March 26, 2007 – Moving Fencing Material into Place

Another nice June-like day in the upper 70’s. Started working on some more fencing (it will never end). Went to town to pick up wholesale buying club order, got some cardboard sheets and more cattle panels and T-posts. Martin is a great 5 year-old worker. Sometimes he asks what work we can do outside.


Here he wraps up the rope that held the panels down on top of the truck. It’s a pain to load/unload them from on top of the truck, but I don’t have a trailer that approaches 16 ft and the truck does, so up they go. The truck has now graduated into the heavy-duty farm use where scratches and dents only add to the value.


Martin was able to drag the panels into position (as long as the location was downhill).


He also was good at distributing the fenceposts – he moved about 75% of the posts to the correct places along the fenceline. All I had to do was get the panels off the truck, drag the uphill panels, and take the binders off the posts that banded them in groups of five and Martin did the rest. The fence is in position, we just need to pound the posts and put up the panels. This is the fence along the SE property boundary.

one year ago…

March 25, 2007 – Ice Storm Cleanup

Another task that had been weighing heavy was the messy yard from the ice storm. We had done some of the cleanup, but today, took three hay wagon loads and a couple of truckloads of branches to the burn pile.  It reached 80 degrees today, but with a strong wind!


All five of us worked and it was much faster than a solo effort. Claire’s comment about the afternoon was “even though I didn’t want to, it feels good to work.”

There is a problem with the old Farmall Cub – it started to smoke around the fan belts, so we turned it off and pushed it into the shed.  We’ll investigate the problem some other day. 

one year ago…

March 24, 2007 – Getting Piled up Chores Done

The weatherman promised rain most of the day, but it really didn’t seem to come as heavily/often as we were led to believe. That gave us a chance to get some much-awaited spring chores done. First was overseeding the back pasture.


Martin’s job was to reseed the cow trail. He did a good job and seeded all the way to the property boundary. We spread about 25 lb of seed over the 2-3 acres.

I’m also behind on fruit tree pruning. Between the cold until early March, ice storm/snow, and week away, it is a little later than I’d like.


I was able to get 90% of it completed. Linda started all the seeds that need a jump – flowers, tomoatoes, peppers, etc.


Martin was a good helper, filling the peat pots for Linda. I also got new fittings on a water tank, so it comes out a one inch hose instead of a garden hose. So the things that had to get done, got done today.

one year ago…

March 23, 2007 – Guest Lecture

Today was a day of errands and more errands. At noon I was a guest lecturer to a business class at MCC talking about the benefits/process of forming a LLC. The errands continued until 9:00 as I needed to drive Claire to Ames for a meeting at church regarding their trip to Boston this summmer.

one year ago…