Sorry for the delayed posts. Winter is usually fairly slow, but this year is definitely the exception to that rule. If you've been checking us out on Instagram, you're probably fairly caught up on what's been going on. We put out a fairly big fall garden this year, but we were really late getting everything in. We went a little overboard on pumpkins, but I was hoping to have some to sell. Unfortunately we didn't get the pumpkins out until...
We had some fairly crazy weather this fall, so we didn't quite get the hay up as early as I hoped. We baled a couple of acres in September in 95 degree weather which is fairly unheard of for that time of year. It actually was pretty nice because I was able to cut on a Wednesday and bale on a Friday. After that, we had to wait for the rain from two hurricanes to pass through and dry off....
Sorry for the long delay in posts. This has been a very busy fall with hay season, the garden, and other projects. I'm going to try to get caught up on everything that's been going on. When I was 16, I bought a 1966 Ford F100. It's the same year and model my grandfather drove. First it was a project truck, then it became a daily driver, then it went back to project truck, and finally it sat for about...
I wrote previously about my workaround fix for the haybine. The threaded rod wasn't quite strong enough for the job, and it broke once. It took me about 30 minutes to get everything up and running again, so I wanted to fix it the right way to minimize down time. I bought a replacement yoke from the junkyard, but it hooked up a little different than the original piece. It shouldn't be a problem, but combine that with the fact...
Last week I was helping my neighbor work on his truck, and we had to kill a wasp nest in the carport. We had a really bad wasp problem last year, and I made the stupid remark about how I got run out buildings last year by wasps but I hadn't really seen many nests this year. Everything was going smoothly when we were loading the trailer for the hay delivery. We decided to load from the double stall to...
Last week I did my first ever hay delivery. One of my friends came to visit and was a huge help during the delivery. The drive there was fairly uneventful, but we weren't able to get the truck and trailer even close to the barn. Luckily they had a small work truck there we could use, so we loaded 20 bales at a time to the work truck, drove them to the barn, unloaded the truck, stacked in the barn,...
One of the existing buildings on the farm is a huge workshop. In addition to standard workshop space, there's also a lane on the side that's wide enough to store equipment without getting in the way of the work space. The lane has carriage doors leading into the workshop that are wide enough to get fairly large equipment in. I used it to store mowers, the tiller, and a leaf vac. Unfortunately there's quite a big gap between the ground...
The biggest problem with my hay fields (and most hay fields in the southeast) is Johnson grass. Cattle seem to like it quite a bit, but people buying for horses and other high performance animals hate it. Horses will actually pick around the Johnson grass, so it adds waste which in turn adds cost to the buyer. Johnson grass is incredibly hard to kill--it only responds to Roundup. Unfortunately Roundup will also kill the grasses and legumes we want to...
Just like last year, I was a little late getting the fall garden in. This time wasn't nearly as late though, so we should see some decent production. I tried running the tiller, but the dirt was so packed that the belt on the tiller kept slipping. I decided to test out the cultivator I got with the farm. This thing worked great! I had a lot of fun running the cultivator, and it was much more pleasant than walking...
Last year's fall garden didn't do so well. I let the garden get completely overrun with weeds so badly I could barely tell what was supposed to be growing and what wasn't. I hate pulling weeds, and I'll look for any excuse to get out of it. One of my admittedly terrible excuses was that I had to walk all the way around to get to the garden. Even though it's right next to my yard, I either had to...