Posts Tagged ‘mowing’
Candle, Burning
Ends, both.
I’m gaining some sense of what life is like for a lot of the farmers around here. Most of them whom we have come to know have non-farming jobs in addition to the crop and livestock work they do.
My day-job has gotten so intense, I’m puttin’ in hours today, even though it’s Friday, a day I don’t usually go in. At the same time, our ranch work is peaking, with the unbelievable spring growth about doubling the size of green things every two days.
The second I got home on Wednesday, I hopped on the borrowed John Deere lawn tractor and struggled till dusk to knock down the too long and too thick grass that hadn’t been cut since the old Craftsman engine popped a gasket two weeks ago.
Yesterday, same routine, different tractor. I walked in the door from work, stripped off the clean clothes and donned the grubs to crank up the brush cutter on the diesel. It was dry enough to cut the hay-field. Not for hay, but for the sake of mowing down weeds before they can mature.
We plan to mow that field short all summer long, hoping to give the grass a better chance at beating out the weeds. It’s a simple method that we have chosen in place of applying chemical weed killers. Just requires a little more patience, and an alternate source of hay bales for a year. We think we have both.
What I don’t have is, enough sleep.
Luckily, I’ve got incredible support from Cyndie, the energizer bunny. She is doubling her efforts to tend to the trimming up and down fence lines, while caring for all the animals, maintaining the labyrinth, buying supplies, Avenging poison ivy, watering and feeding our transplanted maple tree, and keeping me indescribably well fed.
Speaking of caring for our animals, I caught a picture of her the other day, giving Legacy a massage. That was about the same time I spotted the chickens hanging out on the bottom board of the paddock fence.
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That’s all I have time for. There’s work to be done!
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Goal Achieved
I was wearing a short-sleeve tee-shirt and mowing grass in the warm afternoon sunshine on November 1st. Whaaaaat?
It’s for real. Of course, I also then went inside and watched some baseball on television afterward. It’s like a summer with no end. Something tells me it might make winter’s inevitable arrival come on with an abrupt switch when it finally hits.
So, my main motivation to get out on the lawn tractor was to test out my latest landscaping efforts and see how navigable the path around the southern fence lines is.
It worked! Not flawlessly, but it did work. I have wanted to accomplish this goal for a long time, so this was very satisfying.
There are two spots in particular where I needed to get off the tractor to lift it over a too-steep hazard where there are runoff trenches across the path. If I want to be able to drive across these, I’m going to need to modify them to create much more gradual sloping edges.
That can be done, but it’s not imperative that it happen right away. I’m kinda hoping our grass will stop growing and the snow season will arrive soon enough that I won’t need to be driving around there again until next spring.
After I completed a return trip along that fence line, I turned the corner and was headed toward the labyrinth garden. There, I discovered two deer casually grazing the variety of growing treats within. They looked up at me with mild curiosity, surveying my approach. It surprised me a bit that they didn’t act alarmed or run off.
So I just kept rolling toward them, pulling out my phone to see if I could capture them in a picture to share with Cyndie.
They’re there, but the natural concealment of their coloring is very noticeable, because they are mostly not!
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Shaping Terrain
Despite the sprinkling rain that pestered most of the day yesterday, I decided to try moving some dirt and turf from the drainage ditch along our southern property line to the adjacent sloped path.
When the new fence was installed and the drainage ditch improved, there wasn’t much width remaining beside a little bend in the fence. It was an impediment to being able to use the tractor to mow that section of path around the outside of the hay-field fence.
Originally, I envisioned using the loader on the tractor to dig out the sediment that has been accumulating in the ditch, but it hasn’t been dry enough to do that for months.
Since I was already working along that fence line this weekend, I decided to see what I could accomplish using a shovel to dig it out by hand. It was a little messy, and a bit tedious, but it was probably a better method for then using the material removed to improve the path.
Using blocks of dirt and turf that I could barely lift with the shovel, I built up the low side until it was wide enough to fit at least the lawn tractor, for now. Might be dicey fitting the diesel around that bend.
The strip around the fence only received infrequent attention and would grow tall and thick, so I had been mowing navigable portions with the brush cutter. Now that I will be able to drive the lawn tractor around, it will be convenient enough that I can keep it cut short all the time.
Well, as short at the rest of the lawn, which all grows so fast that short is a relative term.
With that little narrow bend of path fixed, there was only one other barrier remaining to allow driving the full circumference of our horse-fenced fields. Back in the corner by the woods there is an old ravine that was created by years of water runoff. Previous owners had dumped a lot of old broken up concrete in it to slow the erosion.
