Pulling the ripcord. Major life change

I have a loan against my canoe, can you help?

The bump did remind me, I've been meaning to post.

I have my irrigation supplies ordered and I'm figuring out where the fence is going to go so that I can keep deer out of the vegetable garden.

Market season is starting, we're booked for another one in a week or so.

Planting has started in the grow house. I have several flats of asparagus, peppers and tomatoes on the way. 

Looks like I'm going to start getting busy.

I killed off the spammer but thankful for the update!  

Tom's post about his cat reminded me this morning...

Wife unit brought home another cat last week.

This is Kali:

It was after she had named the cat that I explained the name meant "She who is death".

Name stuck anyway. I've never seen such a mischievous kitten as this one.

More car loan canoes.

Tomatoes have germinated. Built a couple hive stands and waiting to hear from our bee supplier.

Will be building a chicken coop shortly. 

Added a quick hitch to the tractor  Neighbor was selling one cheap. Should make hooking up implements quicker and easier.

When I was at school in Ireland years ago, all their tractors had a draw bar on hydraulics with a ball on the end. And all of the implements and trailers had a pinto hitch so you could back up lower the drawbar raise the thing up on Hydraulics and go without getting out unless you had to connect a PTO or hydraulic lines. I always wondered why that didn't catch on over here.

In reply to ShawnG :

Kali looks a lot like my son’s cat Opal.  Tortoise shell coloring, very friendly and vocal. Congratulations! 

I just pulled my own ripcord. Except my changes involve less farm equipment.  

Scotty Con Queso said:

I just pulled my own ripcord. Except my changes involve less farm equipment.  

Is that what we're calling it now?

A drawbar is for towed implements with their own wheels.

Three point hitches are for implements that are attached to the tractor and can be lifted up and down but don't have wheels for towing.

A bale spear isn't much good if you can't lift with it.

My brush cutter and bale spear are three point tools. The box scraper I plan to add later will be too.

I'm pretty sure a three point hitch as well as a drawbar is the standard around the world. 

You can find tractors with a drawbar only pretty easily but you won't find them with a three point and no drawbar.

If you look, mine has both.

I don't think movable drawbars are common here, other than the side-to-side adjustment. 

Then there's cat 0,1,2,3 sizes, 540 and 1000 PTO etc..

dculberson said:

Scotty Con Queso said:

I just pulled my own ripcord. Except my changes involve less farm equipment.  

Is that what we're calling it now?

Hey Now.

dculberson said:

Scotty Con Queso said:

I just pulled my own ripcord. Except my changes involve less farm equipment.  

Is that what we're calling it now?

It's like McDonald's. Everyone goes there but nobody admits it.

In reply to dculberson :

Nice. 

Today was The Chickening.

We bought 24 fertilized eggs from a local breeder and set ourselves up for hatching.

Should have some baby chicks in about 21 days.

These are heritage Barred Rock chickens. Should look like this:

Looking forward to having some tiny dinosaurs in my yard.

Spent today working in the barn.

Supposedly, way back when, this was a horse property. The stalls in the barn were evidently used for horses because of the chewing we can see.

The stalls are far too small for our horses, 8' x 8' at most. The ceiling is low as well at only 8'.

We decided to turn two of the end stalls into a chicken coop.

Here's the progress so far:

The middle stall will be used for storage of chicken supplies and I'm going to knock out the divider and build the other two stalls on this side into a single stall in case we need to keep one of the horses inside for any reason.

The stalls on the opposite side will be taken out and the space used for storing garden equipment and building materials. 

The barn is over 100 years old and the walls sit on a dry stacked field stone foundation. It had a dirt floor but a few layers of concrete floor have been poured in. It appears when one layer got too badly cracked and fallen apart, they just poured another.

None of the walls are square, straight or plumb anymore so it's a bit of an adventure building anything inside.

We're reinforcing the barn a bit from inside as we change things to help keep the building alive as long as possible. 

