Crazy Jackalope Adventures

When we bought the place there had just been a lot of work done to repair the levee. It has an amazing man made lake, and we are told there had previously been a swale half way across the levee and it had washed out along with a good chunk of the contents of the lake about six months prior to our purchase. Our delivery drivers tell us stories of driving across the levee and their dually tires hanging out in space on the sides.

On levee closest to the house there are 3 culverts. At least I’m sure two of them are culverts as they tunnel through the levee to the other side while the third is actually a pipe that drops vertically down about six feet and then cuts over through the levee. I don’t know if that qualifies as a culvert or the proper name for it is something else. As part of the repair when everything washed out the swale was removed and another culvert was added at the top side of the levee furthest from the house. This has worked really well to keep it draining during some of the heavy rains we have. I think I calculated that when we drop 3 inches of water out of the lake, we are sending over 1.5 million gallons downstream. The reason we from time to time drop about three inches of water of the lake is our bane, the beavers. We have a den of them on the opposite side of the lake. I am amazed by how much destruction they can cause in a small amount of time. It’s either chewing down trees or pushing the mud up to block off the culverts. I had half-heartedly tried to trap them last fall, but I think there is going to be more effort in that direction this year. We are also hoping that Ix, our new coonhound, will help us do battle with them. They are fairly awesome critters, I would just really like them to be awesome somewhere else.

At one point in time I’d click on the wrong link and my screen would be covered in pop-up ads. One after the other, seemingly without end. I think my homestead todo list is much like this. The items, one after another just seem to keep coming. Many times I’ll do an activity and it seemingly generates four other things that need to be done. I suspect this is actually a good sign, as learning and revelation open the world and you can see what you previously could not. It can be exhausting though and there are times I just want to Ctrl+Alt+Delete and shutdown, or at least nuke the browser. In the end that’s a bad choice because there are a bunch of open windows with important things that I can’t just drop. So I have to have faith that knocking them out piece by piece is leading me to a better place.

The carburetor on the Massey 65 was leaking all over the place after I parked it the last outing. I guess everything is in a state of decay, just some show it a lot more than others. Having never worked on a carburetor before, I did what I usually do, ordered some parts off Amazon. If it’s complicated there is probably a YouTube video that will show me how to fix. There is also two others that show me how to fix it incorrectly and give bad advice, but learning from failure is a powerful tool. It was a fairly easy process in the end and I just had to replace the gaskets to get it running much better than before. More time was spent getting it off the tractor than was needed to do the work. It also gave me chance to wipe of the gunk and know for sure what model of carb it is, a TSX-695, for my future reference.

My grandfather served in WWII as part of a mechanics unit and ran the shop. When I’m working on that kind of stuff I think him. I think about all the complex technology pieces I work on in the cloud these days, and how I sit there and look at these mechanical pieces and try to figure them out. While it would probably be nothing for him. Knowing how it all works together and what to tune to get the best performance or what can be done to just get things to work so folks can carry on. Two engineers from different times.

I managed to get about two acres mowed in under a couple hours. This include driving back up to the house to replace a shear bolt (another item I didn’t know existed until this year) and the muffler getting pulled off when I took out a honey locust tree. Those trees are my bane, every time I take one out there is some sort of repercussion for doing so. I dream of a time when they are not on my property or I have figured out how to live with them.

Mowing is one of those feel good things. I go out there and the vegetation can be 4-5ft high and it looks like you aren’t doing much as you make a few passes around the outside. Eventually you start to a pretty wide swath around the outside and it feel like you are getting somewhere. Slowly the middle area reduces until you can start to see the other side. It’s just a few more passes and then you’ll have this beautiful open area. Which is normally when the tractor/mower/weed-eater give out. Not today though, I got it all done an it looked great in the end. That’s 2 acres down, only 25 or so more to go. Might need to get something bigger than a 5ft brush hog.

Not much accomplished on the homestead this weekend because we were taking Thomas off to college. We let him finish out his senior high school year back in KC. This meant over the bulk of this last year, we hadn’t seen him but off and on. We did have him all summer, and now he’s off to start his own adventure.

I wish we had started our homestead journey many years earlier, Thomas loves animals. It would have been amazing to have seen him spend more years and time around them.

Tom is a smart guy and tries hard to help other people. It is tough to see him go off into the bigger world where we can’t protect him as much. I fear for his big heart in a rough world.  The time has come, though, as it has with a couple of our other kids to be off on their own.

There are times when I think it will be great to be an empty nester, and there are other times I fear it.

