I brought my hay over to Nora’s and her horses loved it.  It ended up being three trailer loads!

Today I mowed some of the really tall grass on the other side of the barn and along our road.  At first I found it hard to maneuver the tractor with the sickle bar, so I ended up missing spots and going over others twice – loading up the bar so I had to stop and clear it.  Then I got the hang of it.  I raked out a path through what I had cut so I’d have room to move without going over the downed grass again, and then carefully cut a few more swaths, and as long as I didn’t go over already cut grass, it worked great.  The key is to not get too aggressive and try to cut too much at once.  That’s when you start to miss grass and get it wound up in the works.

What I cut sure looks like decent hay to my very untrained eye, but I want someone who knows to look at it.  My plan is to see if Nora wants it (loose – not baled), and if she does, I’ll have the fun task of manually raking it up and loading it into my trailer.  If not, I guess I’ll just manually rake it up and load it into my trailer, and then either dump it off some place or burn it.  I hate for it to go to waste (if it’s even worth using for horses) and there’s not enough of it to get our neighbor to use his baler, and he’d have a rough time maneuvering it in there anyway.  Whatever happens, I’m happy to at least start getting rid of all the overgrowth.

I also discovered something about my tractor.  My hydraulics have never worked right, but now I’ve found a pattern.  Sometimes it would lift an implement up all the way, but usually not.  Today I realized that after the tractor has been off for a little while, if I raise the lift lever and then let the clutch out, it’ll quickly lift the implement all the way up.  Each subsequent time, however, it’ll only lift it about 1/3 of the way, and pretty weakly.  Now I have something to go on when researching this.  Oh, and my starting issue from the other day turned out to just be a loose wire.

The new chickens are huge!  I’ve been letting them out when I’m outside and can keep and eye on them.  At first they didn’t want to come out at all, but then, slowly, they started venturing out farther and farther away.  They all followed me out to the water spigot one day and another time two of them walked around the garage by themselves.  The older chickens tolerate them but if the young ones get too close, they get scolded.  Today they were out and Blackie actually went up to them and there were no fights.

Interestingly, their personalities follow their breed.  The two americaunas are the friendliest, and they’ll let me pet them. The barred rocks are the next friendliest, followed by the production red and leghorn.  They’ll sort of let me pet them, but they’re rather timid.  The two wyandottes generally want nothing to do with me.

I really need to finish the coop!  I’m almost done framing it out, and then I need to prepare the ground where it’s going to go before putting it all together and covering it.

We have big beautiful ripe blueberries in the Northern section of our field!  Delia and I picked some immature ones a week or two ago, but this afternoon I rode the 4 wheeler up there through the VERY tall grass) and saw loads of nice big blue ones.

We also have raspberries!  3 to be exact.  I ate one and it was delicious.  We planted about 9 stalks and I think about 4 or 5 of those survived, though there appear to already be some smaller ones sprouting up around them.  Most of the berries are pale and dry (either because it’s the first year they were planted or because we haven’t watered them) but there were three nice ones.

We’re considering getting horses next year so we’ve been thinking a lot about our facilities, where we can have pasture land, etc.  Our field is badly overgrown, so I wanted to get a sickle mower to cut it down.  I found one down in Sturgeon Lake so we made a day out of it and picked up the mower and went to the Duluth Zoo.  It’s a Ford brand 501/14-93.  I managed to find an owners manual and parts manual for it and everything.

We got it home safely and I lifted it off the trailer with my loader.  I had to remove my overrun coupler so the PTO shaft would fit, but other than that it hooked right up.  I say it hooked right up – by that I mean I didn’t have to remove/replace/fix anything else.  What I don’t mean by that is that it was easy.  At any rate, it’s all hooked up.

When I first got it on, I was a bit nervous to fire it up, so I left the clutch engaged and turned over the engine a few times to see what would happen with the mower.  At first it struggled but then it broke loose and smoothed out  I started the tractor and let the clutch out and it rattled to life.  It’s a bit awkward with that big 6′ bar hanging off the side, but I carefully maneuvered around and managed to mow along the side of our road.  It cut beautifully!  Now I just need to figure out what to do with what I cut down.

I went to the back to try to start working on our field a bit.  It started out well but then I learned lesson #1:  don’t go over what you’ve already cut.  When the tall grass is standing, it’s easily able to chop it off at the bottom and let it fall over the back of the bar, but if you go over a pile of cut grass that’s already down, it just gets all tangled up.  When I tried to start the tractor up after clearing out the bar, I heard a zap and then the starter quit working.  I’m not sure what happened, but I hope it’s just a bad connection.

Once I get it running again and have some time, my goal is to cut down an acre of our field.  I’m going to walk it first and make sure there are no rocks or dirt mounds, and then pull all the weedy bushes out, and then see if I can manage to cut it down without getting all tangled.