It will probably never be a really nice barn but it will be a solid, useful barn.

Peppers and tomatoes are doing really well. I'll be potting the tomatoes up into bigger pots tomorrow. 

Worked on the barn a little more today. It's getting cold again so I'll be working indoors for a few days.

Reminds me, I need to stop kicking rocks and work on my own little grow-op setup for the coming spring. Lord knows I have enough LED grow lamps. 

ShawnG said:

What do you have underneath that drill press? It looks EXACTLY like what I need for mine!

In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :

It's a Bora mobile base kit.

Best one I've ever found and I used to sell them at the tool store.

This one has three corner pieces that sandwich a plywood base, whatever dimension and thickness you choose. Way better than the ones with perimeter rails.

Good for around 400 lbs or so.

I bought mine from Lee Valley but you can find them on Amazon.

Congrats!! Happy for you!

Been too cold this week to continue with the chicken coop so I've been in the grow house a lot.

Potted up 200+ tomato seedlings, 200+ sweet peppers and about 150 asparagus into 3" pots so they can keep on growing.

Bought 600, 1 gallon pots at a smoking deal from a former greenhouse.

Ordered a pallet of potting mix and two bundles of 6" x 10' fence posts from my local co-op. The fence to keep the deer out of the garden is going to cost about $2500.

Ordered a hardware kit for a poly greenhouse so I can harden off the seedlings in the spring.

Rebuilt the PTO clutch on our little CASE tractor after it failed on the last snowblower mission.

Next weekend I'm playing pit crew for my neighbor at the snowmobile drag races.

I certainly don't get bored around here.

If any of you have a market garden near you, consider buying your veg from them. It's a lot of work, even in the off season.

Update.

My irrigation supplies showed up. My wallet is $4500 lighter but I have a drip system that will handle half an acre and has room to expand further.

Did some more chicken coop construction today.

Walls are up and nest boxes are built. I'm just reusing a bunch of building materials that came with the property. No need to be really pretty, the chickens will fix that in short order.

Been a busy week.

I bought a bigger subsoiler for the tractor, all my research is telling me that I need to use a subsoiler to break up the hard clay ground in order to get some moisture and organic material into the soil to help it along.

Assembled yesterday:

Also added some bucket hooks to the loader bucket. I'm going to need them to lift the backhoe attachment off of the trailer. 

I started installing the subframes for the backhoe onto the tractor. The loader subframes need to come off and be replaced with the backhoe subframes.

By the time i got the left side swapped, it was almost time to come in for dinner and there was a snow storm blowing in. I decided to get the tractor assembled to a point where the loader would be usable.

Good thing I did because I had some snow removal to do this morning. 

I had nearly finished clearing all the snow we got when a hydraulic line on the loader blew.

By then it was 2:00 in the afternoon so I hopped into the truck and headed to Princess Auto for a couple new hydraulic lines.

Princess Auto is like a Canadian Harbor Freight with a bit of Tractor Supply mixed in (we also have TSC, it's just called Peavey Mart up here).

I managed to get out of P.A. by only buying hydraulic lines, windshield wiper blades, a lower link pin, an ethernet cable and a rolling seat for the garden. I'm not kidding.

Home now, will swap hydraulic hoses tomorrow and do some more work on the tractor.

Monday I will be calling the local tank supplier for a 2200 gallon water tank, they're having a spring sale.

I did not know Peavy Mart was Tractor Supply

In reply to bearmtnmartin (Forum Supporter) :

They're still Canadian operated but they're now owned by the same parent group.

If you go into TSC in Lynden, it looks exactly like our Peavey Mart. Store signage is the same and everything. 

Local guy put a geodesic dome over his coops, we have some hawks here.  Never seen it, but I understand you can get small ones for individual animals.

In reply to ShawnG :

Peavy Mart acquired the Canadian operations of TSC in 2016 and rebranded the TSC stores to Peavy Mart. They also have acquired the rights to Ace Hardware in Canada.