Too wet to plant!
I went up to the farm last Friday (I get every other Friday off because I work 9 hour days the rest of the time - its called compressed work schedule - CWS). I got there about 2pm and immediately noticed how wet the gardens were. Damn! I had taken my starter plants up - the tomatoes and cabbages, etc. No way i was going to be tilling in the two patches I have left to plant - portions of the plots were literally under water!
Barn Cleanup
Anyway, I decided to make the best of my time so I got the tractor out and went to clear out more stuff from the old red barn. This barn was meant for livestock and eventually I will use it again for my goats (I hope), but for now I want to clean it up so that it doesn't provide a home for SNAKES! Last year I killed a HUGE rattle snake sitting right at the door of the red barn - he almost got me while I was mowing in front with the riding mower! He was coiled up, rattling and ready to strike - I couldn't hear him over the mower engine so I got way too close for comfort! Normally, I would leave such a snake alone - they serve their purpose eating up all the varmints - but this was just too close to my personal space to let go. Bottom line is that I needed to clean up this barn so that snakes just aren't attracted to hang out there for dinner.
I used the pallet forks on the front of my tractor to tear out an old partially rotted wood floor (and some rotted hay that was on the floor). I piled up the wood near the front of the building to sort through later - some of it was salvageable. I used some old wood to form a platform on the pallet forks to hold the loose hay so that i could haul it off to the garden patches. I didn't put the hay on the gardens but placed it next to them. I want to use the hay as a mulch on the patches this year instead of relying only on plastic row covers like I did last year. Once I had a big nasty section of the floor done I used the tractor tiller and the front loader to regrade the floor - it was in rough shape and very uneven. It will need more work, but it is much better then it was before.
Some "on the fly" landscaping
While going back and forth over the farm delivering my loads of hay I noticed that there was an unevenness in the "yard" where I removed some fence posts last weekend. So I used the tiller to loosen the soil and the frontloader to grade the ground. The front loader has a mode called "float" that adjusts the loader blade so that it kind of remains level with the plain of the tractor wheels (thats what I think it does anyway!) I "float" the blade over the loosened dirt and it smooths it up quite nicely! I love this technique of landscaping. I will be making much more use of it in the future - especially where I removed those tree roots last year!
Useful find
I discovered that some of the 4x4 posts that were used as an underlayment for part of the wood floor were still in good shape and long enough to use for my grape arbor posts! I managed to get 4 of them that were serviceable as posts.
Fire FIRE!
I finally got back to the scrap wood and sorted through it - there was A LOT of junk wood that was useless to me - so I thought I would burn it! The ashes would be great on the garden - lots of potash in ashes (go figure!) So I loaded up the front forks with a big load of old pallets and some scrap wood and drove it down into the big garden patch. The tractor wheels sunk into the wet ground almost 8 inches! I tried to follow the same path out as I took into the garden so as not too compact too much of the soil. I poured some diesel fuel on the wood and set it ablaze! Here are some pictures:
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| The first load. See the tracks in the mud from the tractor wheels? |
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| I added 3 more loads of wood to the fire, but I did it by carrying the pieces from the tractor loader by foot rather than driving the tractor back over the garden! |
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| The fire burned for HOURS! I was up until midnight with it to make sure that it wasn't going to get out of control. It was still burning at midnight - but the flames weren't leaping up high like in these pictures. |
Here are some videos of the fire!
Weekend cut short
I got up Saturday morning and immediately checked the fire. It was still a bit warm, but only a few embers were left. Almost nothing was left! Not even ashes. The winds over night must have been enough to blow away the ashes. I got my tractor and took the 4x4's I had salvaged and put them in the ground. Then I got a call from Katherine (my wife). She was having some chest pains. I wasn't alarmed as she has had issues with a tachycardia for a number of years. However, this was worse and recurring too frequently. I encouraged her to wait a bit and see if it would subside like it usually does before calling 911 (in retrospect a bad idea! If you get chest pains and you know you have a heart condition, call 911!) After the call I get to working on stripping the bark off of the last two posts that I I need for my arbor. Its hard work - I used a broadaxe and a drawknife to strip the bark and shape the posts. Just as I was getting close to finishing the last post - I get another call. This time Katherine just tells me to come back home as quick as possible and she will call 911 right away! I packed up my plants, Smokey (our dog) and hit the road! She called me again (from the ER) while i was driving back to let me know she was ok and that she was stable and not in danger so that I wouldn't be worried while driving. So 2 1/2 hours later I get home and call her in the hospital. She was being admitted. Anyway, long story short - Katherine is ok - she had an aortic spasm due to an inflamed pericardium (the sack around the heart) that was probably caused by a viral infection. Not the tachycardia related at all! Whew!
