Teresa & Mike CHS - Our journal

[Bruce]

As you know I mostly post on interesting threads
Many tiny fish in the pond, I've seen no adults but there must be some or there wouldn't be babies.

I need to mow the boys' pasture, they like the new grass best so of course they ignore the taller stuff and the plants they don't like. Something wrong with having to mow a pasture that has animals on it! But the neighbors have 3 horses and 2 alpacas in a similar size area and they just mowed recently so I guess it isn't terribly unusual.

Some peas, radishes and lettuce are up, need to plant the 2 tomatoes and the basil since it shouldn't go below freezing until fall. I have 2 artichokes to plant, need to replace the 2 I managed to kill. Plus plant bean, cuke and squash seeds.

I've been working on a poor man's logging winch. I don't do enough to justify an expensive 3 point PTO version. I bought a 4,500 pound ATV winch with wireless remote and am attaching it to a steel plate that will sit on the pallet forks. The plate will be tethered back to the tractor frame so there won't be any stress on the loader. The winch only has 35' of cable so there will be multiple pulls and resets but that is still better than getting on and off the tractor for each pull and moving the tractor some distance forward then back while not running over the rope.

I also bought a skidding cone so the logs should not dig in and get stuck while coming out of the woods. You can probably just power them out with a 12,000 pound PTO winch.

ETA this should get moved to my journal so I'm not cluttering up Mike's.

 

[Mike CHS]

We had a contractor for the power company come out this afternoon to trim a couple of areas under the power lines. I don't what you would call their equipment it was jointed in the middle so it was really maneuverable and had a boom that was probably 50 or more feet long with a large saw blade at the end. He was cutting 4-6 inch trucks with just a touch of that blade and cut more trees at the property line in 20 minutes than I did all winter with my clearing effort. Of course I need to make another burn pile to get my lane cleared since it is completely blocked with the trimmings.

 

[farmerjan]

If I recall correctly, the piece of equipment was probably an articulated tree trimmer.... they have different "bases" or vehicles all according to what kind of ground they are going to be used on...And the booms are often articulated also with having a moveable joint in it to make it more maneuverable. They are something to watch if a good operator is maneuvering them. Really neat. Costs mega bucks but as you can see, the time they save is immeasurable.

 

[Baymule]

They didn’t have a chipper truck and left you the mess? That ain’t right!

 

[Mike CHS]

They trimmed quite a bit around our house also so it's a fair trade.

 

[Baymule]

Then they saved you a lot of work. A burn pile is a fair trade. LOL

 

[Mike CHS]

We have a feral female cat living on the fringes of our house area and after seeing her with 5 kittens this morning, it's a safe assumption that there is a feral male out there somewhere. The kittens are gorgeous and surprisingly not very afraid of us so we will see if we can't get them tame and take them in to get fixed.

 

[Baymule]

Congratulations on the future Mouser’s.

 

[Mike CHS]

The chipper truck showed up today but they were afraid they would get stuck after all of the rain we got yesterday so they will come back later. Of course I had already cut up and piled about half of what of the trees. I took the crew lead out to show him where what is left but also to show them there is no way to turn around at the area the brush is still on. I don't speak Spanish and the crew boss is about as good at English so I'm just guessing what the follow on plan is.

 

[Mike CHS]

We harvested the last of our lettuce this morning and had a good day tilling and transplanting veggies that we had started. We did a better job of planning our starts this year since normally we wind up buying quite a few things but this year we won't be planting anything that we didn't start plus we have quite a few plants to give the neighbors. We still have some squash to plant but the majority of our summer garden is in.

About half of the okra that I started was old seed and didn't germinate so I had to start more of them. I will start the seed in a wet paper towel then plant the sprouted seed in about three days so it is usually ready to transplant in the time it would usually take just to sprout in potting soil.

Our cucumber plants are starting to show fruit so Teresa's experiment with row covers gained a month of good growing time with them. Same with the tomatoes as they are already showing blooms. We are seeing more Bees this year than ever before and I can only guess that the surrounding farm not being planted this year has something to do with that. There is a 200 plus acre farm that is all around us and they have always had a crop duster spray herbicide before they plant but it is fallow this year since it is up for sale.

We bought ourselves a small Honda tiller as a gift to ourselves for Christmas and it is an awesome little machine. It is a wee bit bigger than a Mantis but it does a great job. We have a rear tine Husqvarna but it is awkward to use in the raised beds and it is way too heavy for Teresa to use but she loves the Honda.