JHP Homestead’s Journal

[JHP Homestead]

I'm the same way, I post on other's journals much more than mine.

Don't know beans about beans? Me either. The only reference I have to wax beans is that they are yellowish (and DW doesn't like them). Not sure how those would make black beans.

Haha, nope! I do not know beans about beans. I had to go take a look at the packet and these are Cherokee wax beans. I don’t know if it’s going to taste like a regular black bean but I don’t really like wax beans so it’s worth a try. Next year I’m going to stop being cheap (buying whatever seeds I find on clearance) and buy beans I actually like the taste of.

Do the best you can do. That’s pretty much what we all do. How do you keep your faucet from freezing in the winter?

Yep, we use the frost-free hydrant like what @Bruce posted. The trench is a minimum of 4’ deep and is pushing 6’ in some spots. Praise the Lord for a tractor with a backhoe!

 

[JHP Homestead]

Sigh, ran into some issues this evening. We need to put some pea stone in our trench for the water to runoff from the frost-free hydrant. I priced it out and for 1 cubic yard of pea stone, we can pay ~$125 from Menards, or $15 if we go get it ourselves from the gravel pit. Hmm, not a hard decision. So we built some short sides for our flatbed trailer to make it so it will hold gravel.

Just as we’re fixing to go get the gravel, DH noticed that the (almost) brand new front driver side tire on the trailer looks half bald already. It’s probably an alignment issue but in the meantime, we’ll just swap it to the passenger side. Only when DH took the passenger side tire off, the axle half fell off! Apparently the bracket holding the leaf spring to the trailer frame was busted and has just been just hanging on by a thread for who knows how long! DH, being the man I love, is working on fabricating a new bracket, so maybe we’ll be able to get gravel tomorrow evening. Or next week the way things go around here

 

[Mike CHS]

it worked that way much better than if you had been pulling it at 60 mph and it came apart.

 

[JHP Homestead]

it worked that way much better than if you had been pulling it at 60 mph and it came apart.

Definitely!

Thinking of that reminds me of the time in my teens when my folks, sister, and I were driving back from going camping with our horses. All of a sudden we got passed by a tire! Turns out it was a tire off the horse trailer! Fortunately the 2nd tire held the trailer weight and we didn’t get in an accident. It sure was nerve-wracking limping along until we got to a spot we could safely unload the horses though.

Although I think in this case we’d be losing a whole axle rather than just a tire. I don’t think we’d be getting out of that so easy. Especially not with a couple tons of gravel.

 

[Bruce]

Tons?? How many cubic feet do you need for the hydrant?

Next year I’m going to stop being cheap (buying whatever seeds I find on clearance) and buy beans I actually like the taste of.

Good plan, seeds are pretty cheap anyway

Praise the Lord for a tractor with a backhoe!

And apparently a dearth of rocks! Lucky you. Nice looking trench BTW, looks like you have an 8" trenching bucket?

 

[Mike CHS]

Our feed store sells the basic seed supplies in bulk so you might see if you have one there. I bought a pound of turnip seed the other day for $5.50. Most things like radishes, I can get from them for around 50 cents an ounce and that is a LOT of radish seed.

 

[JHP Homestead]

Tons?? How many cubic feet do you need for the hydrant?

I think we only need 8-10 cubic feet for the hydrant, but for the price of the gravel and the price of gas getting to/from the pit, we might as well get as much as we can. We’ll have a use for it at some point.

And apparently a dearth of rocks! Lucky you. Nice looking trench BTW, looks like you have an 8" trenching bucket?

Yeah we haven’t found many big rocks around here. Which doesn’t hurt my feelings at all. I’ve read your journal and don’t envy your rocks
The bucket on our little backhoe is 12”.

 

[JHP Homestead]

DH got the flatbed trailer fixed. Just in time to go “up North” and get a load of pig feed. There’s a grain elevator near my folks’ house that sells better pig feed for $2 less per bag than what we can buy it for where we live. It’s a 2 hour drive but we were going there anyways to go to my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary, so just lost a little gas mileage hauling the trailer. It still works out better in the long run.

We finally got our load of stone for the water line trench today. Now DH can resume work on our water line!

In the meanwhile, I haven’t gotten much done around the homestead. Mostly playing around with the kids and puttering here and there. We did have a couple litters of rabbits born a couple weeks ago. They’re growing well.

Here’s the Mama rabbit, Yennifer, looking for treats.

 

[Senile_Texas_Aggie]

Just caught up!

 

[RollingAcres]

Luckily you found out about the trailer issues before you had all the peastone loaded up.
Glad you were able to get it fixed and got the stone. Your rabbits are very cute!