We have created a better defined intentional swale a short distance above that directing the bulk of energized flow into the main drainage ditch. It crossed my mind to fill in the ravine, but some water still wants to follow the ease of that natural route and I’d rather not fight it.
Simple solution: a bridge. For now, nothing fancy. I used a few left over fence posts and then broke down and actually purchased additional lumber to make it wide enough to drive across.
I placed them across the washout yesterday in the rain, leaving the task of cutting a notch in the dirt on each side to level them for today.
Then I will be driving to the airport to pick up George and Anneliese. I’ve come to the end of my solo weekend on the ranch. They are going to return the favor of airport transport after midnight tonight when Cyndie arrives home from Guatemala, so I can get some sleep before the start of my work week.
I’m looking forward to having everyone home again.
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Uncharacteristic Wetness
Over and over, day after day, waves of precipitation have been dumping rain on top of the rain from the day before. Even though we might get a couple of dry days every so often between the waves, it hasn’t been enough time for the ground to drain.
This isn’t the kind of weather we usually get at this time of year. In my lifetime, the middle of summer would be when lawns started to turn brown and required watering. As fall arrived, the creek beds and swamps would all be dry.
That doesn’t seem to be happening anymore. Last year, I was surprised that I had to keep mowing the lawn just as frequently in the fall as I did in the spring. Now it is happening again, although this year it is even worse. I can’t keep up with mowing the fast-growing grass because the rain has been too persistent.
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The wetness this year has led to the dermatitis our horses are dealing with, and yesterday I noticed the excessive moisture is starting to show up on the house and garage. The step to the front door of our house stayed wet along the seam and was showing signs of moss growth. The stones along the base of the garage are turning green with algae.
It feels like the climate is changing.
I wonder if anyone is looking into the possibility.
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Very Wet
Yesterday was a beautiful day and we spent the middle hours of it in moderate traffic driving home from the lake. I don’t know why it didn’t bother me more to have driven up to that beautiful place and then experience most of the time confined indoors due to incredibly wet weather. When it finally turned nice, we were packing up and driving home.
For some reason, I didn’t mind one bit.
Just like that, we were home and it was back to the regular routine. I finished the day mowing our grass. The ground was completely saturated in many areas, surprisingly so in the back yard, to the point that the mower left muddy tire tracks in its wake. There is standing water in multiple places, which I needed to navigate around instead of cutting.
I’m looking forward to the few days of dry weather being forecast for the beginning of this week.
The signal booster I ordered last week is scheduled to arrive Wednesday. Getting it installed and calibrated will become my primary objective on Friday if the weather permits.
If it works as intended, it should significantly reduce the time it takes for me to load photos and program my daily posts. I’m hoping to convert the precious freed up minutes into added sleep time.
Getting more sleep will be a welcome change to my daily routine. I’m hoping my posts will begin to reflect it with a little bit less sleep-typing going on during the processsssssss.
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Cutting Grass
Sure, I spent most of Friday mowing the hay-field, and then Saturday I mowed the lawn, but those two projects were easy compared to the work involved in cutting the overgrown grass in the labyrinth on Sunday. The growth since Cyndie last mowed was as thick as it was long. Seriously, I wondered if maybe she had skipped parts of it, because it was hard to imagine that much growth in such a short time.
I paused for a photo when there was just a small strip left, just like we had done out on the hay-field.
Because it was so long, I was using our power trimmer to do the cutting. When possible, we use a reel mower that just fits between the rocks. At the rate things grow around here, I’m thinking we should keep our eyes out for reel mower with an engine to see if we can find one that would still fit the narrow path.
We would like to keep the grass cut putting-green short.
In a surprising shift from my previous mindset of being small-gas-engine-averse, we have had enough luck with the power equipment we have acquired thus far, that I am much more willing to consider the idea now.
There are just too many acres to manage and too many tasks that need to get done, to rely too heavily on human-power (even if it’s still my preference).
It helps that I have grown accustomed to wearing hearing protection, which takes the edge off.
That said, I still refuse to use a blower to clear leaves or clean sidewalks and driveways. Ain’t gonna happen.
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Weeds Begone
It took twice as long as I expected to finish cutting down the 4 acres we call our hay-field yesterday, but I was trying to do a very thorough job of removing the primary invader, Queen Anne’s Lace from sight. The biennial crop is the most visible evidence that we aren’t growing high quality grass hay out there yet.
There is some grass there, and it has become obvious to us from the regular mowing we have done around the labyrinth and along the fence lines, that doing so will help the grasses and hurt the weeds.