Much of this year has been trying to recover some of the land and building out spaces to do the things that we want to in the future. One of the projects was some raised beds down the hill from the house. Kate has taken a fancy to cinderblock construction so we started with 3 raised beds that were about 4ft x 8ft. She quickly realized she could fill that up without much trouble. So we built another set of three with another big island raised be in the middle. At the start we had a big pile of dirt delivered, the first ones beds were filled using a cart pulled by our ZTR mower. We either filled the cart or were putting the dirt in totes to move it. It was a pretty rough job. Things also didn’t grow as well as we expected, but one of the Youtube channels we watch (Living Traditions) had pretty much the same thing happen to them this year. Kate tried out their solution and it seemed to work for us. The net is that while there was some compost mixed into our soil, I don’t think that batch had significant time to age or break down the nutrients. Some foliar spray and extra nutrients fixed it up.

There are a few raised beds up by the house, but we used some screw together metal panel beds you can get off of Amazon for that. All in all while it’s not our first year gardening, it is our first year trying to establish and do it on this property and out harvest has come out pretty good. We aren’t overflowing in bounty, but we’ve had a few meals that are close to exclusively products from our property. Last night we had one of our watermelons, which is a first.

Likely that we’ll be looking at a greenhouse and establishing a well down by the area. We left space and marked out where we’d like a greenhouse to go, there are just so many thing that need to be taken care of currently and it hasn’t bubbled to the top. The same for a well down there as I don’t think it will be hard to find water. Our multi-acre lake is not that far away and we could pump directly from it. Going into the group I suspect will be easy to find water in most locations, just we have SO much rock here that getting a spot we can dig in becomes the challenge. Also trying to figure out if it is a good enough excuse to get an auger for the tractor.

On the far side of our new property is a barn. Previous to our ownership there were cows in the pasture that allowed them access to the barn. There were circumstances that we are unsure of, but I believe there were at least two (maybe more) cow carcasses that were left in the barn. I was quite surprised to realize that it actually has a concrete floor in it as there were a good few inches of dirt and decomposing material covering it. A few weeks ago I push a bunch out with the tractor and brought some loads down for Kate’s garden. This would have been a lot easier to do with a bucket, but getting creative with the box blade worked out. In the garden this material has been amazing to grow things in. I do really wish the first set of beds we made had gotten a good dose of this stuff too.

So now we are getting to a mostly cleared out barn. No power or water is running to it currently. It looks like plastic panels replaced some of the metal in the roof to let in light. These have long worn away and the wood that is(was) underneath those has mostly decayed. The rest of the structure though seems to be in really good condition. I think it’s salvageable and given some work, will be a useful building.

We were really wondering how our cat, that we’ve had for the past 10 years as an indoor cat, would take to the change. There was an upper level deck that we would let him out on at the old house, but generally he spent most his time indoors. Our indoor square footage in the new house is about 1/3 of the previous. So we were concerned if Adama, with his Abyssinian energy and need to roam, would do well. The new place has a wrap around screened porch which I think it was our saving grace. He loves to sit out there and watch what is going on in the yard. He finds sunbeams and lounges in them for hours. The one thing he doesn’t seem to like is the kittens, he makes sure to give them a hiss when they come up close to the screen. It was the same for Tux previously too, though now he doesn’t seem to mind much if Tux plants himself nearby. When Tux does make it on to the porch, they don’t get along. Adama talks a big talk and seems to think he’s a big deal, really though he is a runt and most people wonder if he is full grown. So when a bigger cat comes around and can actually get at him, he gets a lesson in humility. Overall he’s adapted well and seems to be just as happy if not happier in the new place.

When we first got this property we picked up two male cats that had grown up on a farm. They had been around dogs, chickens, cows and about everything else. Mr. Black and Tux were brothers, with Mr. Black doing most the hunting and Tux mostly looking for attention and love. The cats had other names that Kate had given to them and Jake had given them name too, but I’ll stick with my names. One week we were talking about getting a female cat because I had brought up the fact that I was somewhat afraid we might loose one of the male cats, they are outside roaming around the farm and who knows what kind of trouble they could get into. As it happens not long after that Mr. Black started to look like he was in rough shape, as we started to get worried he then perked up, then a couple days later he passed away. So we were down to just Tux. Interestingly since then Tux has become quite the lean hunter and has taken on a lot of the attributes of Mr. Black.

It took awhile but we managed to find a unfixed female cat, Peaches. She is kind of a pain, but also an extremely beautiful cat. Apparently she came already pregnant and with fleas. So the last few months have been spent battling fleas. They managed to make their way from our barn cats to our indoor cat, Adama. So there has been no escaping them and it’s been a pretty vicious battle. I do think we are starting to win though. The kittens that Peaches had are adorable, but we are getting close to the point where we are going to have to find them new homes. Of the six we have I think we will keep two, but the other four we’ll look to adopt out. We will also need to get the two we keep fixed and it’s becoming apparent how quickly you can get overrun with kittens. One of the ones we plan on keeping is a female, so the question will be whether to get Peaches fixed or to get the kitten fixed.