Murphy's Four Wheeler

  The other day I made my usual run to the feed store and picked up  several various bags of poultry, rabbit, and goat feed. Normally I use the four wheeler to move the feed from my car in front of the house to the farm buildings behind the house and backyard.

  On this particular day, I gathered the bike and gate keys, pulled on my farm boots, and headed out back to the bike. I took minute to clear the small, round, brown presents the goats love to leave all over their favorite lounge chair and hopped up onto the bike. I should have known that something was amiss when the thing started up on my first try and didn't die once while I backed it out of the overhang and navigated across fields and through the pasture gate.

  I parked the bike right behind my car in the driveway and left it running while I proceed to load it up with about 300lbs of feed. Just as I was dropping that last bag onto the back rail of the idling bike, the thing coughed once then died. Crap.

  Not to worry, the four wheeler is a fickle thing that is prone to dying at random times if not properly warmed up. As my father says, "She's cold natured." No kidding, dad.

   I hopped on the bike and tried to start it, no go. Sputter, sputter, sputter, but no turn over. I open the gas tank and stare down into a bottomless, gasless vacuum. Double crap.

  Grab the key out of the bike and dash around the house, the backyard, and the farm hopelessly searching for a gas can that actually contains gas before someone noticed the unattended bike sitting out front. No luck. I run to the neighbors' place to borrow some. No one is home.

  So now I have a huge, dead four wheeler loaded with 300lbs of feed that is dead and blocking my car in the driveway. Not to mention the fact that we needed all that feed that day, and I am in no shape to lug that kind of poundage that kind of distance, let me tell you!

  I call Big Onion at work in a panic just certain that I cannot push this huge thing anywhere and if I leave the bike unattended in the front yard for even as long as it would take to run down the road to the gas station some ne're-do-well will happen upon it and somehow steal the dead thing right off our driveway. I had a brief vision of leaving Luna on the bike to guard it while I ran for gas. Like that would deter anyone.

  Big Onion talks me off a ledge. He tells me to unload the 300lbs of feed, and just push the bike out of the way of my car. It's going to be fine, he says. I follow his instructions and the beast of a bike is mercifully easier to move than I had expected, toss a couple empty (why are they always empty?!) gas cans into my car, and hightail it to the nearest gas station where I somehow manage to splash gas all over the back of my drivers seat and myself while loading the gas cans back into the car.

  Speed back to the house to find that thank heavens the local ne're-do-well community is taking a day off. I empty one whole 5 gallon can into the bike and hop back on confident my problems for the day are over.
 
   Sputter, sputter, sputter, cough, cough, nothing. Seriously?! Big Onion gets a second phone call, this one laced with expletives about where this bike can go stick it! Like that makes any sense at all.

 From my description, Big Onion expertly diagnosed that the dohicky came off the thingamanbob and that I needed to loosen a lugsomthing and wiggle the whatsitsbucket back in place. I'm sure he used real words in there, in fact I distinctly remember the words carburetor and hose, but it might as well have been Latin for all I know about engine repair.

  Once again, Big Onion patiently talked me through doing some minor repair during which I busted open at least one knuckle and found hidden reserves of goat turds deposited all over the bike. Loosen this, wiggle that, tighten this again and faith and begorrah the damn thing started!

  I loaded that 300lbs of feed back on the bike AGAIN trying not to bleed on anything as fast as I could move and sped to the back, left the bike running while I unloaded it and didn't dare turn it off until it was safely parked under cover back where it belongs to take up its usual role as goat lounger and collector of pellets. Just to add insult to injury, can you believe, it started raining while I was unloading the feed!?

Just a typical day here on the farm.

 

Fencing the Pasture

Thank goodness for the Grizz!

Currently, we're only making use of about half of our property. In the "back pasture," as we call it, we have another 5-6 acres and a couple of small ponds. However it's all partially fenced, so we're hesitant to put any stock out there.

The north side of the pasture is creek; the west side is half fenced, with posts already up along the rest of it; the south side was fenced by the state; the east side was completely lacking fencing.

I had been pricing fencing for awhile, but we had a lot of other more immediate concerns on the half of the farm that we were using. I suspected in a few months we'd be able to afford what we needed and would eventually get some time to get everything up.

Lo and behold, a friend of ours told us of his grandfather's old dairy farm. Apparently he had recently passed away and our friend found a shed on the property absolutely full of rolls of fencing, posts, and barbed wire. He said we were welcome to whatever we needed.

We also had a roll and a bunch of barbed wire in the back of the Element!

