An old mountain bike - an old welder - an "old" man

I'm not really that old but stooping over a potato seed bed and manually planting several thousand seed potatoes was making my back feel much older than the rest of me. So I got to thinking, as you do when you're in field with nothing for company but baskets full of seed potatoes yet to go into the ground.

"There has to be a better way than dragging baskets around and going backwards and forwards all the time." I thought to myself.

So when my back told me that it was past time to go do something else I wandered off to my workshop and sat down to think some more. And I spotted an old broken mountain bike in amongst my pile of stuff-that-will-come-in-useful-one-day. For the bike that day had come today.

After rummaging around a bit more for some pipe to make a frame it was out with the angle grinder and the welder. It ended up taking me the rest of the day to make my contraption. Sadly there was nobody around to photograph me while I was bending the handlebar into shape. It would have looked hilarious! There I was with my little cart clamped securely to the front end loader of the tractor with me hanging from it to bend the pipe into the shape I wanted!

Enough of that. Here are the fruits of my labours and, more importantly, using this cart has more than doubled my planting speed. As a bonus the cart will come in handy for a whole lot of other jobs around the farm.

Six Italians digging my paddock

Six mechanical Italians that is!

We are fortunate enough to own one of the best pieces of cultivating equipment ever invented . It was made in Italy and is called a vangatrice there. In English that loosely translates to digging machine.

The machine consists of a row of six spades which are mounted on double articulated arms. This system of mounting makes it possible for the machine to mimic the same movement that a person makes when they put a spade into the ground, tip it backwards to loosen the soil, then flip the soil out of the ground and in the process invert the sod dug up. The picture below shows you the six spades.

When used properly this machine turns grassland paddock straight into a seed bed in a single pass. This obviously saves a lot of time and fuel.

But more important is that the digging action loosens the soil properly without creating a hard pan as you would if you used a plough or a rotary hoe. That is a big advantage, particularly if you are growing organically.


In organic agriculture one of our priorities is to look after our soil and make sure that it rich in naturally occurring nutrients. In doing so we also make it possible for us to grow the best quality produce we can.

I have just finished planting all the potatoes. Now it is just a case of keeping the weeds away and making sure that I cover the emerging potato plants.

Here is a picture of one part of the potato field. Doesn't look like much now but in a few months time it will look much more impressive.

Little saw - BIG saw

After searching for a fair while I've finally found the bargain I was looking for!

It arrived this week and I've already given it a bit of a workout. "It" is a 2008 Husqvarna 575XP chainsaw. I found it on a online auction site and managed to buy it at just over 40% of the price of a brand new one.
In New Zealand many tertiary institutions offer forestry courses which are attended by new employees of the major logging companies. In the majority of cases the course fees are paid for by these companies. One very nice little feature of some of these forestry courses is that the students are supplied with all of the equipment they are going to need to complete the course.

This includes all of the safety gear as well as a chainsaw. The saw is of course of a size that is actually suitable for logging work. A lot of students when they leave the course sell their chainsaws for a variety of reasons, in most cases a wish to get cash to use for other things.

In the vast majority of cases these saws have done very little work and are barely run in. And most of them sell for quite a lot of money. Still cheaper than buying a brand new one but not cheap enough to make it attractive. That is until just now.

So I now have a near new proper chainsaw Yes, I know those of you who are fans of Stihl equipment would disagree, but I already have a Husqvarna that has done sterling service over the last six years and all of my, much more knowledgeable than me, friends have Husqvarnas. They were horrified when I suggested that I might consider buying a Stihl chainsaw if one was available at the right price. So it as just as well that this saw came up.

Just by way of comparison here is a picture of my little saw next to the new one. The new saw is going to see a lot of work in the near future. Lots of firewood to cut!

Damn the Dam

What does a good sized rock weigh? And with good size I mean something about the equivalent of between three to five footballs. Must be somewhere in the range of 25 to 80 kg each.

You may remember that in a previous post I said that I didn't want to become either a weightlifter or a body builder. Sadly, i think I may well be on the way to becoming one of those two.

