Category: SA Times

You may recall several weeks ago I mentioned raking leaves and running them through the shredder except I couldn’t get the shredder started so I wasn’t able to determine if that was a viable strategy or not. Since then I’ve learned the trick of starting the shredder, at least some of the time. So today I hitched up the trailer to the tractor and filled the trailer with rakings along the inside of the west fence. Once the trailer was full I came back to the shop where the shredder was, cranked it up and ran the load through it. I dumped the shredded material on the caliche mounds. The alternative to this is bagging the leaves one bag at a time. I think the shredder method was a little faster for handling a lot of material. Only trouble was, after shredding the first load and collecting another load I couldn’t get the shredder started when I got back to it. It starts OK cold and hot but in between I don’t have the right combination of throttle, choke or no choke so I wound up bagging the second load. Continue reading “Cats and dogs but no rain” →

After two years of drought Joyce told herself unless we got decent moisture this winter she wasn’t going to bother with a garden this summer.  Without some help from Mother Nature it is just too hard to get things to grow you see.  Well that’s easy to say in August or September but then comes along a mild winter day to undermine one’s resolve.   So, yesterday we fired up the chipper and finished the garden cleanup started some weeks ago.  It’s unusual to have that chore done this early.  I want to redo the rows by replacing the metal edging with 2X8 treated lumber.  Last winter we made the mistake of letting the chickens in the garden.  We could have hardly done otherwise since we didn’t have it fenced off.  It was a treat for the chickens but they scratched a lot of the dirt out over metal edging which sort of defeated it’s purpose.  Also, the edging has a tendency to get pushed out by the dirt and in places it lays so flat it doesn’t keep the dirt in or the grass out.   Continue reading “Garden: To have or not to have” →

We got a little more snow Saturday. The leftovers from Christmas only just disappeared Friday and we’re back in the deepfreeze where we’ve been mostly since Christmas with the exception of Thursday and Friday. Saturday was a cold and dreary day but Sunday dawned bright and beautiful. A little more snow fell during the night so that the ground was covered.

Continue reading “Basketball and more snow” →

Joyce and I finished wrapping our Christmas presents Saturday morning after breakfast. Joyce had already done a few but there were some large, odd-shaped items that were better handled by four hands rather than two. Later we took Barbara Howard one of the yummy strawberry bread loaves Joyce had baked and visited with her a while. The day started out chilly but there was little wind and there was some nice sunshine so we took advantage of the nice weather to work on cleaning up the garden. I had tried last weekend to get the shredder started without success but Bryant the Wizard said to take the air filter off and put in a couple of teaspoons of gas right into the carburetor. Sure enough, it started up. I had to do that several times before it would keep running. I guess it had been a couple of years since it was started. Anyway we shredded some of the garden growth, which is quite dead and brittle now. We didn’t finish but we made a pretty good start. Continue reading “Cruising to Christmas” →