Right now, we are thinking about just keeping this mowed short for a full year. We may have some additives applied to the soil, and add desireable grass seed over the top, before getting back to baling it again the year after.
The project was almost over before I had even completed the first pass along the fence line. For no apparent reason the shear bolt suddenly gave out and the blades stopped cutting.
We had waited the entire summer to have this field cut, and when it didn’t happen any other way, we decided to finally just chop it down ourselves. This interruption had me wondering if maybe we were making the wrong decision, but I had a replacement bolt and it was an easy fix, so I didn’t let that problem stop me for long.
When it became clear that it was going to take all afternoon to complete the task, Cyndie was kind enough to bring me lunch in the field. It felt just like farming!
When I got to the last little strip to be mowed, I wanted to include Cyndie in the moment of achievement. She was serving the horses their evening feed at the barn, so I whistled to get her attention as I was lining the tractor up for the final cut.
She heard the second of my shrill chirrups, and was looking to ascertain whether I was in need of her assistance while I was backing into position. I was intending to point out that it would be the last pass and I just wanted her to share in the joy of accomplishment, when the blades of the mower started clattering on a rock I hadn’t noticed.
The sound of mower blades hitting obstacles always tends to create a panic response. I stomped on the clutch and lifted the mower. My big moment of victory was dashed by a dose of humble pie. In a comical turn, now she did think something was wrong.
She hollered something to me, but I couldn’t hear her words over the rat-tat-tat of the diesel engine idling. After several fruitless tries, we walked toward each other until I heard she was asking if I had my camera with me so she could capture the moment.
We laughed over the fact I hadn’t hit a single thing all day, but just as I was hoping to get her attention, …clank. I had already mowed over that rock without incident in the other direction. Backing across it on the slope was a different story.
She took the pictures of my final successful pass.
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Did you see that bird she captured in the last shot? It looks as happy as me over having our field freshly cut.
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No Nap
A nap did not materialize yesterday because our rain storms came in waves of two and we decided to try getting a little work done between each. Somewhat randomly, I decided to get out the chainsaw (with its dull blade) and knock down a small dead pine in the back yard before heading down to clear stumps along the wooded portion of fence line on the south side of the back pasture.
When rain drove us back inside, I headed to the garage and pulled the mower deck from beneath the lawn tractor. I had figured out why I was having such a difficult time leveling things. Bent blades.
We decided to make a run to buy blades, and while we were in town on a rainy day, catch the “Jason Bourne” movie in Hudson. That series is always a guarantee for dizzying violent action, and didn’t disappoint.
Chatting up the knowledgeable source at the hardware store in River Falls, I learned what I need to do to get our old Craftsman mower to work as designed. I need to treat it better. He strongly recommended that any engine smaller than a car should exclusively be fed premium gasoline. He said I should avoid the risk of striking sticks, roots, stumps, rock, gravel, and protruding dirt mounds, by not driving over them.
Obvious, really. It’s funny though, because I had just the opposite perspective and was trying to find out if there was a different type of mower I should get that would allow me to mow the grass here and not worry about the sticks, roots, stumps… You know, everything around this property.
For one thing, I need to stop trying to use the lawn tractor on the trail through the woods. That will need to be the trimmer, or, if we have neglected it too long, the brush cutter behind the diesel tractor.
When we got home in the afternoon, I put a new chain on the chainsaw while Cyndie gave Delilah some attention and then together they went down and did the same for the horses. I cut down the other most obvious dead pine tree that was along the trail around the pasture on the north side of the driveway.
When I returned from that project, I found Cyndie pulling weeds near the round pen, lamenting the myriad growth sprouting from the sand within. The tenacious unwanted growth of weeds and grasses seems to be the theme of our summer this year.
I loitered along the fence, talking with her for a long enough time that the horses finally joined us. For some unknown reason, they have been choosing to stay up in the dusty lime screenings by the barn for the majority of their days lately, even though we have been offering them more open access to green pastures.
That’s not all bad, because they are still overweight, but to me, it looks like a lot less pleasant existence.
Cyndie stopped pulling weeds and offered to groom some of the grime off Legacy. The horses had obviously rolled in the mud after the rain earlier in the day.
It was a moment that went a long way to counter-balance the angst of tending to all the challenges we face in taking care of this place.
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Rewarding Progress
We started the day with some group exercise, walking the horses, in pairs, uphill and down, but the main event of the day yesterday was a divide and conquer effort on the ranch. I’d say we conquered. On top of that, we did so under a time constraint, because we had Cyndie’s 40th high school class reunion to attend for dinner back in our old stomping’ grounds an hour’s drive away.
