Measure Twice, Cut Once

Summer is gone and with it the warm weather, we have been keeping a fire in the stove pretty much every day that we are home. We are just finishing up some contract work in the city so we have been staying with Jennifer’s Grandparents. But we should soon have that done and can get back to work on the house, and get a water well dug, we did get the road all finished thanks to our good neighbor Al. We are now just gathering up things for the well and the house and will soon decide where to dig the well. I’m thinking of putting it in the greenhouse that I will be building on the South side of the house it will be and old cast hand pump. We have been working up the two garden spots, as we have been told that a sure way to kill quack grass it to freeze the roots, last night it got down to -8 Celsius. The cows are needing a bit of hay, the fall pasture is all but gone now, we really need to do some more fencing to get the cows in the bush around the North and East side of the yard to eat all the grass. I have made a list of all the post and wire needed now to put it into the budget and hopefully get a start on it in the spring.

That is the plan and after a week or so of fixing and hauling home some very old but much loved farm equipment, I think we are just about ready to start. If you have made hay before then you know that one of the most important ingredients is lots of sunny, dry, hot weather.

The weather man is saying we will get 4 days of it so I think I will cut the first field - 5-6 acres today - and then see if the sunny weather holds. Then maybe in a couple of days the second field 3-4 acres.

Our haying story starts when we first moved to the homestead and I thought I would cut all my hay and put it up by hand. Well I had good intentions and I did buy the right scythe from the right guy, measured myself and had the handle made to fit me. I cut some and made a couple of hay cocks, even carried it in on the hand cart but when I had the chance to get some free equipment and the use of a tractor for the summer (thanks Mom!). I put the scythe back in the shed.

I think cutting hay by hand is a wonderful way to make hay, but I have made allot of hay with equipment and I know how fast it can go. I can cut, bale and stack under cover my entire hay crop, 9-12 acres in a few days with equipment. By hand you would be looking at I would be guessing here, well over 3 weeks to a month. I just don’t have that much time this year and I need to cut my own hay. For two winters we have been buying and that gets tired real fast when you have to haul it home and pay for it. We had been spending about $1000.00 a year for hay and gas to go get it. So we figured we would buy a few pieces of older, cheap equipment and put up our own. We had the hay just no way to put it up.

The first thing we bought was a self-propelled swather, we got a Massey Ferguson 36 at a farm sale for $500.00. It needed a little work on the cutter, new guards and a few sections; the section bar also broke. So far it has cost around $200.00 to get it ready. We used it to cut the hay fields early in the spring. I needed to knock down two years of uncut old hay growth. It also works great to clip tall weeds and tall mature grass the cows don’t eat in the pasture. That helps allot to keep the pasture clean of weeds and growing even.

The next thing we needed was a baler and it just so happened that my parents needed to clean out some of the old farm equipment that they had been collecting. So I hooked onto my trailer and headed down for a visit. The first thing we hauled back was an old New Holland 269 square baler. All it needed was a tire fixed and a few adjustments to get the plunger to run square. Next was a hay rake, now this piece is vintage - not sure of the date but it is old. With a little TLC, and if I take care handling it, it will rake all the hay I have.

So now I think we are ready to have at it. If all goes well we should have some very nice hay for half the price of buying it, in addition to a line of older but useable haying equipment (not including a tractor). Anyone have a nice tractor for sale cheap?

Update:
We started cutting hay and everything went pretty good, we got all the hay cut with only one break down on the swather, the section bar broke again. We will be making a new one this winter much heavier. Then we raked it and waited for it to dry and waited watching the sky for any sign of rain. We had lots of cloud but we prayed and kept an open line to the Lord and he held back the rain. God is good. After all that waiting and walking the field with a pitchfork, the swather made allot of little piles of hay as it was cutting and there needed to be pulled apart so that the hay would dry evenly. We where then ready to start baling the hay into little square bales and that went very well, until I broke both hay needles. We did get one field finished and the hay stacked. Now we are off to get the baler fixed and we should be able to finish the rest in the next couple of days God willing and the creek don’t rise as there say.

Cats

One of the most important animals on the homestead is the barn cat; we got five of them the first summer we moved to our homestead on a full time basis. We started with four males and a female, all intact. With four to one you would think that the female would have had us a great pile of kittens. But in the two summers we have had them we have been blessed with one live kitten. The little female never took to mothering she would have a few, hide them well but then forget to feed them. She just would not mother her kittens, and so we had about give up on her. The males started spraying so I had to cut them - that fixed that problem. I thought that should slow the little female down from having more kittens but it didn’t. They managed to get her into kitten the day before they got fixed.

It was a complete surprise to us the day we came home from having our third daughter - the cat came running into the house with a live kitten in her mouth. My first thought was “How long will this one last?” She put it in the box I had setup for her (the last attempted batch of kittens) in the corner out of the way. She seemed to be spending a lot of time with the kitten, and she moved it around the house a few times before settling on a spot. She had me move her box next to the computer desk; she brings her kitten out into the middle of the floor to nurse it. Now my wife and the cat both nurse their new babies together. My wife looks over at the mother cat and smiles and the cat looks up at my wife and smiles. So all is well with the cats now, all I have do is hope that after she raises this one she will be able to find an intact male to get more kittens from and then we might be blessed with more then just one kitten at a time.

When we first moved to our homestead we had all kinds of ideas for building a cheap road, for we needed about 1/8 of a mile of it. Most of them involved a lot of digging and picking rocks and then placing them carefully by hand to give a solid base to drive on.

The before top and the after shoot of the road across the hay field, still waiting for gravel.

