haymaking

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/3CbozkM

so yesterday was sunday and finally finally BIL had time and we had materials and we could start working on the tiny house * but then*

…

the pigs were out and the reason the pigs were out was that they were out of water. why were they out of water? ohh a fitting broke on the water wagon on friday and nobody mentioned it so on saturday they could only haul them 100 gallons of water. 100 gallons for 30 pigs for 36 hours was. not enough water. so they left. as they do.

anyway BIL had to fix the water wagon. it would be some time, he told me regretfully. that’s ok, i said. the next thing we had been going to do was haul in a little more gravel to go under the foundation, so I collected about a dozen buckets and put them into the back of my car, and drove my car down to the creek, and got down in the creek with a shovel and filled each one of those buckets with gravel. I then hauled the buckets up and put them into my car.

this was much less efficient than using the tractor bucket, but 1) i can’t drive the tractor, and 2) the tractor couldn’t get down into the creek. this was nice clean washed gravel; the gravel the tractor can reach is… kinda muddy.

So I drove my car full of gravel buckets up to the cabin site and by then BIL was done fixing the water wagon– and Sister had volunteered to take over and use it to deliver water to all the animals, which would be at least an hour and a half of work, but some friends had stopped by and Farmkid was going on a big walk with them, so it was no problem.

Anyway. So I hauled about 800 lbs of gravel and rocks by hand, which seemed like a great idea at the time. I got the buckets out of my car, and put my car away, and was dumping the buckets when BIL came back with the first scoop full in the tractor bucket.

He can carry about a ton of gravel in the tractor’s bucket. That’s more than I got in all those buckets with my shovel. i dumped all my buckets around and they looked like basically nothing.

This was still fine, it hadn’t been a terrible idea to do it, except that… well… I was exhausted, and I still had to use a shovel to spread around the three more tons of muddy gravel BIL dumped into the site.

I was so tired.

But we got that done.

So we got the skids set on the blocks, and got that leveled correctly– BIL had done much of the work some previous weekend when I wasn’t around, so we mostly had to re-check his work. Then we laid out the crosspieces– BIL added this to the design, seven 16′-long 2x8 boards, laid crosswise across the skids to be a framework and hold the whole thing square. We got them adjusted just so, made sure the whole thing was square by checking the diagonals like four times each, slid the skids around a bit (using a shovel as a lever to lift them so they could be repositioned– a clever bit of engineering), and got it arranged just so. Then we nailed the crosspieces down, so the whole thing is stable.

The next step is to fasten plywood down to it, put on insulation, put in a vapor barrier, then put plywood over the top of that, and that’s the completed platform. But I don’t know when we’ll have time for that.

In the meantime, I can feel free to collect some more rocks if I like. I am thinking, now that the footprint is fully-assembled, that I should collect nice rocks and pile them all around it. If i can come up with a way to keep groundhogs from digging under the structure too, I’d be glad of that too….

anyway.

It’s supposed to not rain this week so BIL is frantically mowing all the hay he can. Normally everyone’d be on the second or third cutting by now but it’s all first cutting. It’s not going to be great hay. But it just has to be hay, at this point. Something to keep the cattle alive over the winter.

i was going to try to finish editing a Peace-Tied chapter to put up today but I realized that it needed more work and I was too tired. so I will work on that this week and try to get it done by Friday instead, I rather think. It’s only a fairly minor revision but it involves some rewriting for a more poignant outcome and I know I won’t have much time to focus on something like that.

My most-of-me hurts today, I am very tired and going to bed.

Fingers crossed the rain holds off so we can get some fucking hay baled. (Your picture was not posted)

Comments

[frith]

You don't have a wheelbarrow? As someone who shovels manure for a living, I can tell you that a wheel barrow pwns lugging buckets full of rocks nine times out of ten. 8^D Use the wheel barrow to fill a trailer or the tractor's bucket with your clean gravel, then when it's full, the tractor can come back, get hitched to the bucket or trailer, and cart the load off to your foundation.

At least you have rain and the grass is growing.

[galadhir]

Every so often I look wistfully at all those cottagecore posts, and then I read something like this and remind myself that this is what it's really like.

Good luck with the hay! And with finding a chance to get some actual rest.