Posts Tagged ‘creative solutions’
Awkward Delivery
In the middle of the day yesterday, I received a text warning of a delivery of feed for the horses expected to happen in 40 minutes. I headed down the driveway with Asher, hoping to meet the driver on the road, in case he hadn’t been here before. Previous deliveries have gone the smoothest when they park their huge box truck on the road and use a three-wheeled forklift to travel up the driveway to the barn.
I’m glad I was there when the truck arrived, but it didn’t make much difference in the end. I don’t know how many drivers they have, but it was another first-timer. He appreciated my advice; however, the truck he was given didn’t have a forklift. It had a folded liftgate on the back and two versions of pallet jacks inside, neither of which would work on a gravel surface.
This was a first since This Old Horse started using this supplier for feed. I invited the driver to walk up and take a look at the situation himself to see if we could conjure up a method that could work. He decided it would be possible to back the truck up to the barn, and we could transfer the 40 bags by hand. I wasn’t worried about that solution, since I had moved one entire pallet-full by myself just two months earlier when the barn doors were frozen shut. Two of us could make quick work of moving 40 bags.
As the driver maneuvered the truck into position, I saw his tires sinking deep into the turf beyond the area of gravel. Those ruts will complement the many holes made there by horse hooves when they got loose on Cyndie a couple of weeks ago.
I don’t know what the load capacity of his lift gate on the back of the truck is, but it looked like he was severely taxing it when the loaded pallet settled onto the wobbling gate. He struggled mightily to get the tongues of his electric-powered pallet jack out from under the pallet because the significant bend of the straining gate made the angle almost impossible.
Once he was able to lower the gate down to stable ground, it was a reasonably easy effort for the two of us to move the bags a couple of steps to an empty pallet inside the barn. It was an overall awkward process, but a reasonable solution that avoided him driving the load back and waiting for a different truck to be able to re-deliver to us some other day.
I’m all for creative problem-solving. As a bonus, I kept the pallet the bags were on, instead of having him take it back, like I usually do. It looked like a good candidate for containing compost piles.
.
.
Creative Solutions
In more than a decade of living here with horses, I have never gotten around to making an effort toward improving my primitive methods of composting their manure. If I were truly serious about maximizing my operation, I could have put in a base material on top of the bare ground and installed a roof to avoid rainstorms from saturating the piles.
Yesterday, as I was turning over the lone pile that has been cooking for a while, I was dealing with the inevitable tendency of the drying material to resist holding a cubic shape. It naturally slides off to become much more of a pyramid. Since the outer 6 inches won’t be actively composting, the narrowing top portion of the pile is much less efficient than a cubed shape.
Having contemplated a lazy man’s method of a walled fixture to square up the sides, I finally took steps to test my theory.
With my mindset of wanting to reuse materials, I headed down to the hay shed and scrounged for three pallet possibilities. Right in front, I found a scrap roll of 1/4-inch hardware cloth covered in pigeon droppings. How appropriate, I thought.
I stapled the hardware cloth to two of the pallets and relied on the third having minimal gaps between its boards. Grabbing some loose polypropylene twine lying nearby, I put everything on a wheelbarrow and headed to the compost area. Crudely tying the corners of the pallets together, I tossed the pile inside, easily making it much taller than previously possible.
Why it took me so long to do this is a testament to procrastination.
There is an area in the paddock where the clay soil at the surface is pottery-grade quality. When it gets wet, the weight of the horses sinks their feet down a dramatic depth. The soil around that spot has less clay, but is equally messy when wet. So it doesn’t make sense to me how the horses can create a dry path at an angle across the middle of this otherwise disastrous zone.
I don’t know how they do it, but I wish they would make paths like this in all the other messy areas of the paddocks for all of our sakes.
Creative solutions R us.
.
.
Paving Paradise
We are experimenting with a new way to improve a particularly wet and muddy portion of one trail through our woods. Originally, I was hoping we could simply cover it with wood chips. It worked for a while, but we haven’t been chipping branches frequently enough to produce the supply needed to cover all of our trails.
The piles of wood blocks that I have been pulling off pallets salvaged from the day-job are suddenly proving valuable. Instantly, we have gone from having too many of these lying around, to not having enough to cover the muddy lengths of trail that need the most help.
It is interesting to consider the path (no pun intended) these pieces of former trees have traveled. Somewhere, trees are cut down and milled into boards. Then the wood gets cut into these shapes and nailed to pallets. The company that manufactures the products we receive at the day-job mount their units onto the pallets for shipment and charge the end customer for the wood.
We have asked if they wanted the pallets returned for reuse, but like so many other things in today’s world, since already paid for, they apparently weren’t worth the trouble. We end up with perfectly good, single-use pallets out of brand-new wood, albeit with four odd blocks nailed to the tops.
I’ve been pulling the nails to remove the blocks and using the pallets as a floor in my wood shed and beneath stored hay in the hay shed. I also claimed boards off some pallets to build hay feeding boxes for the 4 stalls in the barn. All the while, the odd blocks that were removed have been piling up.
When Cyndie started looking into a boardwalk as a way to get up out of the mud on our trails, we landed on the idea of using the blocks. She wanted to add some words of inspiration and enlisted Anneliese to join her in creating the enhancements.
Yesterday we laid down the first test run. So far, so good. Only a couple more miles to go. I hope there will soon be a lot of new orders for that equipment at the day-job.
It is poetic justice that we’ve found a way to ultimately bring this pallet wood full-circle, placing it on a forest floor once again.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Relative Something 