Posts Tagged ‘ATV trailer’
Everything Right
It is not uncommon to hear people lament that “It’s been one of those days,” where everything goes wrong. On the other hand, how often do you hear about a day when everything went right? That was an experience that I enjoyed yesterday.
We have a pretty significant number of projects we could undertake right now. I started the day yesterday by asking Cyndie if she had any priorities since she wasn’t going anywhere and the weather was dry and sunny. We agreed that doing some wood chipping would be a valuable precursor to continuing to primp the labyrinth garden plants before World Labyrinth Day on May 2nd.
Now, we don’t have the luxury of just stepping out the door and turning on the wood chipper with the flip of a switch. The steps involved before beginning this project are a little complex since it is the first attempt of the season. (Another first!)
Here is what needed to happen in order to get to the 3-point PTO wood chipper:
Since the ground is too soft for the big diesel tractor, we decided to chip up on the driveway. That meant we would need to collect tree limbs from the woods and then haul the wood chips down to the storage area near the labyrinth. That meant we needed to use the ATV and its trailer.
- Make sure the New Holland 3415 tractor starts.
- Make sure the Grizzly ATV starts.
- Remove the snowplow blade from the ATV.
- Put batteries in the Greenworks riding mower and move it out of the garage.
- Back the big tractor up to the wood chipper and make all the connections.
- Drive the ATV down to the hay shed to get the trailer stored there.
- Remove the water tank and miscellaneous apparatus from the trailer.
- Drive the ATV and trailer into the woods to collect tree limbs from staged piles.
- Unload the limbs onto the driveway so we can shoot the wood chips directly into the trailer.
By the time we finished all that, I needed to get some lunch. Not on the list, while I was in the hay shed getting the trailer, I noticed a couple more pallets that would be perfect for a second set to use in the compost area. They were stacked behind a lot of other things, so it took a few minutes of acrobatic arranging to pull them out.
After lunch, Cyndie suggested putting a tarp in the trailer to catch the wood chips. I brought out the big tractor and parked the two machines side by side.
The only thing that didn’t go as planned was that a couple of limbs we’d hauled up were a hair too big. We just set them aside and forged ahead, undaunted. We filled the trailer two times with the limbs we had brought out of the woods.
I drove the ATV down the hill and pulled the tarp out of the trailer to dump the chips. It worked slick.
The wood we hauled made more chips than we expected, so we chose not to bring more branches up to the driveway and began the process of cleaning up and parking vehicles back in the shop garage.
It is rare that I ever accomplish anything without having to cope with some interruption or failure along the way. I’m happy to report that yesterday was very special because everything we set out to do worked without a hitch.
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Much Sawing
Put gas in the chainsaw three times. Hauled six trailer-loads of branches away. I wouldn’t call the project done, but we made a respectable dent in the big maple tree clean-up, and we have it to a point where everything can just sit for a while, allowing us to direct our attention to more pressing needs for a few days.
A lot of grass deserves to be mowed, but that won’t happen today. Rain will be the dominant theme for a while, so I may get back on my braiding of polypropylene bale twine for use as a wrapping on the new posts in the middle of the paddock.
Here are some more photos from yesterday’s effort:
Thankfully, another large effort with the scariest tool I use has ended safely. Somehow, I didn’t even get the chainsaw blade pinched the whole day. That may be a first. Got startled by unexpected shifting of heavy wood a couple of times, but I came through without bumps or bruises.
I am very happy putting the saw back on its shelf for a while.
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Helping Ourselves
We asked for help in finishing the landscaping along the steep edges of our new driveway. I’m taking the lack of response from our excavator to indicate they are either too busy or simply not interested. They must not need our money.
It is a peeve of mine when contractors choose to “ghost” potential customers after initial contact. I generally follow the idiom of squeaky wheels getting the grease but after multiple unsuccessful attempts to communicate our genuine interest in paying for help with our landscaping, we have fallen back on doing what we can with our limited resources.
Up by the shop/garage, I have been feathering the edge with composted manure. Yesterday, we mined a ten-year-old pile of dirt down by our southern border drainage ditch to use at the bottom of the driveway by the road, filling the trailer behind the ATV with hand shovels. We made six trips back and forth and covered a humblingly short length of both sides.
Cyndie suggested we rent a skid steer tractor. She’s not wrong that it would be a more impressive machine for addressing this size of a job. My first hesitation with that plan is that I would be the person to operate it and I’ve never driven one before. The subsequent issues include our lack of truck or trailer to transport the machine, the small amount of available dirt a machine like that could move, and the abuse my novice use would do to the surrounding terrain.
We don’t make a lot of efficient progress with our shovel-fulls at a time, but I have the skills to operate a shovel and can do the work with minimal collateral damage.
The only real challenge beyond not being able to finish the job quickly is coping with my self-conscious embarrassment about the neighbors’ opinions over our using hand tools to tackle work that deserves machines. Working down at the road leaves our methods glaringly obvious to local traffic passing by.
My slow and primitive methods are less obvious up on the other end of the driveway. I’m not certain our efforts will ultimately produce the desired results but Cyndie and I agree what we can do ourselves will be better than nothing. Time will tell.
Having successfully made that small bit of progress near the road yesterday, I’d like to keep going while the weather allows until we use up the rest of the old pile. It’s a good exercise in coping with my apprehension over the impressions my methods give to local observers.
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Trailer Appreciation
Boy am I ever glad to have a trailer for the ATV again. This weekend I put it to good use hauling logs out of the woods and cleaning up failed attempts at round bales in our fields.
