It was a beautiful 70+degrees out and the mower fired-up after a two-day trickle-charge. I moved some junk around in the shed to make better use of the small footprint, and got rid of some cardboard. Te little (10’x12′) plastic-fantastic Tupperware love-shed has got to go, but meanwhile Organize!
With the dumper-trailer hitched I drove out through the swamp to the gravel-patch where the major hump had stood. Nothing was growing in the bare-patch and I stuck my pitch-fork down into the wet dirt, and struck rock. Tried poking the fork in a few more places and it seems like there’s a bunch of double-fist sized rock down in thereabout five inched deep… Wonder what it was they had out here originally? I heaved a big rock and mud into the trailer. Worked it for about twenty minutes and got more rocks, mud, and muck into the trailer. The disrupted areas seeped-in with water. The current soaked-field water-table is about four inches below grade, that is where it is not already ankle deep.
The Chinese-made “sustainable-wood product” (Corporate virtue-signaling!) spading-fork that I got from Crapola Hardware has a POS plastic handle that doesn’t allow much torque or twisting force to be applied before itself turns, so I couldn’t quite work it the way I wanted. Grrr. Remind me to stop buying expensive tool-crap that breaks from that place. The rake from there also broke, and the axe isn’t holding up so well either.
I let the holes I had dug-out fill in with water and threw the shovels and fork back into the little trailer, and with a partial load drove over to another, smaller, hole-in-the-field, and dumped the load beside it.
Half-way into filling it I decided I didn’t really want big rocks submerged in the field because they would pop up under force of thawing, and mash and dull my mower blades. I went back in and dug some of the bigger rocks out, throwing them back into the trailer with a big KLANG!
My feet meanwhile are bogging down with mud and muck and I’m sweating and my glasses are slipping down my nose. Wonderful! So I stomped around in the ankle-deep wet-part of the field to get the mud and off the muck-boots, then drove over to a pile of sticks we had gathered under the big oak – dead-fall from this winter.
Loaded that into the trailer and drove around back to the shed for cleanup. Yay!
Sticks and Stones
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BTDT, after using the rock picker on the football field yard, there were a few rocks that seemed a little too big for the picker. So I dug around this one, and dug around it, (do not use a cheap plastic handle shovel, they shatter) and then tried a crow bar. The cowman said, “step aside little lady, I will take care of it,” starts with the crow bar…no luck. I told him there was a possibility that they spoke Chinese on the other side of that boulder. He finally chained it to the hitch on his pickup to get it out. Next one I came to, he thought it best to build the stonewall over…
Excellent solution! The wall-foundation was already right there!
You got a workout! And it’s a never ending battle on tools… sigh
The Fiskars lopers get sharpened-up with a file, pother hard-use tools have to be considered “consumables.” Holding off on the tractor while my mower still works! I don’t have to plow the field!