Here’s a picture of one of my Christmas gifts this year…  in it’s naked and native form.  It’s the frame for a lift that goes on the back of a tractor.  Better stated – it’s a lift that I’ll be building a platform on that will go on the back of our tractor(s).  This is a really handy item when the platform is in place – it makes carrying things from location to location very easy – things that you don’t want in the front loader for a variety of reasons.

When the platform is built I’ll post more!

With the chill in the air now – things have been slowing down around the farm – and also speeding up… if that makes any sense at all.
For example, just like the seasons change, so do our activities in response to the seasons. We have all the gardens plowed user now. The newest plot is heavily mulched to build up the soil in the spring – others have some of the green manure down on them to be rolled under in the Spring. But there no longer a hurried harvest and preservation drama going on nightly – he season is closed. The seed pots and planters are all put away.
At the same time, I was out until dark on Monday night planting for next spring – 4 types of garlic went in this fall: German, Purple, NY white and Canadian. So already the seeds of another season are awaiting their awakening after what I think is going to be a brutal winter. The signs are all there – apples were ripe weeks early, trees dropped leaves faster than usual, birds headed South sooner than later… Nature knows something and is willing to share – we just have to listen.
The bush hog is off the big tractor now, the parts of the field that didn’t get knocked down have little need for my attention now as the plants have turned brown and dead. The cutter was swapped for the 2 bottom plow for a bit to put the gardens to sleep – and now the tractor awaits the attachment of the snow blower.
On that topic we are getting ready to stand up the snow fence and make the driveway edges and corners with posts and stakes…

(part 1 here)
I mean – there’s stuck… and then there’s really stuck… and then there’s the state my cousin once used to describe 4 wheel drive – “A technology that enables a person to get so far from civilization that the hole they get themselves stuck in hasn’t even been discovered yet”. And boy – ohh boy – did I manage a great stuck here!
As the picture indicates there was a “little bit” of tire spinning – but this was in the context of trying to get a grip on boards, rocks, small buildings – anything we could throw into these holes… the very holes that were filling with water as this experience drew on and would periodically bubble as the tractor shifted and sank further into the abyss. So – after an independent struggle – I decided that the strip of undisturbed dry ground leading up to the tractor would be the perfect venue for the 4 wheel drive truck to back up, hook on, and easily pull me out of this mess… (did you read what I wrote about 4 wheel drive as a technology)?

Getting the truck to the tractor was easy… Getting the tow strap on the truck was simple… getting the strap attached to the slowly sinking tractor was cake… There are benefits of a small tractor – like getting it unstuck with just a simple tow.
Kelli was on the tractor – I hopped in the truck cab. Gently moved forward until the strap was tight. Gave a yell – all was ready. Gently pressed on the accelerator… Felt a tire ever so slightly spin and immediately took my foot off the gas… something didn’t seem right… the front right corner of the truck, it, must have been adrenaline I thought… no – there it is again. I hopped out of the cab and ran around the front to the passenger side and watched in horror and the front tire that spun slowly – almost imperceptibly – was sinking into the mud!
I can commend Kelli and I at this point in the story for acting swiftly and acquiring several varying sized boards and blocks from the barn and bracing the sinking truck now that the front frame was a mere few inches from ground contact… buying us precious time… to figure out… NOW WHAT?!

It’s been a bit since the last post… I think I have been stuck in a bit of a rut… (ahem)
What happens in the spring when you get an overly ambitious, cooped up, cabin fever aspiring small scale farmer… a tractor with 4 wheel drive… a mushy field… and a ground engaging implement? Well – you get a mess. A big one at that.
Like so many big messes in the history of the world – it’s quite often predicated on really good intent. The problem I was hoping to solve was simply smooth out the pasture space that’s in front of our house. It’s where we might keep some hogs down the road but it was last (years ago) planted as a corn field and still has the pattern of rows in the soil. The plan was to simply run in parallel with the rows with the disk on… then to run perpendicular… and that would have smoothed things out quite nicely. And the plan started off just fine…
Now – at the outer edge of this pasture area we have a small patch that grows some of the tell-tale wet area marsh grasses… so I kept a wide berth of that spot because I fully knew power of wet soil in the spring and it’s ability to swallow tractors whole. So – I navigated the rows with the disk on – made good progress – could even tell things had started to smooth out because when I would make a turn I could feel the fresh turned earth under the tractor tires falling into the valleys and making the pasture smoother. It was a nice spring day and I was making solid progress… riding along – I felt the tractor slow slightly… almost imperceptibly… and I instinctively reached over to lift the disk up a few inches. That’s pretty standard – when the tractor gets bogged – lift the disk – less ground engagement – tractor regains footing and keeps moving – drop disk.
I pulled up on the lever – and the tractor pivoted… the higher the disk was supposed to go – the further it “pushed” the rear wheels into the wet soil. I have never been a “tire spinner” and have gotten a lot of heavy motorized things stuck over the years… but almost in an instant – I was in a situation where the poor little Kubota had no where to go… the rear and front were almost instantly so far into the muck that I was sitting frame on mud. The disk was a high as it could go but still firmly planted in the ground… I was going nowhere.
The good news was I was just going to be finishing the field – and from the barn to where the tractor was stuck there was a straight shot of undisturbed – solid ground… surely I could just back the truck up on this strip of terra firma – hook on a tow strap – and be done with this small mess in short order…

It’s a scary testimony to the times in which we live – with a title tag like that, the mind pretty readily heads towards financial peril. So far we are weathering that storm as well as anyone can expect… no, what I’m talking about is one of my lift pins for the disk/drag. For some reason this hardened steel pin decided that the threads had held long enough and they should strip out.
Of course – if you have ever done anything with machinery – apparently the lift pins talk to the little nuts and bolts in the factory… just like the little guys learn how to escape you fingers when you are working on a car and roll to the exact geometric center of the vehicle – the lift pin knew to complete the road to failure in the middle of a disk-ing job in a soggy spring field. The good(ish) news was this minor issue manifested itself on Saturday around lunch – so I had two options to try and rescue the disk – either pull a lift pin from another implement as a temporary replacement or simply pick up another pin at the tractor store and just continue on the next day. The sparkling shiny second photo gives away the choice I made since I was expecting a friend over for a small woodworking project in the afternoon.
What never ceases to amaze me about this very trivial issue is no matter how many extra parts I keep around for this very sort of thing – you can never have everything… the extra pin I had on hand was pulled from “something” a while ago and has a VERY short threaded section… I guess “Be Prepared” should really change to “Be MORE Prepared”… which I apparently wasn’t when I got the new pin installed and headed out to field on Sunday… but that’s another story…