Happy Trails Farm: June 30th

Another trip to the farm, hopefully I will be able to finish cutting up the oak tree that I started last week. I left earlier than usual as it is suppose to get up to 90 today with less humidity than last week. I got to the farm around 9:00 and went right to work getting everything loaded into Lois’s golf cart, chain saw, tools, gloves and a bottle of cold water. Started cutting, piling cut wood and piling small branches, worked for about an hour and decided to take a brake, drank the whole bottle of water. Decided to cut some more and worked for about 30 minutes and went to get another bottle of water so I went back to the barn. When I got back went to start the chainsaw and the starter rope would not rewind back into the saw. So I took it back to the barn and work on it. Should not have done that, as while working on it the spring that rewinds the rope came loose and once that happens you can’t get it back in. So I decided that I was going to have to get some else to fix it. The good part of this story is that just a 1/2 mile by road is a man who fixes small engines, so when I went to lunch I stopped to see if he worked on chain saws. Turns out he does, his name is Phil Haskins, he actually is a neighbor as his property backs up against ours. So he is going to fix the chain saw and it will be done by next Tuesday. Very nice gentleman. So if you are in the Greenfield area and need work done on your small engines/lawn mowers stop in and see him.

So I decide to try the plan B for watering the trees, bushes and plants. What I did was buy a small bilge pump for a boat and install it inside a 5 gallon bucket. Drilled 1” holes (3 rows around the bucket) covered them with hardware cloth so trash would not get into the bucket and plug the pump up.

These pumps are submersible, so I ran wire from it, 20’ long added a 1 1/8” hose to it 15’ long. Now remember I have a fifty gallon tank that I can put into the front bucket of the tractor. So I loaded this all into the front bucket of the tractor and off to the pond we went, I set the bucket into the water, stuck the hose into the water tank and hooked the wires up to the battery on the tractor, I heard the pump kick on, saw water go into the hose but it would not come out of the discharge end. So after moving the hose around I shut the pump off and decided maybe the tank was too high above the pump. I then moved the bucket down to a different spot and moved the tractor there hooked everything up again and water started coming out of the end of the hose.

I was able to fill the 50 gallon tank up in 6-7 minutes. The first time the problem was I had the wires crossed on the positive and negative sides of the battery. I ended up filling the tank 3 times to get everything watered.

I did download pictures from the camera’s, there wasn’t very many pictures from the game camera where the trophy rock was at. I may have to put another rock out there. There was one picture of the turkeys going by. I hadn’t seen those back in there for over a year, so that was good.