My main goal was to tend to the manure composting area, which was getting overfull and in dire need of rotation. With time limited, we decided to just transfer a large portion of the old piles to a secondary storage location and dump them in one big pile for distribution later.
That plan led to selecting and preparing a new spot for a pile of (mostly) composted manure. The place we settled on, near Cyndie’s wild flower garden on the north side of our driveway, was all tall grass and weeds. We are a little sensitive about weeds right now, and I did intend to eventually knock down the growth in the pasture area over there, so my focus suddenly shifted to using the diesel tractor and the brush cutter to mow the entire area.
That’s a big project, and more than I planned to bother with at that time.
Cyndie volunteered to take on relocating the piles of manure on her own while I mowed —no small task— and we were off. That area on the north side of the driveway has a lot of pine trees that create quite an obstacle course for the big tractor. It turns the project into a busy process of maneuvering, offering very little physical or mental rest in the tractor seat.
I only picked off one T-post along the fence line, and hit one large hidden rock, but the number of pine branches abused was too high to count. To her credit, Cyndie hit a grand slam of progress in moving ALL of the oldest piles from our composting area.
Delilah got the short end of things for the day, as we had little time to smother her with attention before serving her dinner in her kennel and hitting the road to visit our past. The reunion dinner was located a stone’s throw from our old Eden Prairie home, at the Bent Creek golf club.
I graduated a year after Cyndie, so I was attending as a spouse, but high school lasts 4 years with multiple grade classes, so I knew many of these people as well as I know my classmates. Some were neighbors from when I grew up, others were siblings of people in my class, so it was just as fun for me to visit and catch up with folks as it was for Cyndie.
I had an additional agenda to collect information from the planners and check the number of attendees to use as reference in planning the reunion for my own graduating class, next year at this time. The first meeting for our planning committee has just been scheduled to occur a couple weeks into August.
Holy cow, August starts tomorrow! My class reunion is just a blink away.
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Inspiration Fades
It happens. Inspiration will wax and wane. My enthusiasm for this adventure we embarked on at Wintervale is ebbing away.
It has been a tough week for me. Where we once seemed to be enjoying a charmed life here, with progress advancing in surprisingly magical ways and solutions flowing with unexplainable ease, our situation of late has become a lot less mystical.
Have we gone off track somewhere? I don’t know. It’s life. Sometimes there are more problems than solutions for a while.
I’m sure there are a lot of reasons for businesses to fail. Ours is simply failing to get started.
Full disclosure, I am writing from a state of overworked exhaustion. Why? Hay. Again. And the thought of facing today’s task of manure management, again.
I threw 100 bales, 200 times yesterday, loading the borrowed trailer and unloading it. Carrying bales up and up to stack them in our shed. It is an endurance exercise where the climb gets higher as the fatigue grows ever more debilitating. At first, the bales seem light, but at the end, they feel a lot heavier.
Today, I need to move the compost piles to make room for more. Since I returned to the day-job, I haven’t been tending the piles in the daily manner I did when I was home all day. Once, every other weekend, is not cutting it.
It’s a buzz-kill.
Meanwhile, there are dangerous trees that broke off and are hung up in surrounding branches over our trail that I need to get after. And siding that needs to be scraped and stained before winter. On Monday, it will be August. Projects that should happen before winter arrives are beginning to loom large.
And we have yet to get our hay-field cut even one time this summer. It has become a field of weeds that are gleefully sowing their seeds for further domination. That is probably the biggest discouragement. It is why we have needed to trailer in more hay than before and it is the exact opposite direction from growing desirable hay ourselves.
It will go a long way to improving my outlook when that field finally gets cut and the weedy debris removed. We have decided to take a full year from hay production and plan to cut it continuously to stop the cycle of weeds growing to their seeding phase. We may also add some recommended soil enhancers and then plant a custom mix of grass seeds in hopes of achieving our goal of getting good quality hay to grow right at home.
That gives me a year of something to look forward to. More mowing. You know how much I love mowing.
Oh, by the way, our lawn tractor is not holding up to the abuse I put it through. I need to shop for something else. Maybe if I do it right, I’ll end up with a machine that I like so much it will change how I feel about cutting grass.
That’s what it is all about here: grass hay and lawn grass. Who knew I would find myself so fixated on a task to which I held such disdain in my previous years?
No wonder my inspiration has a tendency to fade every so often.
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Relative Something 