The neighbors who rented our fields this summer did not have much success trying to get bales out of it. I feel for them. There never seemed to be enough consecutive dry days to finish the job. Instead, the cut hay got soaked by rain. They tried raking it out in hopes of drying the cut grass, but then it rained on the windrows.
Eventually, they enlisted a beef farmer to claim the wet hay, because cows are a lot less picky about moldy hay. He created some relatively ugly looking round bales, maybe since he was working with old, wet hay. By the time he finally tried picking up the bales and hauling them away, five of them fell apart. He just left those where they lay, creating dead spots in our fields.
I guess that is the land owner’s responsibility.
My first challenge in removing the old piles was forking the heavy, wet, moldy hay into the trailer. The second challenge was figuring out what to do with it. I generally use old hay as natural fill, but none of the many spots where we could use fill are easy to reach.
The worst spot was along our property line behind Cyndie’s perennial garden. Instead of being able to dump the load all at once, I needed to empty the trailer one pitch fork-full at a time, carrying each about 35-yards through an obstacle course of low hanging branches and a single fence wire I needed to duck under.
I only bumped my head about 3-dozen times while making repeated trips in and out.
It is super to have the trailer again, but it doesn’t fill or empty itself automatically and it can’t navigate the obstacle course behind the garden. I guess I wasn’t thinking about how much work I have to do whenever I endeavor to use the trailer.
It has me thinking I should have given more thought to that desire to replace the one Cyndie sold.
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Another Trailer
Problem solved.
Enough said.
For the backstory, see “Sad Laughter.”
Cyndie financed the purchase of a replacement for the trailer that she mistakenly sold, and she found a way to have it shipped for free.
On to the next challenge.
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Twice Happy
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, there is no project around here that is as satisfying as chipping a pile of branches. The ability to accomplish two things at once is very rewarding. The unending accumulation of downed branches get piled up for removal and we have an unending need for wood chips on our trails and gardens.
In comes the most useful purchase I have made in our time on this land.
I pulled out the diesel tractor for the first time in months and attached the big blue chipper for a session of munching branches. By the time I finished, I had reduced two tangled piles into a filled wood chip station down by the labyrinth.
The only thing that would have made it easier would be an ATV trailer to move the second pile of branches over to the chipper. I had to make several trips to haul them by hand because I’ve yet to replace the trailer Cyndie mistakenly sold at her barn sale.
I don’t remember paying over $200 for shipping when I bought the first one, and I balked when shopping for the replacement. There is an imitation trailer that I can buy locally to save a lot of cash, but I am wary of the quality. It very much looks like a version of “you get what you pay for” in this case.
I’m waiting around for some magic solution to appear.
Maybe I should start visiting yard sales in the area for someone willing to part with a used trailer.
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Sad Laughter
It wasn’t funny, but we found ourselves laughing over the absurdity. I feel a need to rationalize this tale of Cyndie’s-and-my-collective-failure, with more detail than is probably necessary. For those who prefer a “too-long; didn’t read” synopsis: Cyndie sold our ATV trailer, but I had no intention of letting it go.
The confusion between us goes back in two phases: to last year, when I sold our old lawn tractor, and to our current “passing in the night” level of connection lately.
I will give her credit for remembering that there was a trailer I told her we didn’t need anymore. That would have been last fall, when I sold it, along with the old Craftsman lawn tractor. Unfortunately, last week, when she was preparing to sell anything that wasn’t permanently affixed to the barn, she came upon the ATV trailer.
She thought it was the one I didn’t need.
I wrote that she converted the barn into an equine boutique, but among all the horse care products, saddles, and tack, there was fencing equipment, pitch forks, a 100 gallon stock tank, …and a trailer. I didn’t notice it at first.
So, the day after she gets the barn all set up, she flies to Dallas for a conference, notifying me that I had two appointments to cover, for people interested in our sale. I described this at work: My wife went out-of-town, leaving me home alone, and scheduled two appointments for women to come over and give me money.
The response was, “Isn’t that illegal?”
The first customer arrived Thursday night and spotted the trailer that I hadn’t even noticed was there. I told them that wasn’t for sale, and we joked about my wife selling things out from under me. Later, while pouring through multiple printouts of items and prices that Cyndie put together, I found that she did list the trailer for sale. I was flabbergasted.
She got home in the middle of the night, Friday, and as I wrote yesterday, the morning was all about the weirdness of the fraudulently purchased packages. (One more arrived in the mail yesterday.) While Cyndie was in the middle of frying eggs for breakfast, there was a knock at the door. It was a shopper for horse stuff.
I stayed in the house, grateful to no longer be responsible for trying to price Cyndie’s sale for friendly strangers who want a better deal. A short time later, Cyndie returned and I good-naturedly asked if she sold anything.
There it was.
She sold the trailer, among other things.
“WHAT!!”
I blame myself for not moving it out of the barn immediately when I discovered it. But, it was wedged behind a table of items and I didn’t want to mess up her wonderfully arranged displays. I should have put a sign on it that said, “Sold.”
I should have brought this up for discussion the moment she got home. While we cursed, whimpered, and laughed over what had just happened, I could see the moment she figured out the trailer I didn’t want was the other one. Understandably, she feels just awful now.
That trailer would have come in handy for a couple of chores I did yesterday.
We’ll probably use some money from her horse stuff sale to buy a replacement for the trailer she sold.
I’m trying to laugh about it, …to keep from crying. Sometimes, life imitates sitcoms.
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Relative Something 