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!
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…
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Excellent solution! The wall-foundation was already right there!
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You got a workout! And it’s a never ending battle on tools… sigh
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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!
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