel barrels, huge bent gates, culvert pipes, refrigerators, a couch, an RV door, and old broken tractor implements. Those are just the few that immediately come to mind- there were many more! Our neighbors have an entire collapsed garage, plus all its contents, under there somewhere, just waiting for the next owner of the property to say, “honey, I was thinking I’d mow that patch of blackberries over there in the back pasture today.” Continue reading “‘Neath the Tractor Woes”
Quite some time ago, we bent the hydraulic power steering shaft on the tractor- a New Holland TC30. I’m not sure how or when. But, it compromised the seal, so the thing has been leaking power steering fluid like crazy. We’ve been procrastinating on fixing it (we never want to stop using the tractor!), and were just topping off the fluid all the time. Continue reading “Bent Power Steering Shaft”
A week or so after our excavation work was done, we had a break manifest in our septic tite line, near where the new drainage ditch had been dug. They had actually hit the line while they were digging, and repaired it at that point. But, what we didn’t know was that it pulled, like a thread out of a seam, through the soil and broke at a second point up near the tank. Continue reading “Septic Repairs”
At least the tiniest I’ve ever seen!
Mrs. Pete was taking a nap on the warm tractor seat this morning. Behind her is the newly cleared hillside. I have covered it with 50 lbs of grass seed, and a layer of straw to discourage erosion.
Our garden beds are looking pretty good. We have pole peas that are already about three feet tall, and blooming. Carrots, beans, lettuce, green onions, cilantro, and Brussels sprouts are all coming in well. I just got in from weeding and fertilizing everything this morning. We also have potatoes planted on the sandy hillside, looking nice; along with strawberries and tomatoes. Continue reading “How Does Your Garden Grow?”
Kirk has been enjoying the use of our new road up from the pasture, using the tractor to haul up debris from down there that was a bit too scary to drive on the street. Much of what he’s retrieved are standard-sized logs, metal chunks etc that have probably arrived here from past floods.
But this mammoth looks like it may have been something from the original farmstead, back in the 1800’s. I know that the homesteader family logged the hill and had an on-site sawmill from which they cut boards to build the barns. It took Kirk some finessing to get this onto the tractor bucket (you can only see the tractor’s roll bar and Kirk’s head behind the log, it’s so big). But he did, and got it up the hill and into the to-be-processed scrap pile. Our little 30-hp tractor does pretty well carting big loads like this around.
We’re thinking of what we could do with this one, to keep it around for posterity. Maybe we’ll make it into a bench or something. Any creative ideas?
The new dog yard is finished! We plan to eventually build a large deck on this side of the house, so we wanted to choose fencing materials that would be complimentary to a cedar deck design. So, we used tight-knot cedar 4×4 posts, and cedar 2×4 rails. We did not get these at the “big box” store- these came from a local lumber yard, and the wood is beautiful, nearly flawless, and straight (but was also expensive!). Continue reading “Fancy New Dog Potty Yard”