Category: Tractor

Our  tractor got stuck (again) last weekend. Here and there we have spots of old peat bog soil that can sink a tractor tire with no warning. We’ve filled in many of the bad spots, but Kirk found another one mowing near the reconditioned ditch line on our third drainage ditch.

Lucky for us, we have a good friend, Jerry, whom I’ve known since high school, who has a 4×4 truck with a winch. It seems like every time we have a tractor stuck incident, it seems we are fortunate enough to find Jerry at home and available to do a rescue! For some gas money and dinner, he comes out with no complaint! It only takes a few minutes to pull the tractor out of the worst predicaments with this baby. Thanks Jerry! 🙂

When I was shopping for a tractor, I was really waffling between a couple of brands. I ended up with the New Holland partly because it was affordable, partly because they had great financing deals, and partly because I liked that an old dealership was nearby. I figured they’d always be around. Though I plan on doing a lot of tractor fixing myself, I figured there would be times I’d need them to do repairs. And, I wanted convenience when going to buy parts.

Continue reading “Grass Trap” →

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” →