winter projects
With 80 acres to mess with on a rough mountainside, it's way past due some development in the gardening farming direction. So, Been working on clearing fence row to close in several acres with old chainlink we have a bunch of. Top it with barb wire up to 8 ft and put electric on the outside to keep coons out. Coon and deer are the main garden gobblers. Been cutting fence posts and clearing the path with chain saw, also working on putting en engine in my old track loader, need it to finish making the path for fence. Hope I can get it done before spring arrives. But then I also need a good mowing machine to maintain it, one that will pick up the chopped grass and legumes for mulch and compost. Has to be 4x4 and hillside stable. A decent mower of that kind is $25,000 new right now. Which is about $24,000 beyond my budget for one. But since I have quite a range of odds and ends of junk laying around, looks like I have about everything needed to put one together. But it will take time, lots of shop time to make everything fit together. An old 4x4 subaru car, a 25 HP kubota engine with transmission and hydraulics, mounted on a frame that I can use for the basic mower frame. A 4 ft wide 3 pt hitch mowing deck. Need the fence done by March, and the mower by May. Don't know if I can manage it that soon with either one, but gonna try.
I'd like to put in some orchard of mixed varieties of fruit trees and bushes. Maybe an acre or more of gardens. Plenty of cover crops, grass and legumes to mow for compost and mulch, would be nice to eventually have some pasture for another horse.
Then there's more shop projects that would be interesting. Making machines to help do the work. I like old style simple technology, but reasonable convenience too. Plan to further set up and perfect my foundry and machine shop to make engines and stuff from scratch, or scrap, or even rocks, start with iron ore. That would be interesting to take iron ore rocks, clay, and wood, turn it into working engines, using the old technology of the late 1800's to early 1900's.
You're making me miss my place in the Caribbean.
Right now I'm stuck in the San Francisco Bay Area, renting, so I can't do much gardening (or any nude gardening). But today I did a little pruning of my southernwood.
As soon as I can get back to the Caribbean, I will be putting my banana plantation back in order, checking on the progress of the breadfruit tree, and seeing if I can find me a jelly palm.
I think the Caribbean would seem like tropical paradise, there are so many things I'd love to grow that won't handle cold.
I use to have a timeshare in Aruba and became friends with one of the locals who was a fanatic organic gardener. He complained that the intense sun and lack of water (and very expensive city water) really hindered his ability to grow vegetables except in the winter. I guess we have to be careful what we wish for. He did have a very nice variety of tropical fruit and nut trees though.
City water is not the best for organics anyway because of the chlorine. Kills the soil microbes that in organic is greatly desired. Does it rain in Aruba? If so just build a large roof over living and work space, and a concrete water storage tank, collect rain water during the rainy season to last through the dry season, and then do drip irrigation under mulch.
He had gutters on every roof and a pretty elaborate catchment system, but they don't get near enough rain to keep the garden watered all year. Luckily we get a significant amount of rain here during the summer and with a well water backup I never have a problem with not enough water.
Here in Tennessee we get plenty of rain, usually don't need to irrigate. But it's good to have it available when getting things started a bit later season, such as planting late crop for fall harvest. But I have springs on the mountainside, can build up plenty in holding tanks. Recently bought an old fire department tank truck, I'll take the tank off and set it on blocks where I need water storage for irrigating an area. Fill it off the pipe from the spring that runs through the middle of the several acres I'm fencing. To get the water up to higher level I'll have to pump it. Might need to do that and set the tank up higher. I have a swimming pool liner of about 5 ft tall by 18 diameter I think. I'll have to level a spot and build a round wall of cedar to put it in. Make a good place to cool off in hot weather and irrigation storage.
Anyway, I'm just finishing the trackloader engine job, changing the final drive oil, ready to try it out. Just need to weld cleats on the track plates yet. They are uncleated loader tracks which I found do poorly on my muddy hillside. Then it'll be ready to go to work on the fence project, with more nude friendly weather arriving soon it's time to get at that fence. I prefer doing it without fabric but I'll do it whatever it takes. There is something nice about working out there free of covering, feels much more inviting than having to be covered up, shielded from what? Nothing I want to be shielded from except the cold air when necessary.
Winter is a good time for pruning trees and trimming bushes and hedges. With the leaves gone we can see the structure of the tree and can easily see where to cut. And birds are not nesting so bushes and hedges can be trimmed, or cut back, without disturbing them.
It's also a good time for mending fences.
It might be a bit cold to do it naked.
yes, as I get more fruit trees going there will be more winter pruning needed. I could even use the prunings for grafting stock to get more trees. Blueberries can be started by dipping the twigs in rooting hormone and putting in flats of potting soil. I'm thinking of planting some apple seeds and peach seeds, the seeds of apples make random varieties, but they will be somewhat after the parent apples if they come from a grove of the same variety. Depends on what the blossom was cross pollinated with by the bees. Peaches supposedly come true to variety a little better, but still some variation. If I get enough things going I can retire from all other work and just sell produce for a living. That way I can work naturist style full time pretty much. Although some plantings will be along the neighbor's road that runs full length through our place. Those I will arrange to be what I hire help for more. Especially for the fruit picking. I will put the blueberries along the drive mainly, since they take more picking time and I don't wanna be stuck with picking duty too much.
Growing things can get real interesting. I started the track loader Friday, just for a few seconds. And the hydraulic hose to the final drive blew out. It's actually a good sign. Means the pressure is building up properly to run the drive clutches. Just that the hose has sat there in the weather too long with old broken rubber casing and the steel braid rusted out. I took it off along with a couple more on the loader cylinders that looked compromised and got new ones. They are some of the few original hoses left on it, and the thing is some 55 years old I think.
Rain rain and more rain. Close to double the normal rain volume. The mud is extreme, the road going back to my farm site on the mountainside is a terrible mud wallow. But at least there's the gravelled drive up above and another mud road coming down from that, so I go in from the top sliding down the ruts, and out the bottom. Going the other way would be impossible without a super mudbog truck. But in spite of the mud I've been getting the fence built. Running chain link and barb wire to 8 ft tall around about 7 acres. Started back in January clearing a path for the fence row and cutting fence posts from all the cedar and locust in the vicinity. Got a 5 day break in the rain and it dried just enough to get the fence rolls distributed with the skid steer and rolled out full length, then started digging post holes with the hand digger and setting posts. 3 days of hard work and 80 posts done. Got the rest of the posts distributed along the row today where there weren't enough growing, and put in 8 more. Hope I can finish this week between rains. Been doing most of it clothes free, even when it's pretty cool it's OK when working hard like that.
The fencing project is coming along. Spent all day digging post holes today and got the rest of them in. It was warm, mid 70's. worked clothes free all day.
A friend gave me his old toyota pickup, I hauled it home Monday. It's an '86 model 4x4, he bought it in '88 and drove it till 2015, running the odometer up to 401,000, when it broke, and said he drove it another 7 years putting at least another 50,000 on it. So 450,000 miles and the 3rd engine in it. And this engine has a warn out and jumped timing chain which stopped it in 2015, he left it sit and bought a newer one. So I'm going to fix it and start putting even more miles on it. But I'm mainly going to use it for my naturist farm truck, add a winch and super swamper TSL/SX tires on it, the best mudders I can get and still be OK on the road. need em just to get around reliably on my mountainside and work on the gardens I will be developing inside the fence.
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