The Slow Motion Retirement Plan

dave1949 · May 11, 2014

Clearing cactus, now that's something I never thought about.

How did the 3pt spreader work for you? I need to spread seed, lime and fertilizer on my reclaimed field eventually.

dhagood · May 16, 2014

when i put the gate into our property last year i did not brace the 20' span between the original fence line and the gate. i naively assumed that 6" posts buried 40" or so in the ground would resist the tension of 4 strand barbed wire (of the standard 12.5 gauge). wrong again

so this year i've spent the last several days (in actual work, in elapsed time it's more like 4 weeks) in bracing all the corners.

and now, by gum, i got me some tension on the wire. i tried to tighten the fence over that little span twice but to no avail. in a week or so the fence was once again laughably floppy and on one side of the gate the outside 6" post warped at least 4 inches out of true. look at the last post in the line:

it's a little hard to see, but the top is bowed out of line to the right. that post was solidly in line when placed.

vtsnowedin said:
Will a close mowing now and then prune back the cactus easier then hand digging? I seem to recall that in N.D. the place that always had cactus was inside the legs of the windmill where the lawn mower couldn't go.

a close mowing might very well help, but i have two problems with that. the first is that i don't have a mower :ashamed:, the second is that my grass is pretty patchy in general and i don't want to expose any more ground to sunlight than i must. that's a useful suggestion though, and i'll file it away. thanks for the tip.

dave1949 said:
How did the 3pt spreader work for you? I need to spread seed, lime and fertilizer on my reclaimed field eventually.

the spreader operated flawlessly, but i didn't get the coverage i wanted. the problem with it is that you juggle a bunch of variables: 1) ground speed of the tractor, 2) height of the spreader's outlet above ground, 3) pto rotation, and 4) the size of the opening(s) from which the product is dispensed. the height and pto rotation speed are not that hard to set. the spreader comes with a chart correlating ground speed and opening size but i did something wrong because the coverage i achieved was 10 to 20% of what i wanted. i think it will take some practice to get consistent results, so i would recommend some testing with mulch, sand, or something similar until you think you have a handle on the coverage.

dave1949 · May 17, 2014

dhagood said:
the spreader operated flawlessly, but i didn't get the coverage i wanted. the problem with it is that you juggle a bunch of variables: 1) ground speed of the tractor, 2) height of the spreader's outlet above ground, 3) pto rotation, and 4) the size of the opening(s) from which the product is dispensed. the height and pto rotation speed are not that hard to set. the spreader comes with a chart correlating ground speed and opening size but i did something wrong because the coverage i achieved was 10 to 20% of what i wanted. i think it will take some practice to get consistent results, so i would recommend some testing with mulch, sand, or something similar until you think you have a handle on the coverage.

Thanks for the tips. Sounds logical. It's good to know the spreader worked well. Any sort of seed drill would probably get beat up with amount of rocks and stones I will have.

dhagood · May 23, 2014

what strange manner of beast makes tracks like these?

i'm working on the northern fence now. i have the post hole digger mostly figured out and can get a perfectly vertical post firmly tamped in the ground within 30 minutes of driving up to the spot. that is a huge improvement over last year's pre-tractor timeline. i might live long enough to finish all my fencing...

newbury · May 23, 2014

dhagood said:
what strange manner of beast makes tracks like these?

Looks like Deere tracks, maybe Kioti or Cat?

dhagood · Jun 4, 2014

newbury said:
Looks like Deere tracks

yep

i've been plugging along on the northern fence line. i have most of the wood in the ground now and will be stringing wire in the not so distant future. our property shares a fenced triangle of pine trees with our northern neighbor. this area was fenced to keep pregnant cows from eating pine needles. the property line runs through the fenced area, and my neighbor doesn't care about keeping his portion fenced. today i worked on a corner where the old triangle fence will meet the new fence on the property line.

this picture was taken from the end of the old fence line looking due south. i cut the barbed wire courses at the old end of the fence and laid them out of the way, put in the brace along that line of fence, and got the top two courses of wire put back up.

this is sort of looking along the property line. it's good to finally get some of the wire in its final position.

dhagood · Jun 21, 2014

another couple of days off, so another day and a half working on the north fence. i got some wire up, and in general i'm pretty happy with how this one section turned out. this view is just about perfect.

this view looking west, while not perfect, is pretty close to it. given that this is the first section of fence i've ever put up, plus the fact that i've done all this by myself, i'll take it.

this section was about 200 feet long and is pretty flat. the slope starts in the middle of the western h brace and drops about 120 feet in a little over a quarter mile. i need about 15 minutes of no wind in order to determine where the next h brace will go for a man/atv gate. i put in a h brace while i tried to compensate for the 25 mile an hour crosswind. this was a stupid idea, and i paid the price in having to dig one of the posts out. i might have to dig both of them out but i can't tell yet. live and learn i guess.

one nice thing about a tractor with a front end loader is that the bucket is a wonderful place for putting all the tools you will definitely use and some tools that you might use for any given project. i've been adding tools, and adding materials, and adding...

think i can talk my wife into a bigger tractor? "but dear, the bucket's full!"

newbury · Jun 21, 2014

dhagood said:
<snip>
one nice thing about a tractor with a front end loader is that the bucket is a wonderful place for putting all the tools you will definitely use and some tools that you might use for any given project. i've been adding tools, and adding materials, and adding...

think i can talk my wife into a bigger tractor? "but dear, the bucket's full!"

Or - "Darn honey, the bucket's just not wide enough, I need to get a wider bucket".

dhagood · Jun 27, 2014

i took my father out to work on the fence with me today, and we spent some quality father/son time by... driving t-posts. we got 9.5 posts driven (one post was half driven in when i noticed that the preceding post was badly out of line, so we had to pull them both). this is not a huge amount of work, but there are extenuating circumstances in that my father is 89 years old. that didn't stop him from walking up and down the hill several times, nor did it stop him from insisting that he do half the work of driving the posts in manually. i would measure where the posts should be, get them lined up against the guide wire with the level, and get them started. he would then shoo me out of the way, hitch up his pants, and bang away at the t-post driver for all he was worth.

quite a guy, my father. he's a combat veteran of world war 2 (b-25 tail gunner in the pacific, flying against truk, the japanese home islands, and all points in between) and korea (f-86 fighter pilot) and a retired career air force officer with 30 years of service. if i've grown up to be half the man he has proven himself to be, i am well content.