You see, on our farm we have a dam that the previous owner built and it holds back a good bit of water. But it has a few design flaws in it and during the heavy rains we had recently the dam overflowed. That in itself isn't a problem really because small dams are supposed to do that. The problem is that as a result of the poor design/built the overflowing water was busy breaking large chunks of dam off. We lost nearly a third of the width of the dam as a result. In the photo below you can see how much overflow pipe is sticking out into, well ... nothing. The bath below the pipe is there to stop the falling water eroding more ground away and is positioned on top of a big(ish) pile of rocks.

You can also see some of the repair I am making. I'm still not quite used to recording things to use for a blog entry so I missed taking pictures of the dam in its diminished state. All that grass you can see below the repair is what slumped off the dam during the storm.

What I'm doing is driving steel posts into the ground to stabilise the slumped ground. Then there are more steel posts to support the old bulldozer track I found on the farm. I'm using the track to support the rocks I'm dropping down the dam to shore up the slump.

What you see in the picture is perhaps slightly less than one quarter of the repair completed and already my muscles are bulging out of my shirt!

We're lucky that we have a good supply of sizable rocks lying around on our property and I'm busy moving them from where they were to their new spot holding up the dam. Of course that means picking the rocks up, putting them on the transport tray of the tractor, taking half off again because I overloaded the tray and the tractor couldn't lift it off the ground, driving back to the dam and carefully and lovingly place each rock in its designated spot (well more like roll them down the bank and hope they land in a good spot and shifting them if they didn't).

Eagle eyed readers will notice that the dam is near the spot where I cut down a tree recently. Which brings me to why this job is so urgent. The firewood trees and the dam are higher than the house. That means that if the dam were to fail a whole lot of water will come rushing down the hill toward the house and, hopefully, miss it. I'm not keen to take that chance and will keep shifting rocks until I'm confident that the dam won't fail.

Of course in the meantime there are all sorts of other urgent matters to attend to and somehow we manage to strike a balance between doing those and fixing the dam. I haven't got a picture of the damn dam repair as at today but it's looking much safer now. Obviously I'm going to over-engineer my repair and I expect that I'm maybe one third of the way through the full repair job, but the pressure is off now. Once the full repair is done I'll report back with a picture of the very large pile of rocks that will be the downhill side of the dam.

Wellington Folk Festival 08

What a boring tittle for four wonderful days filled with great music and great friends. If music was like chocolate then this festival was like eating bars and bars of deep, rich, dark 70+% chocolate. Not that weak watered down milk chocolate but the real good stuff. MMMMMMM!

We got to the Brookfields Outdoor Education Centre on Friday morning and set up our campsite first of all. Jenny and I are part of the site management team for the festival so we get to arrive before most people and that gives us the advantage of being able to put our tent in one of the "good" spots.

Good for us means that we're away from the campfires and other sources of smoke. There's something about humans when they go "camping" (complete with the queen size inner sprung mattress and a small lounge suit) that seems to bring out the need to become a Davy Crockett and have a campfire with smokey wet wood. Over the years we've worked out where we can escape all that smoke and this is something that is very important for Jenny. For that reason we cook outside our tent in our outdoor kitchen. The little tent you can see in the background on the left is where we keep our gas powered fridge.

These photos were taken before it started raining. And it rained, and rained, and rained and then it rained some more. In fact a lot of the campsite, particularly in the busy spots was resembling melted chocolate by Sunday afternoon. Did we, or anybody really care??? Nope! The music made the wet irrelevant.

We had the great pleasure of listening to Pat Higgins, formerly of County Galway and now living in Wellington, when he sang some wonderfully soulful songs as well as playing some fantastic tunes on his Irish flute.

For us the highlight of the festival was Tim van Eyken who was over from England. He is a superb musician and plays the melodeon with consumate skill. Coupled with that he has a beautiful singing voice and is very handy with a guitar too. If you ever hear of him playing in a town near you do what you can to go listen to him. It will be worth your while.

In the tradition of folk music concerts the final concert was closed off with what we call an "ugly". This is when most, if not all, of the musicians who were feature guests at the festival play together on the stage. And what a rousing time it was too! With Jugularity (an Australian band) leading the song it was like going on a rollercoaster ride around Piccadilly Circus. What a joy!

And then, all too soon, it was all over for another year. On packing up day the sun shone on us all so we were lucky enough to be able to pack away dry tents which saved us another big job when we got home.

Now we have the warm, chocolatety memories to savor of another wonderful Wellington festival.