It took us awhile to get it out of the shed and loaded up on the trailer. Many thanks to our friend and his father who helped us with this rather daunting task! We sadly didn't get any photos while we were there, but you can definitely take a look at how loaded up the trailer was. And, of course, it had to rain cats and dogs on our drive home. I won't bore you with too many details on how fencing is put up, mostly because I can in no way claim to be an expert. There's a variety of sources out there to learn how to install field fencing. We're big fans of Google when it comes to research, and if you're a new farmer you might want to do the same.  Properly installed fence should require little maintenance for some years, so I'd rather do it right from the start.

First off, our neighbor was kind enough to bush hog our field for nothing. I offered him a turkey and he refused. He did it just to be nice! How awesome is that? It's good to make friends with your neighbors. I hope we can return the favor one day soon. Clearing that whole field saved us from a whole lot of extra work!

Now came the fun part of actually putting up the fence. We decided to make use of t-posts. While we have an excess of 4x4s from the southern property line we had no auger and not enough manpower or time to dig those holes by hand. The t-posts had already been purchased months ago in preparation for fencing, so it was just a matter of hammering them in ... which sounds easier than it looks.

Using a "mother-in-law" to drive in the posts

We decided to space them fifteen feet apart, and to leave a twelve-foot opening where we'd like to add a gate. While we want it closed off, we do want to make sure we have access from either side, especially since we're not sure if the small bridge that crosses a drainage ditch would actually hold the weight of a car, truck, or tractor.

For the H-braces we used Wedge Loc, a system that lets you build the whole fence with t-posts, as normally you'd need wood for the braces. This way we didn't need to dig any holes and save us some time. Wedge Loc doesn't seem to have a huge reputation (I'm surprised I even found it) but we'll see how they hold up. In theory it should work well, but only time will tell.

Since the fencing we got from our friend was only about four-feet high, we'll be stringing a strand of barbed wire across the top. Sheep don't typically climb things, but this will help more with keeping the goats in and some potential predators out.

Putting up the actual fence requires anchoring one end of the roll, unrolling it, standing it up, then pulling it taut before attaching it to the posts. I fashioned a fence puller out of a 2x4 and some hooks and we used the winch on the Grizzly to do the pulling for us. It got it pretty tight, but a tractor would probably have worked better. At one point I put the Grizz in reverse to give it some extra tension and snapped the 2x4 fence puller in half. Oops.

A week ago I finished the fencing on the western side, save for the barbed wire. This past Monday was my birthday and to celebrate I took off work to try and get as much fencing done as possible (don't worry, I took plenty of time to relax as well). We brought Thea and Gwen out with us. They keep us so very productive.

We ended up running out of t-posts and sunlight that day but we're very close to finishing. Hopefully in the next couple weeks we can get the last bit of fence, barbed wire, and gates up and put all of our land to use. We have plans on building some large, mobile chicken tractors. I'm very much looking forward to seeing the field dotted with sheep, goats, and chickens. For now, I'm certainly content just being out there and admiring the view.

The Grizzly

Since we bought the farm we have been doing pretty much everything manually. That includes my loading our little cart up after every visit to the feed store and dragging it across the backyard and pasture carrying 3-4 fifty pound bags of feed. Not fun. 

We finally decided enough was enough and took my dad up on his offer to get his old, currently unused four wheeler.

First we had to figure out a way to get it here. I finally got a trailer hitch for my Element (I was ridiculously excited about this). Big Onion was a real trooper, crawling under my car in the almost hundred degree heat to install it.

Of course the installation did not go smoothly. He fought to make that thing line up with the holes in my car for about an hour before I had the idea of pulling out my car's dinky jack and using the weight of the car to get everything in place. Total worked. (MacGyver with Boobs to the rescue again!)

We drove over to my brother's about an hour and a half away and loaded up the bike. This was my little car's first time pulling anything, so I was a nervous wreak the whole way home. Thank goodness Big Onion drove. 

Once again, things went less than smoothly when we got the bike home. No joy rides through the pastures for us. The thing was totally dead. It had been sitting unused for almost a year. Big Onion ended up replacing the battery and the air filter and rebuilding the carburetor. He also had to tighten some things, loosen others, straighten something that was bent....is my lack of mechanical knowledge obvious yet? That man is damn handy to have around.

The bike is finally up and running! It still has it's minor issues, but Big Onion has taken it as a personal challenge to get the thing running smoothly.

Yesterday we used it to 4 fifty pound bags of feed and a bale of hay all at the SAME TIME! It was amazing.

That bike is a beast too. You can get a bushhog and tillers that attach to the back, a much more affordable option for us since a tractor is just way, way out of our price range right now. It has a towing capacity almost as high as my car. It can even tow it's own trailer! It has a winch on the front and rides smoother than any bike I've ever driven. This thing is going to be a life saver when we start fencing the back pasture next month.