We have now been living on the homestead for two years with no road - only a rough trail across the hay field. It was time to build a road that would be all weather. The first thing was to breakup all the sod and move most of this along with the topsoil off of the road bed. Next ditches needed to be cut along the sides so the water would drain off the road; a crown needed to be put on the road so the water would run off the road and into the ditches. You could do this by hand if you didn’t have anything to do for the next ten years. You could hire someone to do it for you but you would still need ten years to earn the money to pay for it. The next thing to do was to borrow a small tractor with a couple of pieces of equipment.

1. Blade to move the dirt
2. Chisel plow to loosen the dirt
3. Set of harrows to smooth everything out

We finally had all the equipment borrowed and then it started raining, and so we used this to help us too. The ground under the road was very dry and so as we worked up the sod we found that with the rain (2-3 inches in two days) we could mix the thin layer of topsoil in with the sand and clay that the chisel plow was bringing up.

Day 1
We just kept plowing the roadbed bringing up more sand and clay mixing it all together letting the rain soak it up.
Day 2
The rain quit and we left it for a day to mellow out and let some of the water in the low places drain off.
Day 3
We put on the blade and began to move and pack the dirt. We did blade some of the topsoil off but most of it was now mixed into the clay and sand. By moving the dirt with the blade from one side to the other it began to dry out, it was almost perfect for packing and moving. We soon had most of it bladed to the middle and packed down hard. Next was to cut in ditches and to set how wide the finished road top would be, the borrowed tractor was small so it took allot of passes to cut the ditches in deep enough, but in time we had the road looking pretty good. Next we had to back blade the other side of the ditch, so that we could drive thought the ditches if we needed to. Once this was done with many more passes we hooked the harrows on behind the blade and started to drag and blade any rough spots. Then we packed the road with the pickup truck finding all the soft spot and really packing them down. Then back to the tractor and blade, we filled in all the holes and pulled the edges of the road back up after the truck had pushed them out. By now the roadbed was pretty firm but it still had two or three soft spots so we left it for a couple of days to dry out. Then we loaded the 400-gallon water tank into the truck, filled it, and packed the road again. Now the soft spots showed up and we just keep packing and then blading dirt back into the holes and pulling the edges up until no more soft spots were left.

Finishing touches

We still needed to know if the ditches would drain the water away from the road, we again were blessed with more rain, about an inch of it in less then a hour. That filled up any low spots in the ditches to show us where we needed to cut them down a bit more. It also showed us when to cut in side ditches to drain off any water along side of the road.

Now we have a well draining road and ditches, this is very important - for if you have water sitting in the ditches or along side the road it will only soak up the road bed and soften it, you will soon have a soft spot and then ruts. Now that the road is pretty much finished we still have one low spot along the road that needs to be drained; a major ditch needs to be cut in or a culvert has to be put under the road. We decided to cut a major ditch and use the dirt to build up a low spot, it worked out very well.

The last thing we need was to put on some gravel or sand. We had a neighbor put a couple of inches of sand and small rock on top, and then we packed that down and smooth it out, and now we have an all weather road. When we had the sand put on it is deeper in some spots then other’s so I just take the wheel barrow and move it around as any holes show up.

The financial cost was very cheap, the sand and rock on top cost 2 days of work traded to the neighbor helping him move a barn, but the rest was my own time and very much enjoyed this job and then about $50.00 for fuel in the tractor. Over all I am very happy with the price, as we had bought one 17 tonne load of gravel from the local pit and it cost $420.00. It didn’t go very far, it only covered the approach off the county roadway. We had heard that it could cost as much as $10,000.00 to $15,000.00 to have someone make the road and gravel it for us. I won’t say I would want any big heavy equipment to come over the road but for our pickup and minivan it will give us many years of service in all weather.

A planting we did go.

Rhubarb today.

I can still remember my first garden; I was all of about 8, maybe 9 years old. The gardening bug bit me at a very early age and I have tried just about every kind of garden you can think of. I’m one of those that can sit and look at seed catalogues for hours, and then - when I can’t stand it anymore and the garden is still locked in the dead of winter. I just sit down in front of the computer I use a wonderful old computer program called Mac Draw Pro and I can plan and layout just how I want to plant the garden in the spring.

This winter I didn’t do too much computer gardening I used my allotted computer time working on my self-heating house plans. But now that spring is here it is time to be out planting and forming new garden beds. I’m still working on my self-weeding garden system, which I think is going to be a great success this year. I have all the mulch I need from the cleaning up of the hay fields. After much digging and first working up the new garden patch with the tractor, I have new beds ready for planting. My oldest daughter and I have been busy planting some seeds in six packs to seed in the garden. We seeded the squash - I like to just start them in pots for a week or so - more just to crack the seed. I find this gives them a great start. Many plants that are started by seed are greatly helped in this way by just using a cracking chamber to get them to go. This is how many of the big greenhouse nurseries start their plants. I have found a very cheap and easy way to do this on a very small scale (watch for an upcoming post).

Today we have some rhubarb plants to set out, we managed to get some plants from a very old farmyard. We have tasted this rhubarb before and are very happy with it. My wife and I both love rhubarb in baking - one of my favorite recipes is rhubarb cobbler and I’m very happy to have been able to go back to the area I grew up in and bring a small piece of it home.

Rhubarb is a very heavy feeder and can stay in the place you plant it for a very long time, I’m just guessing here but I would say the farmyard we got the plants from is well over 75 years old. So it has proven itself to be very hardy. I first dug a good deep hole and filled it half way with good compost I then mixed in some garden dirt and planted the rhubarb it had four pieces all with healthy leaves. I mixed up some more compost with dirt and covered the plants up. I had a bit of a mound with leaves sticking out and the plant crowns just showing a bit above ground level. I then watered them in good and mulched with old hay, they will most likely be in this place for twenty years or until they need to be moved. The nice thing is that we now have a start of rhubarb and can cut off pieces and multiply it and share it with anyone needing a start.