Posts Tagged ‘wood pallets’
Some Firsts
I searched my photo archives for an image I wanted to include in yesterday’s post, but didn’t find it until it was too late. It was a shot of the boulders in the center of the labyrinth after Cyndie’s cousins and brothers helped me place a rock on top back in the fall of 2017.
I was excited about having that smaller rock resting on the two boulders and ending up the tallest. It didn’t last in that position for very long. At one point, I ended up wrestling it sideways all by myself, to avoid having it tip over and roll off of both of them.
This is what it looks like now. It’s not nearly as interesting looking. I’ve added the little egg-shaped rock as an accent, but it never lasts very long there. I think birds land on it, then push off when they fly away, knocking it to the ground.
That’s the first picture of the center since the maple tree has been removed.
Yesterday morning, Cyndie and I experienced a first when she discovered she had a black eye for no known reason when she woke up. I asked her if she feels safe at home. She wakes up all night long at any sound or activity, so we have ruled out a possible stray elbow while we were sleeping.
I suggested she do a little research with Dr. Google. Of course, the list of possible causes included cancer, brain diseases, or impending death. Undaunted, she kept reading. Toward the bottom, it mentioned allergies, of which Cyndie has many. She recalled blowing her nose after working in the dusty barn and raking the winter accumulation of debris out of the labyrinth, and said the tissue was blackened. I pointed out that my weather app had alerted me to extremely high pollen levels, as well.
Those triggers, along with aging blood vessels, combine to logically explain how she might have developed a black eye overnight.
“That never happened before…”
In a first-time experiment of using pallets to frame my pile of composting manure, I peeled them off to turn the pile and add air.
I broke the composting manure apart and shoveled it back between the pallets for a second round of aerobic decomposition. This setup definitely allows me to work with larger amounts of manure in one pile. It’s inspired me to want to rig up a second set of pallets so I can start a fresh batch while this one continues to break down.
Other firsts of the season accomplished yesterday include hooking up garden hoses, pulling the leaf net off the landscape pond, and mowing grass with the push mower in four different spots where it has already gotten surprisingly tall.
It would be a more inspiring indication of our transition from winter to true spring if we hadn’t lived through so many April or even May unexpected snowstorms in our lifetimes. It’s awkward, trying to decide when to hang all our snow shovels in storage for the year.
Too soon feels like it would jinx things. It wouldn’t be a first.
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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.
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Wood Pavers
Over the weekend I processed the latest accumulation of pallets that I salvaged from work this winter, removing the blocks from the top for use as pavers on a stretch of trail prone to being muddy.
It frustrates me that the company that sends their equipment mounted to these pallets doesn’t want them back. The least I can do is find additional uses for them. I’ve already built an entire chicken coop out of dismantled pallets. My other common use has been to place them on the ground in the hay shed to allow airflow beneath stacked bales.
Unfortunately, we haven’t been stacking bales for a couple of years now. That doesn’t mean we won’t be doing that again in the future, should we have another chance to have horses on the property, so I need to keep some percentage in reserve.
I plan to offer up any growing surplus to the surrounding neighborhood. What farmer couldn’t use more pallets when they are free for the taking?
Most of the boardwalk that we already created out of the blocks is three-wide. I’ve decided to change things up now to cover more distance by placing them single-wide. We basically walk down the middle anyway, and the 4-wheeler is wide enough to straddle the boards so driving the trail won’t dislodge them.
I have to drive timidly over the existing portion of the “boardwalk” to limit the disruption.
Originally, I imagined the blocks would push down into the mud to become “grouted” in position, but that has only barely started to occur. Now I’m just waiting for decaying leaves to fill the seams between them. Hopefully, the wood won’t all rot before the blocks finally become more firmly seated in place.
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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.
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Relative Something 