Hard working weekend! Down and dirty….

Backhoe Weekend…!
Some weekends are busier than others, and this one certainly took the cake (I mean brownie, wouldn’t you say, Dan?) Friday evening we purchased a 20′ long x 12" wide culvert along with 10 top rails for a chain link fence and six 2x4s. Getting all that into my Dodge Caravan was tricky. Getting me into a passenger seat was even more tricky. I felt like I couldn’t breathe and I hoped that nothing would happen on the way back to the farm.
 

 
Dan had the rental supply store deliver the backhoe, a tractor, and a stump grinder to the property Friday afternoon so we could use it all weekend. When I arrived Friday after work, he had the driveway drainage area completely redug. (Did I tell you that it rained a lot on Friday? 3.66 inches) We got to witness where the water flows, how much, and what to be on the look out for. Consequently, the farm was VERY wet… oh, let the fun begin!
 
When David, my son, and I arrived on Saturday morning, Dan had placed the culvert and covered it completely. The water was flowing through it from the ditch nicely. This was huge because it meant that the water won’t be flowing onto the main part of the farm now. 
 

 

Additionally, Dan had moved the two huge piles of AB gravel spreading it over the drive area and the entrance to the farm. His assessment was that we need two more loads delivered to make a place to drive into on the farm.

 

 
I could see his point… Yikes!
 
While showing David around the property and checking out where the water was flowing, we decided to create a little bridge (later known as a damn) to get across one part of the creek. It was a good thing we bought those tall gum boots before coming out to the farm because David would have lasted about 2 minutes without them. It was quite cold, too, on Satuday morning. Good to have something covering your ears…
 

 
David’s first job was to create a new ditch to redirect the flow of water on the property. David filled up the backhoe with Diesel fuel.
 

 
Then David got his first lesson in ditch digging from Dan…
 

 
Then he was off to the races…
 

 
David explained at lunch that the more he dealt with issues while digging the more he learned how to operate the backhoe and to solve the problems. He recommends wearing goggles to protect one’s face from random objects that just show up.
With the ditch well on its way to being dug, we moved on to the stump grinder. I found it to be an odd machine with a single blade in front. It took me a while to really get the point of it…
 

 
You can see how the blade is spinning in the photo above. You’re supposed to approach the stump and just shave off a bit of the edge of the stump and down into the root going left to right over and over again until the darn stump is shredded and gone. Here’s another shot where you can see half the stump ground away…
 

 
The stump grinder certainly shredded stumps to bits, but it was pretty hard for me to work with. I put my whole body weight into the machine and sometimes I couldn’t really make much of a dent in the stump. The wood was hard and I’m not very strong. 
 

 
We did chew up a few stumps that way, but it seemed like a lot of work for not very much result. Maybe digging the stumps out with the backhoe tomorrow would work better…
 
This morning, when David returned with Erin, his girlfriend, David got to remove the plug for the new ditch and watch the water flow down it… How’s that for rewarding?! (Dan had finished digging the last third of the ditch this morning before anyone showed up. He’s a fast worker. Maybe he’s done this sort of thing before…)
 
 

 
Erin got her backhoe lesson and was working away at digging up a stump when I arrived this afternoon.
 

 
Sometimes the bucket would get stuck with too much clay in it. David dug out the bucket so Erin could keep going.
 

 
It’s amazing how difficult it is to free the stumps from the ground. There’s a tap root and a lot of side shooters, so they had to be dug on each side and then grasp the back of the stump underneath to get the tap root to break free. No easy task. It took a lot of perseverance. Trying to lug some of the stumps off to the side let me know just how big the root system is for those trees. Dan said if we get a bulldozer we should be able to get the rest out without too much of an issue because it’s a bigger machine and can handle the size of the roots better.
 
Bryce came out today too and did some logging. He likes to do this sort of work and was glad to be able to do it.
 
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Dan felled a few more trees too…
 

 
Then Bryce cut logs about 6′ long and Dan stacked them on the tractor bucket. My job was to take the stack of logs and dump it on the north side of the property.
 

 
I got the hang of manuveuring the levers better today…
 
At the end of the day and the weekend, with the equipment parked and ready to be picked up tomorrow, I looked back at the farm to assess the progress… Wow! It was wet and muddy, but we certainly cleared out a lot of the property. With a couple loads more of gravel we’ll have a stable parking area at the entrance.
 

 
The sun is setting on it… but what once was a densely treed lot was cleared in the areas that we need it to be cleared to get ready for the hoophouses and the pole barn. Stay tuned… the fun is just beginning. I wonder when the well digging guy will show up…
 
Bon appetit, or I hope we can grow vegetables soon!